Between May 1949 and August 1954 the composers Pierre Boulez and John Cage exchanged a series of remarkable letters that reflect on their own music and the culture of the time. This correspondence, together with other relevant documents, has been edited and annotated by Jean-Jacques Nattiez and is now available for the first time in English in a paperback edition.

Music Lessons marks the first publication in English of a groundbreaking group of writings by French composer Pierre Boulez, his yearly lectures prepared for the Collège de France between 1976 and 1995. The lectures presented here offer a sustained intellectual engagement with themes of creativity in music by a widely influential cultural figure, who has long been central to the conversation around contemporary music. In his essays 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 often crippling conservatism of established musical institutions. Woven into the discussion are stories of his own compositions and those of fellow composers whose work he championed, as both a critic and conductor: from Stravinsky to Stockhausen and Varèse, from Bartók to Berg, Debussy to Mahler and Wagner, and all the way back to Bach.
Including a foreword by famed semiologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez, who was for years a close collaborator and friend of the composer, this edition is also enriched by an illuminating preface by Jonathan Goldman. With a masterful translation retaining Boulez’s fierce convictions, cutting opinions, and signature wit, Music Lessons will be an essential and entertaining volume.

Pierre Boulez (born 1925) is a major figure in French musical life, being not only the leading French composer of his generation, but also an outstanding conductor. He is also a prolific writer on music, and this is a translation of his first collection of essays, published in France in 1966. In these essays Boulez worked out many of his most significant ideas about music, and he sets forth his views with characteristic intellectual vigour and acuity. The essays are divided into four parts, the first three concerned with a common preoccupation (aesthetic, technical, polemical), the last a collection of entries intended for a music encyclopaedia. Boulez writes mainly on the giants of twentieth-century music - Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Debussy, Messiaen, Ravel - and he offers penetrating and at times provocative analyses of some of their music and musical styles, such as neo-classicism and serialism. His illuminating comments arise from intimate knowledge of the music, and the resulting collection is an essential document of post-war modern music.