Inside Pierre Boulez

Just how do you learn to play a Pierre Boulez score? “The leaps are awkward. The spacings of the chords are often large and dense, and there are many, many notes on every single page. As with lots of contemporary music, the patterns, the pitches are nothing like what we grew up practicing. The scores are the kind of music that someone who doesn’t really read music would say [are just] full of black dots and circles. The page is covered with specks.”