Music Lessons: The Collège de France Lectures

Now in paperback to celebrate the centenary of Pierre Boulez's birth in 2025. A groundbreaking group of writings by French composer Pierre Boulez, his yearly lectures prepared for the Collège de France. 

Music Lessons marks the first publication in English of Pierre Boulez’s Collège de France lectures, written while he held the chair of Invention, Technique and Language in Music at the Collège between 1976 and 1995. Representing Boulez’s most significant writings from the period, the lectures offer a sustained intellectual engagement with one of the dominant figures of twentieth-century music, a consummate composer-conductor who remained central to the conversation around contemporary music until his death in 2016. Boulez explores, among other topics, the process through which a musical idea is realized in a full-fledged composition, the complementary roles of craft and inspiration and the degree to which the memory of other musical works can influence and change the act of creation. Boulez also gives a penetrating account of problems in classical music that are still present today, such as the conservatism of a musical community fixated on the repertory of the past. Woven into the discussion are stories of his own compositions and those of fellow composers whose work he engaged with in his many roles as teacher, thinker, and conductor: from Stravinsky to Stockhausen and Varèse, from Bartók to Berg, Debussy to Mahler and Wagner, and all the way back to his beloved J. S. Bach.

Including a foreword by semiologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez, who was for years close to the composer, this edition is also enriched by an illuminating preface by Jonathan Goldman. With an authoritative translation retaining Boulez’s fierce convictions, cutting opinions and signature wit, Music Lessons is an essential and entertaining volume.

Jonathan Dunsby is professor of music theory at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.

Jonathan Goldman is professor of musicology at the Université de Montréal.

Arnold Whittall is emeritus professor of music at King’s College London.