André Boucourechliev was born in 1925 in Sofia, Bulgaria. He began studying music at the conservatory there in 1946, and by 1948 had begun his career as a virtuoso pianist, winning the Grand Prix in Bulgaria’s national musical performance competition. This in turn garnered him a fellowship from the French government to study in Paris, where he moved in 1949. He settled there and adopted it as his home, becoming a naturalized French citizen.

He continued his musical studies in France at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris, studying piano and harmony, as well as counterpoint with Andrée Vaurabourg. In 1951 he earned a concert degree from the Ecole Normale de Musique and began teaching there, a position he held until 1958. In 1955, he took a master class with Walter Gieseking in Sarrebrück.

After this time, he devoted himself to composition and to teaching, as well as to his own, highly personal thinking on the nature of musical language.

Alongside his instrumental pieces, such as Musique à trois (1957) and Sonate pour piano (1959), Boucourechliev also composed works for tape during stays in Milan at the RAI’s Studio di fonologia de la RAI, as well as a stint with the ORTF’s Groupe de recherche musicale: Texte 1 (1958) and Texte 2 (1959). At the GRM in Paris, he also composed Thrène, based on an unfinished poem by Mallarmé (1974).

Invited by Pierre Boulez to showcase his early work at the Domaine Musical, Boucourechliev premiered Signes (1961) and Grodek, based on Georg Trakl’s poem by the same name (1963). Shortly thereafter, these pieces were performed again at the Darmstadt Summer Course.

Although not a serialist, Boucourechliev nevertheless made a place for himself in the musical avant-garde of the time, primarily with his open works, including the Archipel series (1967 to 1970), composed for various musical formations, which won him international acclaim. After Ombres for string orchestra, Faces, and his Concerto pour piano (1970-1975), he composed an opera titled Le nom d’Œdipe (1978), then Lit de Neige and Le Miroir, both for voice and orchestra (1984 and 1987, respectively).

Boucourechliev’s oeuvre also includes numerous pieces for piano, including his Six études d’après Pianèse (1975), and chamber music - including three quartets (1968-1989-1994). Trois fragments de Michel-Ange (1995) for soprano, flute, alto flute, and piano, was his last work.

Boucourechliev taught as the deputy of Olivier Messiaen at the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMDP) before being appointed as a lecturer on contemporary musicology at the University of Aix-en-Provence (1978-1985) and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris (1985-1987).

Boucourechliev wrote books on Schumann, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Chopin, and Debussy, which were translated into several languages, as well as an overview of his research on Musical Language (Le Langage Musical, published by Fayard, 1993). He also wrote many articles chronicling the musical world of his era and many radio and television broadcasts, and continued his own profound and highly personal thinking on music.

He was awarded France’s Grand prix national de musique in 1984, and was Chevalier de la Légion Honneur and Commandeur de l’Ordre des arts et lettres.