Cacophonix is dead

In the aftermath of September 11 76-year-old composer and conductor Pierre Boulez was arrested at a Swiss hotel. The frantic search for anything that smelled of terrorism led the police everywhere to make some hasty decisions; a few decades earlier Boulez had declared that all opera houses ought to be blown up, so accusing him of terrorism made sense, somehow. Being arrested could not but please the old composer, whose public persona rested on the idea of being a musical revolutionary: he was, after all, one of the leaders of the European post-war avant-garde.

Boulez had indeed devoted most of his life to defending the idea of a new music for a new time. After the zero hour, with Europe destroyed by war and shocked by images of concentration camps and the devastation of Japan, the old cultural regime had to go whilst audiences had to be…