Perfect Sound Forever

Composer-Conductor or Conductor-Composer?


Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna
by Daniel Barbiero
(December 2025)


It's difficult enough for new and challenging music to gain acceptance. But when the contemporary composer's time and energies are divided between composition and conducting, it would seem even harder. If nothing else, two different sets of skills have to come into play. While obviously related (both involve intimate familiarity with musical forms and techniques), they're different: to compose a work is one thing; to interpret a work, particularly the work of another composer, and to realize it by directing a group of professional musicians is quite another. The composer-conductor has to be a kind of musical amphibian equally at home in two different, yet complementary, regions of the musical ecosystem.

This double life of the composer-conductor naturally raises a number of questions. Can both activities be pursued at the highest level, or must a choice between one or the other ultimately have to be made? Specifically, will the time- and labor-intensive activity of conducting intrude on composing, to the point of making it difficult or even impossible? Will the composer-conductor's own music have the opportunity to develop and to get the visibility and hearing it would need in order to find a place within both critical discourse and listener awareness? Will the composer's conducting career and reputation as a conductor overshadow and eclipse his or her career and reputation as a composer, thus rendering him or her a conductor-composer rather than a composer-conductor? And why would a composer turn to conducting to begin with?

These questions become particularly poignant for the composer of avant-garde or otherwise challenging music who also conducts. Nor are the answers especially obvious. For as shown by the careers of two prominent avant-garde composers of the postwar period, Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna, composers' motivations for conducting may differ, just as the effects of their conducting on their compositional activities and reputations as composers may differ as well.


Boulez

In the immediate postwar period, Boulez (1925-2016) was widely recognized as one of the leading young European avant-garde composers. As early as his "Second Piano Sonata" of 1948, his mature musical language was on display. It was, and would remain, firmly rooted in Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern's twelve-tone modernism as well as in the complex rhythms that he'd been introduced to from listening to the music of Stravinsky and through his studies with Messiaen in 1945-1946. His "Structures I" for two pianos (1951-1952) took the language of dodecaphony and broadened it by extending the organizational principle of the twelve-tone pitch series to the parameters of duration, dynamics, and timbre. Boulez's biographer Joan Peyser aptly described the piece as an "Art of the Fugue for the serial language" (Peyser, p. 69). It was a language that was coming to dominate the European avant-garde. His "Le Marteau sans maître" (1952-1954) while still serially-based, represented a new development in that its unusual orchestration arose from Boulez's desire to create unconventional combinations of sound color, a desire that reflected Boulez's recent turn to Debussy for inspiration.

As with any kind of radically new work, Boulez's initially met with resistance. Audiences and critics generally were hostile, but composers, particularly his contemporaries, were receptive. And not only his contemporaries: on hearing an early performance of "Le Marteau sans maître," the much older Stravinsky declared that it was the best work yet of Boulez's generation. It was reactions like Stravinsky's, as well as those of younger composers, that helped Boulez build a reputation as a rising force within European new music. But Boulez used his own considerable verbal talents as well. He aggressively positioned himself as a prolific, and often sharply polemical, writer of essays, criticism, and manifestos.

Because his compositions posed challenges to performers as well as to listeners, Boulez found himself having to conduct them. This began as early as spring 1957, when he stepped in to conduct his "Visage nuptial" for a performance in Cologne. Later that year, he conducted "Le Marteau sans maître" in Los Angeles, taking over for Robert Craft when Craft either had trouble with the score, or invited Boulez, as the composer, to conduct (accounts differ and this was the performance that Stravinsky heard). Boulez followed this with conducting dates in New York and then in Europe upon his return to the continent the following year. In retrospect, these performances represent the beginnings of Boulez's international career as a conductor, although it may not have seemed that way at the time. As he told Peyser, he "had no feeling then of embarking on a conducting career...The professional consequences I never foresaw. I only did it to benefit my composing" (Peyser, p. 134).

But a factor other than an ad hoc willingness to conduct his own compositions may have been in play. At the time, Boulez began conducting, the European avant-garde was undergoing a change in direction that turned it away from the kind of rigorous serialism Boulez was committed to and toward a mode of composing that favored chance and a lessening of the composer's control over all aspects of the composition. Indeterminacy was ascendant, partly in reaction to what was perceived to be the rigidity of serial methods, and partly in response to the shock of John Cage's participation in the 1958 Darmstadt summer session. Ironically, Cage was there in Boulez's place when the latter had to cancel his previously scheduled appearance. He was working in the Baden-Baden electronic music studio on "Poésie pour pouvoir" and either could not or would not disengage in time to make it to Darmstadt. Cage's style of presentation and ideas about the use of chance operations in composition had a profound effect on the young composers in attendance, including Stockhausen, who himself turned to aleatory composition and now supplanted Boulez as the leading figure among Europe's avant-garde. In an ironic turn, the designation of the new music of chance as "aleatory" derived from Boulez's statement "Aléa," a presentation on his "Third Piano Sonata" delivered at Darmstadt in 1957. As pianist David Tudor, who was at Darmstadt with Cage, bluntly told Peyser, "[i]t was in 1958 that Stockhausen surpassed Boulez as a power in Europe" (Peyser, p. 138).

To be sure, by the mid-1950s Boulez had begun incorporating a degree of indeterminacy into his compositions. His pre-compositional material still consisted of serially organized "charts and tables," as musicologist Martin Iddon put it; but now these structures served as "variable labyrinth[s]" through which the composer, through a process of decision-making, would trace a path (Iddon, p. 189). Boulez's bringing structure and chance into a productive dialogue was his simply doing what he had advocated in a 1954 essay: creating a "dialectic operating at each moment of the composition between a strict global organization and a temporary structure controlled by free will" (quoted in Griffiths, p. 87). As a programmatic statement, this well captures the direction his music was to take going forward. But at the end of the 1950s, the rigorous pre-compositional structures and dodecaphonic vocabulary of musical modernism that continued to claim his allegiance had lost its dominant place within the avant-garde. Not only had the avant-garde gone in another direction, but it had splintered into multiple other directions, and Boulez's kind of modernism was no longer the central one.

Did Boulez turn to conducting as a withdrawal from an avant-garde he no longer felt at home in? Messiaen, for one, thought so. He hypothesized to Peyser that Boulez took up conducting when changes in the musical landscape weren't to his liking. These changes "make him suffer... [he] cannot go unperturbed through change... he thinks that advancing the language is all. He feels he must be in the advance guard and he doesn't like what is happening there" (Peyser, p. 1).

If in fact his turn to conducting was a withdrawal, it was one that took him to the top of the profession. During the 1960s, he took on increasingly high profile conducting jobs, and by 1969, he was appointed to succeed Leonard Bernstein as music director of the New York Philharmonic, which he did starting with the 1971-1972 season. He seems to have seen the post as an opportunity to evangelize for the musical Modernism he espoused, as reflected in his choices of works to conduct as well as in the programs he initiated with the intention of educating listeners and expanding the audience for the music. But the results were mixed. He presented Elliott Carter's "Concerto for Orchestra" as well as Varèse's "Amériques," giving the latter work its first performance in many years. It was a considerable, and indeed admirable, achievement. But overall, listeners were resistant, there were canceled subscriptions and letters of complaint, and consequently, his ambitions had to be scaled back. In 1977, he left the New York Philharmonic and returned to Europe when the French government offered him the directorship of the newly opened Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique (Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music, or IRCAM) in Paris, which he had helped found earlier in the decade.

After the move, Boulez reduced his conducting obligations and turned his attention to administering the institution as well as to composing. During his tenure in New York, he'd composed very little; after 1977, his output was still small, a good portion of it consisting of revisions and reworkings of older material and much of it left unfinished. Did the years spent conducting, in which Boulez's energy was diverted from composing, have a permanently enervating effect? Did this relative lack of productivity only represent the kind of slowdown in inspiration not uncommon among artists in mid-career? Or was musicologist Richard Taruskin right in suggesting that Boulez came to embody the "essential irony of late-twentieth-century art -the transformation of the avant-garde (vanguard) into the arrière-garde (rear guard) precisely because of its commitment to an old concept of the new"? (Taruskin, p. 480). Whatever the reason may have been, Boulez produced relatively little new material.

Nevertheless, although he spent much of his career as a conductor and later as an administrator, Boulez is largely remembered as a composer. If for no other reason, his early work as a major force within the European postwar avant-garde gives him the right to claim a permanent place of priority in the history of Western art music. And although we've mentioned his writings only briefly, composer John Adams is surely right to have asserted that he was "one of the most important writers about music." Certainly his output as a writer and propagandist was substantial -the published volume of his Collège de France lectures alone runs to over six hundred pages. And he has even had an entire study dedicated to his use of philosophical discourse in explicating his music, a use that demonstrates his awareness of the conceptual connections between his compositions and contemporary trends in philosophical thought. Modernism in the various arts (visual, literary, and musical) relied to an unprecedented degree on verbal explication, justification, and provocation, and here too, Boulez proved to be outstanding.

Boulez's high reputation as a composer was underscored in recent years on the occasions of two major biographical milestones. His 90th birthday in 2015 saw a number of celebratory events, although as Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times noted, much of the activity took place in Europe, with the New York Philharmonic neglecting to honor the birthday of its former music director with a presentation of his music. The 100th anniversary of his birth this year [2025] has also seen a good number of commemorative concerts and other events in Europe and America, including one by the New York Philharmonic -- proof of his continuing importance as a composer.

In sum, despite its having taken up much of his effort during the better part of a decade, Boulez's work as a conductor did not prevent him from having a lasting reputation as a composer. In the final reckoning, Boulez's music likely will be judged to have stood at the end of a line of development that runs from Mahler through Webern rather than to have opened up of an entirely new path, but as such it represents the late flowering of a tradition rather than its threadbare continuance.


Maderna

Like Boulez, Maderna (1920-1973) was closely associated with Darmstadt. In contrast to Boulez, whose attitude toward the summer courses Iddon has described as "one of disinterest, sometimes bordering on disdain" (Iddon, p. 108), Maderna had an apparently more satisfying and certainly longer-lasting connection--so much so that he ended up settling in the city in 1962 and resided there until the end of his life, having become a naturalized German citizen in 1963.

Maderna was first present at Darmstadt in 1949 -- not in person, but through the performance of his "Fantasia per due pianoforte (B.A.C.H.-Variationen)." His first in-person attendance at Darmstadt was in 1951, and in the following year, he began conducting there; beginning in 1954, he taught conducting and composition. Nearly twenty of his compositions were performed at Darmstadt, notably his "Musica su due dimensioni" (1952), possibly the first composition for an orchestral instrument and electronics, which was presented at the "Wunderkonzert" of July, 1952.

Maderna's institutional association with Darmstadt was crucial for establishing him as a major composer among the younger generation of the European musical avant-garde. During the 1950s, along with Nono, Boulez, and Stockhausen, he was considered one of the central figures of what became known as the Darmstadt "school," or "style," or even "cult" (Iddon, p. 125). This collective label, while convenient for critics and others attempting to come to terms with the new music, was something of a mischaracterization. For although these four composers employed serial techniques in one form or another, they did so in individual ways- sometimes they did this rigorously and sometimes loosely, and more often than not in a manner that went against the caricature of "Darmstadt" serialism as necessarily involving a rigid, wholly determined generative method for handling the entirety of a composition's musical materials. Maderna in particular favored a more flexible method of composing and consequently, his work was considered more lyrical or expressive than some of the other serially-composed work being produced in the 1950s and 1960s.

From the 1950s and up until his death, Maderna composed works of various types including pieces for orchestra and chamber ensemble, among which were a string quartet, a piano concerto, and a work for solo violin, as well as theater pieces. In addition to composing for more conventional ensembles, Maderna was an early explorer of the musical possibilities presented by the new electronic technologies for sound production, capture, and reproduction. In addition to his work on "Musica su due dimensioni," some of which was undertaken in the Bonn electronic music studio, he had worked in the Paris studio for musique concrète and in the electronic music studio attached to the German state radio station in Cologne. His early commitment to electronic music was such that in 1955, he and Luciano Berio founded the Studio di Fonologia Musicale at the state radio station in Milan. The two initiated the studio with a jointly composed tape piece called "Ritratto di città" ("Portrait of a City") made up of sounds recording during a work day. Maderna also composed several other electronic works later in the decade such as "Notturno" (1956), "Syntaxis" (1957) and "Continuo" (1958) and produced a second version of "Musica su due dimensioni" (1958) that differed substantially from the earlier one. His experiments with tape with and without conventional instruments continued through the 1960s.

It was in 1950 that Maderna began his career as an international conductor with engagements in Paris and Munich. He doesn't seem to have fallen into conducting accidentally nor to have taken it up in order to present his own work, as had Boulez. And also unlike Boulez, he had studied conducting as part of his musical training. Indeed, according to his entry in Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, he had been conducting in public as early as the age of seven. By 1960, he was seen primarily as a conductor rather than a composer, and was especially valued as a conductor of modern operas. He conducted and taught throughout Europe and in the United States, and in 1971, he was made director of new music at Tanglewood. Even after having been diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him, Maderna maintained an active conducting career.

Although he continued to compose even while maintaining a demanding schedule as a conductor, in the end, Maderna's reputation as a conductor overshadowed his reputation as a composer. Clearly, his accomplishments as a composer were substantial and engaged with the methods and materials at Western art music's leading edge. And yet contemporary histories of postwar composition devote less attention to him than to his old colleagues Boulez, Nono, and Stockhausen and rarely discuss any of his individual compositions at length, if at all. Other than his "Musica su due dimensioni," none of his compositions are remembered to the extent that we remember works by his contemporaries, say, Boulez's "Structures" and "Le Marteau sans maître," Stockhausen's "Kreuzspiel" or Nono's "Il Canto sospeso." One of the constants of reputations is that they change over time; what was once the big four of postwar new music -Boulez, Nono, Stockhausen, and Maderna -has largely been reduced to three.

It's possible that Maderna's early death prevented him from experiencing the kind of later life burst of compositional creativity that, had it happened, could've reversed the polarity of his reputation. It's also possible that, with the period in which he flourished as a composer receding farther back in time, his compositions have come to seem lacking some of the weight and aesthetic ramifications of works by his now better-known contemporaries. And unlike Boulez, Maderna did not produce a prolific, and profile-raising, body of criticism and programmatic prose--a clear disadvantage at a time when art was expected to have an elaborate and well-articulated theoretical scaffold with which to support it.

But it's also true that in order to have a successful hearing, new music is as much in need of skilled and sensitive conductors as of composers, and Maderna was by all accounts a superb one. Given the difficulty--for performers as well as for listeners--of much of the music he chose to present, that in itself was a worthy accomplishment.


References:


Also see our article on Boulez's ...explosante-fixé...

And see our earlier article on Pierre Boulez


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