From Laurent Bayle to Maxime Pascal, the Boulezian heritage seen by the world of music

Laurent Bayle (former general director of the Cité de la Musique, general commissioner of the Boulez year):

“His public face and his cultural commitment pushed him very early on to take on a radical exterior. But he had an intimate side which showed through in his work and from which a great humanity emerged. It is the same with his work which cannot be summed up as a sum of compositions. He not only had a creator’s point of view but a vision of what creation needs to sustain itself over time. And knew how to give institutions the necessary impetus to achieve this. In this, he remains unique in the history of music. He is not the only one of his generation to have wanted to give birth to institutions but he is the only one whose matrices still proliferate. Thanks, no doubt, to this alliance between vision and pragmatism which characterized him. He saw far but knew where to bend so as not to lose his line – gymnastics of which politicians themselves are rarely capable. With them he never showed himself to be inferior. Not out of pretension but out of conviction…