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French composer, conductor, and music theorist Pierre Boulez was regarded as a leading composer of the post-Webern serialist movement who also embraced aleatory elements and electronics.

As a child, Boulez demonstrated a formidable aptitude in mathematics, but in 1942 he enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire. His studies there often ran into difficulties, as he rapidly developed revolutionary attitudes toward all things traditional. Two decisive influences during those years helped to shape his musical personality. The first was Olivier Messiaen, the other was René Leibowitz, who introduced him to serial music, where Boulez found "a harmonic and contrapuntal richness and a capacity for development an extension of a kind I have never found anywhere else."

By the late '40s, Boulez began using a technique known as total serialization. One of his earliest works to gain public notice was his Second Piano Sonata (1948), following its performance in concert at Darmstadt in 1952 by Yvonne Loriod, Messiaen's wife. The piece from the 1950s that sealed his reputation was Le Marteau sans Maître from 1954 (revised in 1955), for singer and chamber ensemble. The instrumentation gives prominence to exotic percussion, extended vocal techniques, and textures that are often brittle, but also lyrical. Rigorously organized, Le Marteau nonetheless goes beyond strict serialism to a more personal style. The premiere took place in Germany in 1955 under Hans Rosbaud, after the Südwestfunk Radio underwrote an astounding 50 rehearsals in order that the piece be performed properly.

During the late '50s, Boulez began allowing greater freedom for the performer in works like Improvisations sur Mallarmé for soprano and chamber ensemble. In his Third Piano Sonata (1957), the pianist can reorder the five movements in a variety of ways, and certain passages within the movements offer alternate paths, thereby making the artist select which to play and which to omit. In 1957, Boulez embarked on Pli Selon Pli, a work in five movements for soprano and orchestra to texts by Mallarmé, making use of a more restrained open-form technique. He was also known for withdrawing and rewriting his compositions, making nearly everything he wrote a work in progress. For instance, ...explosante-fixe..., first sketched in 1971, engendered a number of works and transitory phases over approximately 25 years, including a 1996 version for solo MIDI flute and chamber ensemble. In 2000, he received the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in Composition for his 40-minute chamber piece Sur Incises for three pianos, three harps, and three percussionists.

Boulez was also one of the 20th century's most influential conductors, known for extraordinarily precise performances of contemporary works by Bartók, Ligeti, Messiaen, and Varèse, among many others. He debuted in America in 1965 with the Cleveland Orchestra, and in 1966 conducted his first operas, Wozzeck and Parsifal, and made his first orchestral recordings. In 1968 he was named music director of both the BBC Symphony Orchestra and New York Philharmonic, where his programs of modern music were often met with harsh criticism. In 1970 French President Pompidou announced the experimental electronic music institute Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) to be under Boulez's administration, where he remained until the mid-'90s. In 1975, he formed the Ensemble InterContemporain, a group devoted entirely to performing new music, including his own Repons (1980). The following year, Boulez was invited to lead the centenary performances of Wagner's Ring Cycle at the Bayreuth Festival. Around the same time, he left his permanent conducting appointments, but continued to guest conduct many leading orchestras often. As a conductor, Boulez made many notable recordings; in 1996 he won a Grammy for his recording of Debussy's La Mer with the Cleveland Orchestra. Active into his eighties, his repertoire expanded to include works by such composers as Mahler, Janácek, and Szymanowski. Health issues limited his engagements after 2012, and he unfortunately was too ill to attend celebrations in honor of his 90th birthday. Boulez passed away at his home in Baden-Baden in January 2016. ~ TiVo Staff

Although Anton Bruckner wrote a great deal of sacred choral music (including not only his grandly conceived Mass No. 3, but also his more intimate Mass No. 2 and his astringent motets, which fuse Renaissance and 19th century techniques), he is best known for his symphonies: two unnumbered apprentice works, eight completed mature symphonies, and the first three movements of a Ninth. (The finale has been reconstructed by several hands, but most performances include just the movements Bruckner completed.) The symphonies, influenced to some extent by Wagner and identified with his school by the Viennese public, are monumental: expansive in scale, rigorous (if sometimes gigantist) in formal design, and often elaborate in their contrapuntal writing. Their sonorities are stately and organ-like; the Viennese critic Graf wrote that Bruckner "pondered over chords and chord associations as a medieval architect contemplated the original forms of a Gothic cathedral." Despite occasional folk influences in the scherzos, his symphonies are uniformly high-minded, even religious, in spirit. Together, they form the weightiest body of symphonies between Schubert (whom he greatly admired) and Mahler.

Bruckner was born in the town of Ansfelden, Austria, on September 4, 1824, the son of a schoolmaster/church musician and the eldest of 11 children. His first music teacher was his father, and at ten, he was deputized for his father as organist at church and made his first attempts at composition. At 13, the year of his father's death, he was accepted as a choirboy at St. Florian, which, however far afield he would travel, was to become his lifelong spiritual home. He spent the first years of his career as a choirmaster for a group of monks and teaching in various parishes, one of which was close to Enns, where he studied with Leopold von Zenetti beginning in 1843. In 1845 he returned to St. Florian as organist and teacher and remained there for the next decade. He next began studying composition and counterpoint with Simon Sechter, primarily by mail.

Until this point, Bruckner's output consisted mostly of sacred choral music and organ pieces, but now he would start to expand his horizons. He passed exams at the Vienna Conservatory in 1861, and then, the 37-year-old student approached cellist/conductor Otto Kitzler for lessons in form and orchestration. Around the same time, he created his first large works, including a Symphony in D minor that he later derisively named "die Nullte," the Symphony No. 0. Kitzler had introduced Bruckner to Wagner's Tannhäuser in 1863, and Bruckner was present at the premiere of Tristan und Isolde in 1865. He remained a near-fanatical admirer of Wagner, but the extent to which his own vast musical structures were modeled on Wagner's is a matter of debate. His symphonies sometimes show a spirituality similar to his sacred choral works, which he also continued to write.

Bruckner landed a teaching post at the Vienna Conservatory in 1868, but always retained something of his original rustic character. An often-repeated anecdote tells how he gave a tip to the aristocratic conductor Hans Richter after a successful rehearsal of his Symphony No. 4, telling Richter to go and buy himself a beer. Musical life in cosmopolitan Vienna at the time was split between two schools, the Wagnerians and the Brahmsians. The resulting criticism of his music from the Brahms faction, plus his own lifelong self-doubt are generally seen as the main reasons for his multiple revisions of many of his major works. Bruckner also gave organ performances throughout Europe in this period, impressing audiences with his improvisations that often produced ideas he would use in the symphonies. The Symphony No. 7 (1881-1883) was successfully premiered in Leipzig and New York before being revised and performed in Vienna in 1886. The Eighth brought a standing ovation when premiered in Vienna under Richter in 1892, with even Brahms heartily joining the applause. It was dedicated to Emperor Franz Joseph I, who had decorated Bruckner with the Order of Franz Joseph in 1886 and supported the composer in his final year. The last years of his life were spent in ill-health and working on the Ninth Symphony, but it would never be completed. Bruckner died in Vienna on October 11, 1896, and was buried in the crypt at St. Florian, below the "Bruckner Organ." ~ TiVo Staff