John Adams on Boulez's 'Music Lessons'

“Boulez is perfect,” a composer friend said to me with a resigned shrug sometime in the late 1970s. My friend, an American, had just returned from a residency at IRCAM, the state-of-the-art electronic music center Pierre Boulez had then recently created in Paris. His shrug said as much as his words. The air of perfection that surrounded Boulez, who died in 2016 at 90, was daunting. There seemed to be nothing at which he didn’t excel: composing his dense, detailed, exquisitely honed music; con...