Talk:Pierre Boulez

I would love if someone could/would discuss this in the article:

"What you have in serial music, of course, is a dialectical discourse; a statement is made, then negated; then the product of those is negated. Boulez, in his early aesthetic writings, is frankly Marxist in describing this."

http://www.sospeso.com/contents/articles/murail_p2.html

I don't know enough about Boulez, and I've never heard his music, so I won't find it anytime soon...Hyacinth 19:31, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

Pronunciation

Perhaps a note about pronunciation is in order. I initially assumed that his name was pronounced "bou-lay", but I've heard radio announcers (who have otherwise impeccable pronunciation with foreign names and words) say "bou-lezz". Sure enough, googling for "pierre boulez pronunciation" turns up some authoritative-looking pages that say it's "bou-lezz", not "bou-lay".

I don't know if Wikipedia has a standard way of writing the pronunciation of potentially confusing words/names, but if anybody else is as easily confused as me, this might be helpful to note.  :-)

• This might be a good idea; for a while, after I bought my first Boulez conducts Wagner LP in the 80s, I thought too that Boulez rhymed with "voulez". The best way to do this would probably be to add a version of his name in IPA. Like this, I think: [bu:lɛs]David Sneek 09:03, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I believe the name should rhyme with "voulez" (being French), but that Pierre insists it does not. Either that or it is not French (my name is mispronounced Russian and my mother's last name, Sather, is mispronounced by her immediate family as Saather rather than Say-ther). Hyacinth 00:37, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

David: Ah, great thinking to use the IPA! Looks close. But according to the IPA article, [bu:lɛs] looks like it would be pronounced 'bou-less', which is not how I've heard it said. I thought the final consonant was voiced: [bu:lɛz].

Also, it might be useful to also have the obvious-but-wrong pronunciation next to it, for comparison, as in: "[bu:lɛz], not [bu:leɪ]".

I don't know the best place for it. The page for Goedel puts it in brackets after the name, but before his dates. The page for El Cid puts it later in the article, surrounded by //. (I have no particular preference.) Comments?

I have a CD on which French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who is kind of a Boulez specialist, gives an introduction to the first Sonata, and I just listened carefully to his pronunciation: to me the final consonant does sound like a Voiceless alveolar fricative ;-) Googling to make sure I found this (http://www.math.nyu.edu/~wendlc/pronunciation/French.html#exceptions), with the correct pronunciation on mp3, but unfortunately the computer I'm working on right now has no sound. Maybe you or Hyacinth can check if it's voiced or not there. About the place: if we're just going to put the IPA in there, I think we should put it right behind the name, if we want to explain that final "-ez" in French is usually pronounced "ay", but Boulez is the exception, the end of the first paragraph seems best. David

That page says it's "boo-lehz", which to me means voiced (like "z", and especially because they say earlier on the page to pronounce "z" as "z"). But right above it is "behr-lee-ohz", which I've always known as ending with an unvoiced consonant. (And the recording for Berlioz definitely sounds like an unvoiced final consonant to me -- behr-lee-ohsss.) The recording for Boulez ... wow. I put it on loop and listened to it for a while, and I really can't tell if he's trying to voice it or not. It kind of starts out sounding sharper like a "z", but then ends more muffled like "ss". To my ears, it sounds like he's saying "boo-lezss".

So, bonus points for finding a recording, but now I'm as confused as ever. Perhaps we should just call Pierre on the phone and ask him to say his name.  :-)

You're right [zss] seems closest, which is a bit confusing... So I asked for help.

Unfortunately, the speaker in that clip is not French. I am fairly sure that the French pronunciation is [bu'lɛz]. It is the same pronunciation that is given in the [Encyclopedia (http://www.bartleby.com/65/bo/Boulez-P.html|Columbia)], which seems to be pretty accurate with most other names. I don't know of any French word or name that has a "z" that is pronounced "s". Saying that it is a mixture of z and s seems to me to be overcomplicating things. Of course, in English, we use the long u, represented with a colon, so we could write it [bu:'lɛz], as suggested above. I'll go ahead and put up a pronunciation, but I'm not French either, so if anyone knows better, please change it. Lesgles 12:30 16 Dec. 2004

Thanks, now we can move on to another syllable!

Hello, Im french, stumbled upon help. and it comes naturally to me : "boo-lehzzz" (dunno the number of z's if it's important for IPA pronunciation) . The mp3s you listen at are wrong because I recognize the english accent spoken with. Sorry! ;-) To conclude, and IMHO the final consonant is a Voiced alveolar fricative. this (http://www.math.nyu.edu/~wendlc/pronunciation/French.html#exceptions) is quite byzarre because I do not agree with the exceptions like, by example : "Darius Milhaud" it is not "yo!" (double-"l") but rather "lo" (simple-"l" as here for Milhaud) etc. etc. Conruyt 20:44, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)