Pierre Boulez lays into his fellow composers

Pierre Boulez (pictured), arguably France's greatest living classical music composer, has defended his reputation as a bully – in times past he used to disrupt concerts at which the great violinist Stravinsky was playing – and delivered a coruscating blast at his contemporaries in a no-holds-barred interview with the Daily Telegraph.

Responding to the bully claims, which were made in Alex Ross's award-winning survey of 20th-century music, The Rest is Noise, he says: "Certainly I was a bully. I'm not ashamed of it at all. The hostility of the establishment to what you were able to do in the Forties and Fifties was very strong. Sometimes you have to fight against your society."

Then Boulez, 83, gleefully sticks the knife into the reputations of his fellow composers, claiming that the minimalists like Philip Glass and Steve Reich "are too simple to be interesting". John Cage, whom he knew in the Forties, was "very trivial", and while fellow Frenchman Erik Satie "could be funny", Boulez objects to the fact that he "was a small man". However, his most caustic remarks are reserved for John Adams, best known for his opera Nixon in China. "I cannot say I will spit on his music, but I cannot admire it either," he says. "His opera The Death of Klinghoffer sounded like bad film music."

Boulez is in London this week to celebrate the centenary of his compatriot Olivier Messiaen – and he, too, receives a severe critique. "He was a very good teacher, and I liked his more adventurous works,” says Boulez. “But then you find a conventional or even banal melodic phrase, or he finished with a C major chord, which I found puzzling." The Telegraph's interviewer suggests this could have been down to a "quest for religious mysticism", to which Boulez replies dismissively: "You don't need C major to find eternity."

Finally, of his infamous harangues at Stravinsky, he said: "I may have booed at one of his concerts, but the incident he [Alex Ross] is referring to was some of my fellow students of Messaien rather than me. We all felt that Stravinsky's neo-classical period was a dead-end street, a waste of time."