Pierre Boulez Quotes

Music is a labyrinth with no beginning and no end, full of new paths to discover, where mystery remains eternal

Any musician who has not experienced - I do not say understood, but truly experienced - the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch.

The aim of music is not to express feelings but to express music.

For me, curiosity is life. If you are not curious, you are in your coffin.

It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All art of the past must be destroyed.

More and more I find that in order to create effectively one has to consider delirium and, yes, organize it.

Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous.

All art of the past must be destroyed.

Creation exists only in the unforeseen made necessary.

Music should be a collective magic and hysteria.

We have to fight the past to survive.

Why compose works that have to be re-created every time they are performed? Because definitive, once-and-for-all developments seem no longer appropriate to musical thought as it is today, or to the actual state that we have reached in the evolution of musical technique, which is increasingly concerned with the investigation of a relative world, a permanent 'discovering' rather like the state of 'permanent revolution'.

We need to restore the spirit of irreverence in music.

The function of pop music is to be consumed.

I suggested that it was not enough to add a moustache to the Mona Lisa: it should simply be destroyed.

I shall be the first composer in history not to have a biography.