"Readers can now take stock of the daunting, demanding Boulezian worldview and, whether they warm to his own works or not, appreciate him as one of the most important writers ever about music. Although Boulez was to live over 20 years after the final lecture, Music Lessons has the feel of a vast expository Gesamtkunstwerk that ponders and probes musical experience to its very essence. It ranges over music's fundamental building blocks – its modes of organization and how we perceive it, both acoustically and culturally – to how memory both aids and interferes with the process of cognition, and on to matters of notation, style, idea, technology and tradition."–John Adams "The New York Times"
