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This week Music Matters celebrates the ninetieth birthday of Pierre Boulez – one of the most influential and important living musicians of our time. Leading composer of the pioneering avant-garde, conductor of brilliant precision and clarity and creator of institutions which have shaped modern music like IRCAM, the centre of electronic research in Paris and the performance group Ensemble Inter Contemporain - but also a thinker, visionary and controversial provocateur whose radical views still divide the music world today. With the use of nearly five decades of Â鶹Éç archive material of Boulez himself, Petroc Trelawny traces his life and work, with the music critic Paul Driver and academic Morag Grant. We hear about Messiaen’s influence in Boulez’s early life and how African and Asian music changed his perception of time in the mid-1940s; how he took up the baton, why he can’t relate to the music of Shostakovich and Britten and why conducting Mahler needs more than just sentimentality. We also hear his views down the years on the orchestra, on technology and music, and emotion and intellectual content in contemporary music.

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