Abstract
Throughout Pierre Boulez's career, his creative activity was matched by complementary professional roles designed first and foremost to promote the dissemination of his work and the modern works he supported: founder and director of institutions, conductor and musical director. Sporadically, then more systematically, another role was added, that of teacher and pedagogue, on two sides: that of the teacher and that of the mediator seeking to increase the intelligibility coefficient of works presented in concert to a lay public. His teaching at the Collège de France is at the intersection of his activities as a pedagogue and as a theorist-poetician of his own work.
The problem to be examined is the following. Multiplying roles has a typical curvature. Firstly, it is the product of necessity; secondly, it is a means of multiple learning; and thirdly, it is a resource in the quest for greater control over the factors of production and dissemination of creative work. But this multiplication has obvious costs: multiple tasks may be complementary in functional terms, but they are rivals in terms of the energy to be expended and the allocation of time given to the different tasks to be performed.
I will show how, in the course of this multi-active career, Boulez's compositional activity acquires or reinforces characteristics that make it more complementary than rivalrous, but not without difficulties and ambiguities, all these functions which, for each of them, could fill a complete diary of activity.
