This year marks 100 years since the birth of Pierre Boulez, and the Stauffer Academy, in collaboration with the Ensemble intercontemporain, is hosting a special workshop from March 31 to April 4. The project will explore the legacy of the French composer and culminate in a concert on April 4 at the Arvedi Auditorium of the Violin Museum in Cremona.

Designed around the “learn-by-doing” philosophy, where the public performance plays a central role in the learning process, the workshop focuses on preparing a concert programme that combines Boulez’s works with music by Bach and Webern, two composers who profoundly influenced his artistic vision. The Stauffer students will dive deeply into excerpts from the Livre pour quatuor, a demanding yet pivotal piece in Boulez’s output, and Anthèmes 1 for solo violin. The programme will also feature pages from Bach’s The Art of Fugue (Contrapunctus I, III, and VII) and Webern’s String Quartet, Op. 28.

The workshop will be led by the string quartet of the Ensemble intercontemporain, the renowned French ensemble founded by Boulez in 1979, which accompanied him throughout his artistic and personal life. The professors – Jeanne Marie Conquer and Diego Tosi (violins), Odile Auboin (viola) and Renaud Déjardin (cello) – will perform together with the students in the final concert.

The Boulez100 project also includes study days, lectures, and seminars in collaboration with the Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage of the University of Pavia. Among the speakers is the musicologist Jean Louis Leleu, who played a key role in completing the unfinished fourth movement of Livre.