Jacques Lenot

A composer’s needs

Born in 1945, Jacques Lenot belonged to the generation that came after the first serialist composers, including Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Entering his twenties in the 1960s gave Lenot — like so many of his peers — an instructive distance from the postwar avant-gardes. The distance opened a creative space in which he could develop his own approach to serialism, guided by four central needs.

The first of these was for self-teaching. In his music practice, Lenot is almost entirely self-taught, apart from brief private instruction in basic theory and piano, which he abandoned upon reaching adolescence. From his very first attempts at composition at the age of eight, he made music outside the institutions that normally shape composers’ training.

In addition to having no experience of the music schools in his native Charente-Maritime, with the support of Maurice Fleuret, Lenot later waved away two other opportunities for instruction. In 1967, a year after Lenot composed his first complete work, Diaphanéis, Olivier Messiaen selected it to premiere at the fourth Festival de Royan, where the French National Orchestra performed it under the direction of Maurice Le Roux. This success led to an invitation to study with Messiaen at the Conservatoire de Paris. He refused. In 1982, IRCAM invited him to work there; again, he refused.

No doubt these decisions arose from a need for his own personal freedom — or more precisely, several kinds of freedom. First came freedom from the usual narratives of music history. Lenot chose an approach rooted in the Lutheran church music of the Baroque era and in the work of Robert Schumann, Claude Debussy, and Anton Webern. Second was freedom to choose his guides: the Stockhausen of Gruppen, exhaustive readings of Boulez, and the influences of Sylvano Bussotti and Franco Donatoni, with whom Lenot worked. Third was freedom to produce music without concern for whether the “music market” would be able to absorb his abundant output. His catalogue, as of today, includes some 350 pieces. Finally, he needed to be free to control his entire chain of production, from composition to publishing. After having been published by Amphion, Suvini Zerboni, and Salabert, he founded his own house, L’Oiseau Prophète.

Lenot’s second need related to the composer’s status in contemporary society. During the few years he worked as a salaried employee — he taught in the French public school system from 1965 to 1973 — he recognized how strongly he needed to live from his composition alone. Any other form of employment seemed unacceptable to him, whether in teaching or artistic administration. Because he built his professional life almost entirely outside institutional affiliations, his biography must be traced through the places he has lived: Charente-Maritime until 1977, Paris from 1977 to 1992, Plaisance du Gers from 1992 to 1997, and Roubaix since 1997.

The third need was poetic. Lenot lives through poetry, in the powerful tension between the feeling imparted by the sound of each word and the concreteness of its elements. Three poets in particular nourish his imagination: Friedrich Hölderlin, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Philippe Jaccottet. Yet he has never put these writers’ words to music, or written a single note for their poems. Their work has a force that surpasses their potential “vocalization.” What he shares with them is a romantic literary space built of shattered transcendence, withdrawal — not as an escape from the world, but as a way of observing it — and expressive rage.

Tangible traces of these three poets appear in the titles of Lenot’s compositions. These include Paysage avec figures absentes, borrowed from Jaccottet; Prélude pour piano no. 8 “En bleu adorable,” taken from André Du Bouchet’s translation of Hölderlin’s In lieblicher Blaüe; and Prélude pour piano no. 14 “Maintenant il serait temps que les dieux sortent des choses habitées,” drawn from a translation of a Rilke poem. This practice reveals another way poetry enters Lenot’s composing. The title of a piece about to be written is highly significant: it must already contain the seeds of the entire expressive spectrum the work will unfold.

The fourth need arose from the space of serialist composing, a space in which Lenot felt unquestionably free. For him, serialism was indeed a space, not a doctrine: an enrichment of Weber’s legacy, much as a gardener enriches the soil. To sketch out the musical garden beds in which his works take root, Lenot uses not one magic square, but four, achieving an apparently infinite array of possibility. For the past fifty years, this admixture of creative soil, combined with his own obsessive temperament, has allowed his musical inventions to flower in a profusion of works. These pieces do not follow a chronological path or fit within consecutive stylistic periods. In this respect, Lenot falls outside the dominant historical narratives of twentieth- and twenty-first-century music.

Composition: places and formulae

Lenot composes constantly: this statement describes less a biographical fact than an irresistible compulsion. His productivity runs against the grain of a custom introduced in the twenty-first century, that creators must produce a sense of scarcity around their work and reveal only its quintessence to the public. Until he established his own publishing house in the 2000s, Lenot wrote without concern for whether music publishers would take interest or not. In this respect, he found company with other composers such as Darius Milhaud and Wolfgang Rihm.

The musical language and poetry that characterize Lenot’s work are linked to the physical circumstances in which he composes. To borrow from the twenty-first century’s journalistic fascination with the question “How do artists create?” let us note that Lenot has composed in two basic postures. For many years, he worked bent at a right angle over a high table, bringing his extremely nearsighted gaze within a few centimeters of the hand-ruled tracing paper on which he wrote. His scores, copied in India ink, are not just musical manuscripts but also graphic objects. In the early 2000s, after surgery corrected his vision, his working method changed. He began composing and recording simultaneously on a computer, sitting upright and at a measured distance from the screen.

This new posture did not alter his more granular compositional method, but it did change his relationship to the act of writing. It allowed him to see his work with greater distance as it took shape and, more broadly, to view his own creations with a new detachment. As he explains, “Previously, I compressed my post-serial harmony into a range — what I called a ‘corridor’ — of a seventh. This produced the grisaille I was seeking: a palette of grays that corresponded to my poetics at the time.” Now, by contrast,

cracks have appeared in the grisaille and it has been opened, slowly and slightly, with the feeling of a music that is coming from some indefinable beyond. And yet this acoustic space was no longer sounding — so I redeployed my material in this significantly enlarged ambitus. Additionally, before, I worked in consecutive panels: a panel in the low register would be answered by panels that flew up into the high register. These alternations have now given way to simultaneities.

He adds,

I cannot disavow my identity as a post-serial composer, but over the years, I have come to treat the tone row as a mode of twelve sounds, rather than as a set of ‘modes of values and intensities’ in the manner of Olivier Messiaen. I have also stopped confining tone rows to a single octave: the risk of monotony is too great. Instead, I distribute the notes across a two-octave space.

The many strands that shape Lenot’s sonic material create a texture with a sense of airiness. As he explains, this airiness comes from his use of strings. Whereas before he “treated them as a compact continuum,” now “I split the strings, though with moderation, lest I introduce energetic inertia and create a monochrome palette.”

This change occurred well before Lenot moved to computer-based composition. One example is Ciels (traversés) a piano piece written in 1995. It features fixed parameters: with the quarter note at 42, it is unmeasured, to be performed with “absolutely no nuance at all through to the end,” and made up of 88 hexachords. These chords “are interwoven between the two hands, which are placed two octaves apart and move “in a slow progression toward the high register.” This stable framework is suddenly disrupted by a trace or wake that no longer spans two octaves, but one. Lenot describes this moment as “experienced as a ‘puncture’ that pulls the air upward and out. The chords escape from the magic square in which they had been enclosed.”

Decisive in this evolution were two works premiered at IRCAM. In 2007-2008, Lenot produced Il y a, an installation jointly commissioned by IRCAM and by the Festival d’Automne in Paris. Designed for eighty-four loudspeakers (or twenty-eight virtual trios) the work was projected from the vaulted ceilings of the Église Saint-Eustache. A few years later, in 2012-2013, IRCAM commissioned his Isis und Osiris, which premiered in its Espace de projection. This piece was for an ensemble of seven musicians, an “orchestra” of 360 acoustic loudspeakers, and real-time electroacoustics. In both pieces, Lenot deepened his approach. He no longer treats musical time and musical space as separate dimensions, but fuses them into a single entity. This shift also transforms his understanding of timbre, as he explains:

The aura of my sounds has changed: thanks to computers, a piccolo can be played at the pitch of an octobass, like a thirty-two-foot organ pipe. I no longer write for instruments as I heard them before: my lines can be transformed using the very parameters that were used to write them: dynamics, timbre, octave. Now, when I hear a flute, it sounds to me like a material called ‘flute’ that I can change as much as I want. The five types of flute (piccolo, transverse, alto, bass, octobass) have become one single material for me.

Throughout Lenot’s oeuvre, keyboards — piano and organ — hold a structural role that cannot be overstated. The piano is the only instrument in which he received any formal training, and it is the one he uses most in his catalogue. When he was a young autodidact, playing piano and reading scores served as essential tools. Although Lenot almost never composes at the piano, the gesture of hands on a keyboard and the polarity between left hand and right have left their marks on his musical creations. “This piano habit has stayed with me: even now, when I start on an orchestral work, I always plan for a piano, which I get rid of later on.” The organ is particularly present in later works. The possibilities the instrument offers — including overlapping textures, harmonic constructions, couplings, and acoustic illusions — find a continuation in the digital tools and programs Lenot used to create Il y a and Isis und Osiris.

Melancholy

Broadly speaking, certain instrumentations do not appear in Lenot’s orchestral works: namely, percussion, percussive keyboards, and plucked strings, including the harp. At the same time, he shows a particular fondness for alto flute, clarinet in A, horn, viola, and cello. All of the latter sit in the lower-middle register, where contrapuntal density and musical conversation have long tended to gather. They also share muted colors, warm but withheld sonorities, and a bedrock of melancholy.

Three recent concert pieces — Chiaroscuro (2010), Erinnern als Abwesenheit II, with piano (2009), and Erinnern als Abwesenheit III with viola (2009) — expand the functions of instrumental timbre. In the third of these pieces, timbre is woven into an intricate network in which aura (“a luminous vapor the Ancients believed followed the gods when they were on earth”) and chiaroscuro (in the manner of Caravaggio, La Tour, or Rembrandt) sustain not a gradation from darkness to color, but a dramaturgy of absence. In this, the work echoes Erinnern als Abwesenheit — “memory as absence” — the phrase by which “Paul Celan once described the task of poetry.”

From here, utopia emerges. Lenot remains astonished that he has fulfilled what seemed to him, as a child, an impossible dream: to devote his life entirely to composition. Having succeeded, he is perpetually driven to bring other wildly ambitious projects to life. Among these are his cycles, which also respond to questions of how to sustain dynamic development and large-scale form. His catalogue includes several such cycles, including Allégories d’exil and Utopia glossa. More recently, he has transformed the idea of the utopian cycle into long-form works built from interlinked and inseparable aphorisms. Brevity becomes the tool to conquer length and create monumental form. Examples include Cinquante-quatre fragments sur la déploration du Christ, commentaire d’un tableau d’Ambrogio Fassano dit “le Bergognone” (2004, 56 minutes), Et il regardait le vent (“62 successive one-minute movements divided into five sections,” 2014, 70 minutes), and String Quartet No. 7 (“42 configurations for four musicians,” 2012, 42 minutes).

Lenot explains, “I notice each instrument’s solo. And then they run into each other, almost inadvertently, coagulate, and break apart again.” In this way, he is imagining “a world of microscopic details, at the level of the grain of a voice. These dissimilar elements, like a flurry of memories, form a complex and shifting whole.”

A final crucial element in Lenot’s language is a feeling of loss, which permeates and haunts most of his work.

What I have lost, or what I fear losing, is hard to explain. I can offer two examples: my tombeaux. I imagine the ‘tomb’ in the sense it was often used in French baroque culture, as a tribute to a remarkable person who has died, as Ravel did in the Tombeau de Couperin […] In a tremendously private way, when speaking of tombs, or, more lightly, with melancholy titles, I address each of these works to myself as if I had just lost someone. Beyond the pain caused by the death of loved ones, I feel a constant sense of loss, I live with it all the time, it drives me. […] And, like all melancholics, my melancholy feeds on that of others. […] I have built the essential part of œuvre on grief, on loss. […] And I can’t help it: outside the moments when I compose — in the sense of getting into the “nitty gritty” of the job, when I’m working on combinatorials or playing with rhythm and pitch — I am devoured by this work of loss.

A feeling of loss also runs through Lenot’s literary interests. Alongside the poets already discussed are two playwrights, Bernard-Marie Koltès and Jean-Luc Lagarce, as well as a library dominated by German-language, romantic-leaning writers such as Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, and Robert Musil, and by French classics including La Fontaine, Chateaubriand, and Proust.

These tastes place Lenot within a peculiar creative pocket of music, visual art, and literature. They also connect him to a long Western tradition of melancholy, one he shares with contemporaries such as Hugues Dufourt, Rihm, and Heiner Goebbels.

All quotations of Lenot come from Frank Langlois’s published and unpublished interviews with the composer; see the “Resources” tab on this page.