Pierre Boulez - obituary

Pierre Boulez, the composer and conductor, who has died aged 90, was one of the seminal figures of music in the second half of the 20th century. He led the avant-garde in the 1950s and, to use a 19th-century phrase, pioneered “new paths in music” for his and the succeeding generation. He was an iconoclast who became an icon. He was also a great conductor in a repertory which he gradually widened a