Pierre Boulez began teaching at the Collège de France in 1977, in a chair entitled " Invention, technique and language in music ". His lectures are devoted to the principles, problems and aesthetic and technical parameters of compositional activity. As a theorist and teacher, he deals successively with thecomposer's" métier ", musical language in its relationship with invention, intuition and decision in the creative act, and the individual and collective dimensions of musical research, organizational work and thematic issues, the relationship between system and idea in creative development, sound material as a learning object, the relationship with the past in the creative process, and the concept and practice of compositional writing, for three years. His teaching concludes with a long theoretical and analytical interrogation of the incomplete and incomplete construction of the work.

As an extension of his teaching, he devotes his seminar mainly to exploring the parameters of compositional activity, including through applications to the analysis of some of his works, as well as to the research activities developed at Ircam, which he founded and directs, notably in musical informatics and electroacoustics, the psychology of perception and psychoacoustics.