his childhood in a musical family in Douai

Henri Dutilleux on…

his childhood in a musical family in Douai

“Every one worked very hard and got up very early. My elder sister Hélène played the violin, and played it very well too. Paulette, my other sister, was a gifted pianist, just as my mother had been. My brother Paul played the cello. My father was an amateur violinist but he had at one time thought of becoming a professional musician…When they had time my parents practised the violin sonatas of the day - Franck’s, Lekeu’s, Fauré’s, Pierné’s, even Debussy’s…

“The church bells rang on the hours, half-hours etc. There was also a bell-ringer who came on Sundays and those sonorities awoke many things in me. Those sounds are very special, full of rich harmonies. I tried to reproduce them on the piano and that stimulated me. I wanted to write music more than anything. I don’t know where that came from.”

developing a personal style

“I felt [from an early stage] that in my works to come I should keep well away from a certain spirit of French music - that which would limit it to clarity, charm, elegance and moderation.”

harmony

“Working with Jean Gallon [at the Paris Conservatoire] was a real privilege…He awoke in me a harmonic sensuality which was no doubt innate but which he was able to develop further… It is a constant in my style and a constant in French music in general. It has always been said that French music is characterised by that harmonic sensuality.”

colour

“There are several constants that, looking back, I can see in my style… But I would like to talk about colour. If we look into the past and the work of the masters we find a different kind of colour every time. Harmonic colour with Chopin, Schumann, Liszt; colour also with Berlioz because of his extraordinary orchestral palette; colour which is at the same time harmonic, orchestral and modal with Debussy and Messiaen… On my level instrumental counts for a lot and if I am always ready to write for orchestra it is perhaps for that reason. I’m talking about a whole style, about looking for certain combinations of timbre, or for modally coloured melodic lines…”

serialism

“I have never been able to accept the basic principle of twelve-note music, which is that all the degrees of the chromatic scale are of equal importance.”

the “independent” composer

“I am difficult to classify… but I don’t much like being described as independent. Independent of what? Of cliques, certainly, or of certain great movements like serialism, doubtless. But through this need to classify me, to put a label on me at all costs, I am put alongside musicians with whom I feel no affinity. (They must feel the same about me!) I could feel more affinity with avant-garde musicians or those classified as such… It’s very difficult to define oneself… With each new work I try to go further, not to repeat myself. So I instinctively take a different direction from that which is expected of me.”

Proust and memory

I often think of [Proust’s] method of construction, which corresponds to my objectives in organising musical time - if it isn’t too risky to compare two different domains, literature and music. It is nothing to do with leitmotifs. Leitmotifs can become very irritating: ‘Here I am, it’s me again!’ When I call on memory I am thinking of an event in sound, which is sometimes very brief and not immediately identifiable but which will imprint itself on the listener’s subconscious.

religion

“I was brought up in the catholic religion but I haven’t really practised it for a long time, although I often go into a church to spend some moments in silence … You see, I have a faith which is peculiarly my own, not at all like Messiaen who proclaimed himself a catholic musician with great force and with the greatest sincerity… What I believe my music has affirmed for some time is not a sacred revelation but the sense of a sort of mystery. It is perhaps not necessary to practise a religion to have a sense of the sacred… I feel that the sacred element has made its presence felt more and more in my works… Is a musician deprived of the sense of the sacred because he hasn’t produced any purely religious work? Why should it always show on the surface?

jazz

An American pupil gave me a big album of CDs, ‘The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz,’ a superb anthology with Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Art Tatum, Benny Goodman, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown, Thelonius Monk… I’m dazzled by the quality and the virtuosity of the instrumentalists in those little ensembles, by the invention of the composers and improvisers. Above all, I’m fascinated by the talent of the great black singers, among whom Sarah Vaughan moves me particularly.

conducting

“Philippe Gaubert taught conducting [at the Paris Conservatoire] and if I was his pupil for a year I was nothing for him to be proud of, since I very soon gave up conducting: I would have been a bad advocate of my own music.

dumbing down

I’m worried about the increasing pressure from powerful organisations - media, press, publicity - to impose products which are an insult to culture. They are appealing to the supposedly low taste of the public; I say “supposedly”…

his Paris home on the île Saint-Louis

“In Paris I make myself work regularly in the morning and at the end of the afternoon - when my days are not eroded by everyday tasks: endless mail, requests, telephone, constraints of all kinds. When a work is already under way I use every available minute to take it a little further… When I’m really into a work I live for nothing else, I submit to it entirely, and then I’m happy.”

his country house in Touraine

“It’s about sixty kilometres from Angers, at Candes-Saint-Martin in Touraine, just at the point of confluence of the Loire and the Vienne. It’s very beautiful, this spectacle of two rivers joining together in front of you. It’s so attractive in fact that I have turned my desk in the opposite direction, towards the church and the slate roofs, so as not to be distracted by the arrival of a heron on the sand banks or a flight of wild geese high in the sky.”

extracted and translated from Henri Dutilleux: Mystère et mémoire des sons (interviews with Claude Glayman) published by Actes Sud 1997