Boulez
© Hiroyuki Ito for New York TimesPierre Boulez leading the Met Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, New York City, 2010
The giant French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, known for his ardent advocacy of the contemporary music, has died. He was 90.

Pierre Boulez, the French composer and conductor who was a dominant figure in classical music for over half a century, died on Tuesday at his home in Baden-Baden, Germany. He was 90. His death was confirmed by his family in a statement to the Philharmonie de Paris.

Pierre Boulez was born on March 26, 1925, in Montbrison, a town near Lyon, the son of an industrialist, Léon Boulez, and the former Marcelle Calabre. He studied the piano and began to compose in his teens.

Mr. Boulez belonged to an extraordinary generation of European composers who, while still in their 20s, came to the forefront during the decade or so after World War II. They wanted to change music radically, and Mr. Boulez took a leading role. His "Marteau Sans Maître" ("Hammer Without a Master") was one of this group's first major achievements, and it remains a central work of modern music.

Mr. Boulez gradually came to give more attention to conducting, where his keen ear and rhythmic incisiveness would often produce a startling clarity. (There are countless stories of him detecting, for example, faulty intonation from the third oboe in a complex orchestral texture.)

He reached his peak as a conductor in the 1960s, when he began to appear with some of the world's great orchestras, including the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra. His style was unique. He never used the baton, but manipulated the orchestra by means of his two hands simultaneously, the left indicating phrasing or, in much contemporary music, counterrhythm.

His characteristic sound — unemotional on the surface but with undercurrents of intemperateness, at once brilliant in color and rhythmically disciplined — suited his core repertoire of Stravinsky (several of whose works he introduced to Europe), Debussy, Webern, Bartok and Messiaen, and it was refreshing in many of the excursions he took into earlier music. It was a sound that depended on his famously acute ear.

As a young composer he had matched intelligence with great force of mind: He knew what had to be done, according to his reading of history, and he did it, in defiance of all the norms of French musical culture at the time. To be a conductor, though, meant working with the existing machinery.

It was his reputation as an avante-garde composer and as a crusader for new music that prompted his unexpected appointment as music director of the New York Philharmonic, succeeding Leonard Bernstein. After the initial shock at his arrival, there was hope that he might, as many said at the time, bring the orchestra into the 20th century and appeal to younger audiences. But his programming often met with hostility in New York, and he left quietly six years later.

His destination was Paris. Dismissive of the French musical establishment, he had spent most of the previous two decades abroad, but President Georges Pompidou, keen to reclaim a native son, had agreed to found a contemporary-music center for him in the capital: the Institute for the Research and Coordination of Acoustics and Music, known as Ircam. It had its own 31-piece orchestra, the Ensemble Intercontemporain. In the 1980s, he gained further government support for his grandest project, the City of Music complex in the Villette district of Paris, housing the Paris Conservatoire, a concert hall and an instrument museum.

A defining moment came when he heard a broadcast of Stravinsky's "Song of the Nightingale" conducted by Ernest Ansermet; it was a work to which he often returned throughout his conducting career. Against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to study engineering, he went to Paris in 1942 and enrolled at the Conservatoire.
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Among the honors Mr. Boulez received in his later years were the Kyoto Prize in 2009 and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in 2013. Over the course of his career, he won dozens Grammy Awards.

In 1995, his 70th-birthday year, Mr. Boulez conducted his own and other 20th-century music in London, Paris, Vienna, New York, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Brussels and Chicago. In 2005, he spent his 80th birthday in Berlin, which hosted a retrospective of his music.

[T]he achievements contained in his published works and recordings are formidable, and his influence was incalculable. The tasks he took on were heroic: to continue the great adventure of musical modernism, and to carry with him the great musical institutions and the widest possible audience.

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