Pierre Boulez becomes honorary citizen of German town
mainThe French composer and conductor has been made an honorary citizen of Baden-Baden, where he has maintained his main residence for the past half-century. The honour was granted to mark his forthcoming 90th birthday in March.
We thought he’d like everyone to see it.
Thanks, it’s good to know what the old boy is up to.
The Baden-Baden orchestra had created its profile in the postwar decades as a progressive band, advocating the modernist revolution in serious music, with a strong diet of Boulez and Stockhausen. A medical research in those years showed, however, that the players suffered much more severely from depression, psychic ills, stress problems, digestive disorders than the average orchestral player who mainly lived on a diet of the old repertoire. Now that modernism has been established as a convention, it has been absorbed into the mainstream. But has it become healthy thereby?