Pierre Boulez, a maverick composer and conductor who once worked on one of Frank Zappa‘s classical albums, died at his home in Baden-Baden, Germany on Tuesday. He was 90.

Pierre Boulez was born March 26, 1925, in the small town of Montbrison in the Loire region of France to a family that had “nothing to do with music,” he told the Guardian newspaper in a 1989 ...

Pierre Boulez — who has done as much as if not more than any other living composer and conductor to change the way we think about and make music — turns 90 on Thursday.

Pierre Boulez’s intellectual curiosity can never be sated, one suspects, ... Boulez’s Ninth is more in the Otto Klemperer vein: gaunt, granitic, unadorned.