Music Lessons - by Pierre Boulez (Paperback)

About the Book

Music Lessons marks the first publication in English of Pierre Boulez's groundbreaking Colláege de France lectures, written while he held the chair of Invention, Technique and Language in Music at the Colláege 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. These writings served as the basis for the wide-ranging and extemporaneous talks Boulez delivered at the Colláege. Collected here, the lectures read as freestanding prose essays, tracing nearly twenty years of Boulez's evolving ideas on creativity in music and the nature of musical language. Boulez explores, among other topics, the process of transforming a musical idea into a full-fledged composition, the complementary roles of craft and inspiration, and the degree to which memory and past musical legacies can influence and change the act of creation. Boulez also gives a penetrating account of long-standing problems in the world of classical music, such as the conservatism of a musical community fixated on the repertory of the past. Woven into the writings are discussions of Boulez's own compositions and those of composers whose work he engaged with in his many roles as teacher, thinker and conductor: from Stravinsky to Stockhausen and Varáese, from Bartâok 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.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Readers can now take stock of the daunting, demanding Boulezian worldview and, whether they warm to his own works or not, appreciate him as one of the most important writers ever about music. Although Boulez was to live over 20 years after the final lecture, Music Lessons has the feel of a vast expository Gesamtkunstwerk that ponders and probes musical experience to its very essence. It ranges over music's fundamental building blocks -- its modes of organization and how we perceive it, both acoustically and culturally--to how memory both aids and interferes with the process of cognition, and on to matters of notation, style, idea, technology and tradition."--John Adams "The New York Times"

"That Boulez was a major figure in post WWII twentieth-century music is indisputable. This book demonstrates the depth and breadth of his contemplation of musical topics over a period of nineteen years of lectures at the Collège de France. . . . Boulez offers profound insight into his thinking as he approached compositional problems. . . . I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Boulez and to those interested in late-twentieth-century serial composition."-- "College Music Symposium"

"What is most refreshing in Boulez's writings is the unfashionable ambition of his questions. . . . Many passages here show him as one of the best thinkers of musical creativity of the past hundred years." -- "Times Literary Supplement"

"Music Lessons provides English-language readers with the fullest document yet of the mature Boulez's musical thought: his approach to composition, his analysis of his predecessors' work, and his attitudes toward many sectors of twentieth-century musical activity. It is an important publication, especially because I believe it casts doubt on the notion that Boulez grew wiser or more generous with age. This book embodies his every paradox: he is both discerning and myopic, clever and needlessly cruel, capable of moments of thrilling clarity as well as long stretches full of bland, arid tautologies. . . . As his era recedes, it feels newly possible to take stock of both his strengths and his limitations."--Matthew Aucoin "New York Review of Books"

"Boulez spent his career writing and composing with intensity, and Music Lessons clearly demonstrates his ability to explain the music art form to everyone, whether they are musicians or not. Boulez was and remains an inspiration to those who call themselves artists, and Music Lessons makes his teachings more accessible than ever as the first publication in English of his groundbreaking Collège de France lectures. This book is recommended for all music lovers, from professionals to the casual listener."-- "Music Reference Services Quarterly"

"Not since the nineteenth century has a composer of major stature written so eloquently, elegantly, and profoundly as Boulez did in these leçons. They read, engagingly, like a journal of discovery, evolution, and defining of a personal artistic aesthetic. From iconoclastic enfant terrible of the European avant-garde to the equally demanding but avuncular orchestra maestro, Boulez insists (autocratically) on the obligation of composer, performer, and listener to think about music, not just feel it. The translations are rendered sensitively and comprehensively, resulting in a book of historical significance."-- "Bernard Rands, Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy-winning composer and Bigelow Rosen Professor Emeritus, Harvard University"

"The long-awaited English translation of Pierre Boulez's Collège de France lectures is a major event. Comprehensive and incisive, his brilliance tempered by wisdom and profound experience, Boulez gives essential insight into the craft of composition."-- "Alex Ross, author of "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century""

"This collection of essays by one of the crucially important figures in postwar contemporary music, representative of a renaissance in Boulez's critical writing, illuminates far more than his musical oeuvre alone. These lectures exemplify the ways in which incisive musical thought can create a compelling staging ground for understanding the critical cultural, historical, philosophical, technological, and social issues of our time."-- "George E. Lewis, author of "A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music""

"While also picking up steam as a composer, appearing internationally as a conductor, and leading a computer music lab in Paris, Pierre Boulez in his fifties and sixties was bringing his theoretical contemplations to a summit in the lectures contained in this volume. This is a book to set beside Schoenberg's Style and Idea as one of the great documents of musical thought from the last century, essential reading for young composers and all who are concerned with where we are musically, how we got here, and whither we might go."-- "Paul Griffiths, author of "Modern Music: A Concise History from Debussy to Boulez""

About the Author

Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) was a French composer, conductor, and music theorist. He conducted with major orchestras in the United States and Europe, including the Cleveland Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, and the Berlin Philharmonic. 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.