Jacques-Louis Monod
Monod was born in Asnières (now Asnières-sur-Seine), a northwestern suburb of Paris, to an affluent family of privilege and of French Protestant affiliation with ancestral roots in French-speaking Switzerland [1] His musical prowess was detected early when he enrolled in 1933 at the Paris Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique as a child prodigy at the age of six, below the official minimum age of nine.
Monod's teachers at the Conservatoire were Yves Nat and Olivier Messiaen; including master classes under the visiting conductor, Herbert von Karajan; he also studied with his godfather, Paul-Silva Hérard, the organist at Paris's St. Ambroise Church.
A decisive turning point for Monod occurred in 1944 at the age of 17, when he took private lessons in composition and theory for five years, subsequently remaining a lifelong supporter and president of an association promoting the music of the French composer and conductor René Leibowitz, a Webern disciple and émigré from Warsaw, Poland (rumor has it that during the German occupation of France, which lasted until December 1944, the young Monod surreptitiously brought food to Leibowitz, a member of the French Resistance).
Whereas, the noted pianist Charles Rosen claims to have heard Monod perform Milton Babbitt's The Widow's Lament in Springtime as early as 1945 or 1946 at Princeton[2] – and yet the work was not composed until 1951.
Under the direction of Leibowitz, Monod performed and recorded the piano part of Berg's Chamber Concerto and Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte, Op.
Monod directed American premieres of many works of Webern, assisting Richard Franko Goldman (of Goldman Band notoriety) in directing the first all-Webern concert in the USA (and the first all-Webern concert in Paris during 1951, according to liner notes from a 1976 CRI LP), which took place in New York City on 8 May 1951, and included the world premiere of Webern's Five Canons on Latin Texts.
Each program was different and was broadcast internationally to a wide listening audience ... [Monod] has conducted major orchestras and chamber ensembles in Europe, Scandinavia, and North and Central America" (Equinox Music CD 0101 Liner Notes).
A notable performance took place on Tuesday evening, 21 December 1965 with Monod conducting the British premiere of Kurt Weill's school opera composed in 1930, Der Jasager, based on a libretto by Bertolt Brecht and after a Japanese Noh-play, as reported by David Drew.
At the Guild of Composers concerts, which often took place at Columbia University's Miller Theater, performances included the music of Elliott Carter, Arthur Berger, Claudio Spies, Mario Davidovsky, Seymour Shifrin, Earl Kim, Donald Martino, George Edwards, Robert Helps, David Lewin, Fred Lerdahl; and Milton Babbitt, who composed an earlier work, Du, dedicated to Monod and Ms. Beardslee.
His doctoral dissertation – a second doctorate – was completed with distinction at Columbia in 1975 and assisted by the Princeton- and Columbia educated pianist-composer and a Babbitt-Monod disciple, Thomas S. James, consisting of a detailed exposition on the compositional premise of his seminal work, Cantus Contra Cantum II for Violin and Cello: music which represents a tour de force in rhythmic and serial complexity.
The strict formal characteristics of his non-experimental and non-improvisational, highly controlled music requires superior technical abilities on the part of performers.
Moreover, the overly-mechanical and superficial aspects exhibited in some earlier works of integral or total serialism are entirely absent and circumvented in Monod's music; which as a result, provides listeners with lyrical attributes.
[11] The title for his extensive cycle of serial compositions composed during the course of the past forty years, namely "Cantus Contra Cantum", refers to the late-medieval concept of "line against line" as a progression beyond "punctus contra punctum", i.e., creating advanced music that is correlated to the development of modern Western polyphony: "music-synergy", wherein the interaction of two or more parts or voices in each work creates a combined effect that is greater than the sum of their individual effects.
In 1979, the ISCM in New York City performed his Cantus Contra Cantum I for soprano and chamber orchestra, the first of a series of works that realizes Monod's advancement of a polyphonic "langue".
It is made up of seven sections: The first and the last are hummed vocalises, and the middle five are settings of French texts by Paul Éluard and Jean Senn (chosen for their complementary treatment of the imagery germinating from the word visage).
Thus, I will agree with Naum Gabo 'that a work of art restricted to what the artist has put in it is only part of itself', and that 'it only attains full stature with what people and time make of it'.For both the non-professional and professional listener, understanding will begin with and depend upon the intensity of intuitive perception and the desire for a significant aesthetic experience that transcends the measurable assets of a given discipline.
(NWLCRL358)More recent performances took place in New York City during February 1987 and in March 1989 of his provocative, "Tränen des Vaterlandes—Anno 1636" (Cantus Contra Cantum IV), a four-minute choral work accompanied by "sackbuts", based upon "a gruesome poetic depiction of carnage and devastation by Andreas Gryphius ... [the music is] stark but appropriate for the horrors described";[12] and his two a capella works, Elergies, evoking "the ghost of Anton Webern ... music as exquisitely beautiful as any this listener has heard in some time".
to Stanford, as reported in an October 13, 2017, online blog by the head Librarian of their Music Division, Jerry L. McBride, the former archivist at the Schoenberg Institute at USC.
McBride writes: "In 2016 and 2017, many manuscript scores of Monod's own compositions were added to the collection dating from 1967 to the present, as he continues to compose new works."
Over the years, Monod had given private lessons to talented musicians, including those influenced by mathematics and the computer sciences: many occupy various professional positions in the US and abroad in the areas of conducting, composition, and theory.
His closest associates in America include the composers Earl Kim, Seymour Shifrin, Arthur Berger, Mario Davidovsky, Claudio Spies, and Malcolm Peyton; and in France, Michel Philippot.
