Pierre Boulez: Composer, Teacher, Communicator
Through a series of interviews with Katharina Rengger—flautist, teacher, and former head of the Lucerne Festival Academy (2000–2011) under Boulez’s artistic direction—alongside musicologist Jonathan Goldman and IRCAM director Frank Madlener, we seek to understand the conditions that shaped Boulez’s unique approach to teaching, particularly his engagement with composers.
Jonathan Goldman suggests that Stravinsky and Schoenberg—both positioned in stark opposition to Adorno—serve as useful reference points for situating Boulez’s own pedagogical stance. Stravinsky, who never actively pursued teaching, and Schoenberg, who dedicated much of his life to it, mark two extremes between which Boulez’s teaching practice may be placed.
Boulez articulated his views on teaching on multiple occasions, as Goldman highlights, often linking composition with analysis rather than treating them as separate disciplines. While this perspective may reflect Messiaen’s influence, it also reveals Boulez’s student-centered approach: a belief that musical identity is forged through confrontation with others. In a 1961 lecture in Darmstadt, he criticized conservatories for ‘passing on a certain number of taboos’ and outlined his vision of the ideal teacher—one who could connect students with the masters of previous generations, while also provoking ‘fundamental doubt and permanent dissatisfaction,’ rejecting mere liberality in favor of rigorous intellectual challenge.
“For me, teaching was a shock. And I think it should be a shock.”
Pierre Boulez
As early as the 1950s, Boulez expressed skepticism about "education above a certain level," yet he tempered this view with the "extreme importance" he placed on the "meeting of personalities," which he believed could offer more than formal instruction itself. Throughout his career, he repeatedly emphasized the need for a well-defined endpoint to such encounters, stating, "In Messiaen, I also found—and this is much rarer—an understanding of the rift that must separate master and pupil once the time for learning has elapsed."
Boulez had the opportunity to fully develop this pedagogical approach during his tenure teaching composition at the Musik-Akademie in Basel from 1961 to 1963, though he later admitted he "did not do it with great enthusiasm." His method combined complementary analysis and composition classes; the latter reserved for a small group of students. He approached analysis as a personal and creative act, while his composition instruction was rooted in practical exercises. In line with his own approach to writing music, Boulez sought to instill in his students the ability to develop and deduce musical structures. He described this process in an interview with Philippe Albèra: "I gave the students some material and asked them to develop it, and I developed it myself. After a month, we would look at what everyone had deduced from the initial structures."
In addition to thematic exercises, Boulez also had to engage with the works submitted by his students—an experience he found particularly uncomfortable. Beyond the “clumsiness and shoddiness” he often observed, he felt constrained to an “exclusively personal position,” where he had only his own memory and expertise to contrast with the work presented. In this situation, he believed, “the student will at most be able to observe the teacher's egocentricity, which will teach him [...] nothing really useful.” At a 1996 symposium at IRCAM, Boulez continued to question whether creativity could truly be “conveyed, guided, or argued.” He also reflected on the impact that teaching—both its content and the mere act of transmitting knowledge—might have had on his own creative process. His conclusion was affirmative, as he acknowledged, “Teaching, for me, was a shock. And I think it should be a shock.”
Boulez had already formalized his teaching, albeit in a more theoretical manner, through a series of lectures titled Penser la musique aujourd’hui (Thinking About Music Today), delivered in the summer of 1960 at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt. These lectures later became the foundation for the book of the same name. Around the same time he began teaching in Basel, he was also appointed as a guest lecturer at Harvard for the 1962-63 academic year. This specialized—yet broadly accessible—teaching foreshadowed the more extensive work he would later undertake at the Collège de France, where he held the Invention, Technique, and Language chair from 1977 to 1995. There, Boulez engaged both expert audiences and non-specialists alike. As Jonathan Goldman notes, the publications that emerged from these courses—Jalons pour une décennie (1989) and Leçons de musique (2005)—notably contain no musical examples. 
In contrast, Boulez envisioned a much more practical approach to teaching when he founded the Lucerne Festival Academy in 2004, which he directed each summer until 2015. Katharina Rengger, who oversaw the project’s implementation, describes its structure: “At the academy, the core was the orchestra, for which we designed concert programs around two crucial projects: a composition masterclass aimed at young conductors working with contemporary repertoire, and direct work with composers. Every three years, through a competition, we selected two composers, with Pierre Boulez playing a key role in their selection.” The first composers to participate were Dai Fujikura and Christophe Bertrand, followed by Ondrej Adámek and Johannes Boris Borowski. As Jonathan Goldman highlights, Boulez’s mentorship extended beyond the academy, guiding and supporting these composers well after their time in the program.
Katharina Rengger highlights the dynamic triangle formed by composers, conductors, and young instrumentalists in the academy’s orchestra. Their intense exchanges foster a collaborative environment of mutual learning. The academy’s three-year structure allows these relationships to develop over time, with commissioned works premiering at the end of the cycle. Before reaching that stage, composers participate in trial sessions during the academy and in multi-year meetings where, as Rengger notes, “Boulez gave advice and, above all, questioned the composers—guiding them toward new possibilities through this process of inquiry.” In these sessions, composers engaged in dialogue with members of the Ensemble intercontemporain and the academy’s young musicians, testing their ideas in direct collaboration with performers. Dai Fujikura and Christophe Bertrand, for example, who received a commission for 2005, were able to refine their ideas during the 2004 academy.
Rengger recalls that these exchanges were never dogmatic—efficiency was always the guiding principle. “Boulez was tireless, ensuring that these three weeks were as enriching as possible, sparking discussions that extended far beyond rehearsals. He himself seemed to draw energy from them, as if they were a source of renewal,” she observes. Some of the most compelling moments, in her view, took place during the ‘Forum’ concerts, where audiences were given insight into the creative process. These performances were not only a means of communication for young conductors but also an opportunity to engage the public in the challenges of conducting.
This commitment to dialogue, according to Frank Madlener, was a defining thread running through Boulez’s interactions—not just with composers, but also with his colleagues and the audience. His approach, Madlener suggests, was a kind of maieutics, a Socratic method of guiding others toward discovering their own artistic voice.
“Boulez was tireless, ensuring that these three weeks were as enriching as possible, sparking discussions that extended far beyond rehearsals. He himself seemed to draw energy from them, as if they were a source of renewal.”
Katharina Rengger
By ensuring that questions arise from within ourselves, that we “emancipate ourselves from any professorship,” Boulez establishes a form of intelligent didacticism—one that is evident even in his conducting, which seeks to “make things appear.” Frank Madlener describes this as “a Socratic effect that always leads back to the same attitude: emancipation from the model.” Just as “Pierre Boulez’s conducting is explicit, shows, and lets us hear,” some of his works can also be understood as rhetorical acts. In Répons, the necessity of real-time electronics becomes evident. Éclat explores a rhetoric of resonance, also revealing the power of the conductor, since its temporal structure depends entirely on resonance. Likewise, Jonathan Goldman notes that Domaines—where the clarinetist moves between different sub-ensembles—makes the form of the work physically visible through its trajectory. 
Goldman also recalls the decisive influence of the Bauhaus model on Boulez’s approach to pedagogy. This influence manifests on multiple levels, the most immediate of which is deeply connected to Paul Klee’s teaching. Boulez admired Klee’s method: “All of Klee’s genius lies there: starting from a very simple problem and arriving at a remarkably powerful poetics in which the problem is completely absorbed. [...] For me, this is the greatest lesson of all: not to be afraid to reduce the phenomena of imagination to elementary problems—‘geometrized,’ so to speak. Reflection on the problem, on its function, allows poetics to gain a richness it might never have discovered if we had simply given free rein to the imagination.”
Beyond this artistic affinity and Boulez’s admiration for a man who believed that “pedagogy has only enriched invention,” the influence of the Bauhaus can also be seen in the very design of IRCAM. As Hugues Dufourt has noted, the institute embodies a vision of pedagogy “understood as cooperation between artists, education in the techniques of art, and large-scale didactic activity.” Pierre Boulez, the institution builder, always seemed to view education as an integral part of his work—a vision that extended to the Ensemble intercontemporain as well.
Jonathan Goldman recalls that “in the 1980s, Boulez directed concert-workshops whose programs were designed to highlight, independently of his personal tastes, works that he considered important documents in the history of music.” His reach in transmitting knowledge was vast, yet he wished it could extend even further. “At the end of his career and his life,” Frank Madlener recounts, “when he thought back to Lucerne and the academy, he said that if he still had to do something today, it would be to teach artistic direction,” clearly expressing his concern over the standardization of concert programming.
We have yet to fully assess Boulez’ legacy—a “legacy preceded by no testament,” to borrow René Char’s words.
By Pierre Rigaudière
Photo 1 : Pierre Boulez, février 2009 à Salzbourg © Le regard de James, Jean Radel
Photo 2 et 3 : Pierre Boulez et Le Lin, Concours international Olivier Messiaen, décembre 2007 © Ircam-Centre Pompidou, photo : Éric de Gélis
Photo 4 : Pierre Boulez, concert scolaire, 1983 © B. Meyer
Photo 5 : Pierre Boulez et une partie des musiciens de l'Ensemble intercontemporain, mars 2009 à Anvers © Le regard de James, Jean Radel
