Boulez is now over 80 years old, and is now the only major composer-performer of Western music appearing in public. Earlier in this century there were several such figures-rachmaninov, Bartok, Messiaen, Prokofiev, Britten, Strauss and others. The split between the platform star and the serious composer has become almost complete, the result of the economics of record production and virtuoso careers, as well as the difficulty for the average concertgoer of understanding, much less liking, most contemporary music as it is usually represented (misrepresented is the more accurate word). Aside from a few "postmodern," not to say reactionary, composers like Arvo Part and Henryk Gorecki who have made it big with the record-buying crowd, there is supposed to be no real audience for the kind of music composed by Boulez and Stockhausen, music that is neither tuneful nor in any ready-made way accessible to ears that have been sated with recordings of Mozart, Brahms and Beethoven.

Boulez still represents, for many music-lovers, the archetypal social-security composer devoted to the manufacture of sonic sewage. To his small but powerful group of defenders, he is viewed as a stunning conductor, as one of the great intellectual advocates of musical modernism, as a genius who has produced refined atonal masterpieces such as Le Marteau sans Maitre and Pli Selon Pli.

Boulez was one of the most articulate members of the French postwar musical avant-garde. As much through his articles and interviews as his compositions, he became one of the most talked about - yet least loved - composers of his generation. Here, the Third Programme (later Radio 3) had been founded with a specifically elitist mandate, thank goodness for that! Both it and the still youthful Arts Council (formed in 1945) adopted the theories of a confident, Continental avant-garde, with Boulez as its most debonair musical advocate. When he was finally rewarded with the chief conductorship of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1971, it was a symbol of what had been known for years-that the avant-garde was now the establishment, and that those composers who traced their musical ancestry back through Sir Edward Elgar, rather than Arnold Schoenberg, should find other jobs. With such direct influence, Boulez inevitably attracted envy and criticism. Indeed, in the near-hysterical atmosphere that pervaded discussions of new music, he wa s frequently accused of being Stalinist.

Boulez remains one of the most puzzling figures in the music of our time. Although he composed Le Marteau sans maitre when he was around thirty, it turned out to be the beginning of the end of his main creative phase. He has composed little new music over the past twenty years. In the wake of Boulez's turbulent years at the New York Philharmonic, in the mid-1970s, the writer Joan Peyser came up with a psychological interpretation in her book Boulez (1976), with her suggestion, for example, that he suffered from crippling emotional inhibitions as a result of his Catholic upbringing. Today critics are more likely to see Boulez as a victim of his own vision of musical history. When modernism went out of style, they say, Boulez was left stranded. Yet the ecstatic reception Boulez receives these days when he conducts in Chicago or Vienna--neither city a bastion of modern music, from which Boulez never strays--suggests that Boulez is not so easily consigned to the historical dustheap.