The String Quartet

In 1949, Pierre Boulez completed several movements of the Livre pour quatuor (1949-1959), the first strictly serial music for string quartet. If cerebral music exists, its essence is captured in this quartet music.

In those same years, Greek-French composer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) believed that Boulez’s serialism was child’s play for a mathematician. Just as an architect develops his designs on the drawing board—and Xenakis was initially an architect!—he composed his sounding objects, often with the help of computers for the calculations, such as string quartet ST/4-1,080262 (1962).