Jacques Hétu was born in Trois-Rivières, Quebec; he began his professional training at the University of Ottawa where he was a pupil of Father Jules Martel[1] from 1955 to 1956.
In 1956 he entered the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal and studied there for five years with Melvin Berman (oboe), Isabelle Delorme (harmony), Jean Papineau-Couture (fugue), Clermont Pépin (composition and counterpoint), and Georges Savaria (piano); he also studied at the Tanglewood Music Center during the summer of 1959 with Lukas Foss.
In 1961 he won several important awards, including the first prize at the Quebec Music Festivals composition competition, a grant from the Canada Council, and the Prix d'Europe.
[6] In 1985 he composed Missa pro trecenteismo anno, a large-scale choral setting of the Roman Catholic Mass to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Bach's birth.
[10] Hétu's Concerto for Two Guitars, composed in 2007, was premiered by Marc Deschennes and André Roi with the Orchestre Métropolitain conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
[13] The final choral movement of what is a large-scale score sets the “underground” poem by Paul Éluard, Liberté, which had circulated during the French Resistance in the 1940s.
[14] Although Hétu studied in Paris with Dutilleux and Messiaen, he eventually reverted to include a tonal core to his compositional technique, and decided against following Pierre Boulez into serialism or atonality.
[18] Hétu's abandonment of serialism and atonality and his return to more historical musical traditions caused considerable resentment against him from the avant-garde proponents of modernism.