Call for Papers
Pierre Boulez and His Cultural Legacy Today
Symposium, Institut Français Edinburgh, 6-7 November 2025, with two live concerts and a workshop featuring violinist Rachel Koblyakov
Supported by the Royal Musical Association
As a composer, conductor, administrator and thinker, Pierre
Boulez emerged as one of the decisive figures of the trente glorieuse,
the period of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity, the welfare state, technological
innovation, European integration and cultural participation in France and
Europe after the Second World War. There was a darker side, however, notably
France’s unsettled colonial history, epitomised by the brutal war in Algeria, as
well as deepening social divisions, all coming to a head in the events of Mai
68. The national dimension is at most one aspect of Boulez’s music and
personality, in any case: while, for many, his music epitomises a distinctly
French, post-Debussyian colourism, he embraced serialism at a time when it was
firmly associated with Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School and widely
regarded as antithetical to the French school represented by the likes of Nadia
Boulanger, Les Six and La jeune France; and he would go on to
champion Wagner and Mahler. Moreover, he lived and worked for periods in
Germany, the UK and the USA. In addition, he had a long-standing relationship
with Scotland: arriving first with the Renaud-Barrault theatre company in 1948,
he developed a fruitful collaboration with the Edinburgh International Festival
over many years.
Conversant in literature (notably
René Char and Mallarmé), painting (Paul Klee) and philosophy (Lévi-Strauss,
Adorno, Eco and Deleuze) as well as music, Boulez represented an ideal of modernist
and high-art cultivation that formed part of the progressive imaginary at the
time but has since fallen under the suspicion of elitist disengagement. This
symposium explores the legacy of Pierre Boulez in relation to our times. In a
period characterised by the spectres of colonialism, neoliberalism, resurgent
nationalism, and cultural populism, we ask what his work, his thought, and the
cultural institutions he inaugurated might offer for the present and for the
future.
Indicative Themes
- Serialism as cultural practice
- IRCAM and French and European cultural policy in the late twentieth century
- Boulez and the modernist imagination
- The post-war avantgardes and decolonisation
- Boulez and Scotland
- Music, new technologies, and the scientific paradigm
Programme Committee: Edward Campbell (University of Aberdeen), Morag J Grant (University of Edinburgh), Björn Heile (University of Glasgow), Peter Nelson (University of Edinburgh)
Please submit proposals for papers or panels (max. 250 words) on the submission form.
Deadline: 1 July 2025
Please contact Edinboulez@gmail.com for any queries (please do not use this to submit your proposal but use the submission form instead).