Pierre Boulez left us just as the old year transitioned into the new. His passing marks a sea change in Western classical music, which has lost the last of a priestly caste. An august lineage is at an end, its legacy in abeyance.
Boulez's musical universe was eminently patriarchal: power, domination, control; complexity, abstraction, hermeticism. Ego. Yet, as the I Ching would have it, the situation is evolving slowly, and yin is gaining ground. From an animus esotericism of the head to an anima esotericism of the heart. One hundred years ago modernism shattered a worldview. One hundred years later we can begin to grasp wherefore.
