Music: Boulez Ex Machina

The composer turns to computers for a major new work

If there is one international musical figure who can truly be described as protean, it is Pierre Boulez. The former enfant terrible of French composers, who combines a brilliant mathematical mind with an expert musical ear, Boulez has been the chief theoretician of the postwar serialist movement. During his tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1971 to 1977, he introduced audiences to unfamiliar repertory by familiar composers like Liszt, and startled them with lucid, penetrating readings of standards like Debussy's...

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