Boulez The Mellow? Think Again.

It’s almost impossible to write a profile of the suddenly-new-again Pierre Boulez without mentioning how the onetime enfant terrible of music has mellowed over the years. But while Boulez may no longer blast his contemporaries and openly dismiss composers whom the rest of the world loves, his opinions haven’t really changed all that much. For instance, Boulez still insists that Stravinsky’s neoclassic period is “totally artificial,” and that the composer didn’t really do anything interesting from the beginning of his neoclassicism to the day he “discovered” twelve-tone music.