Henri Dutilleux - Influences and Style

Influences and Style

Dutilleux's music extends the legacies of earlier French composers such as Debussy and Ravel but is also clearly influenced by Béla Bartók and Igor Stravinsky. His attitude towards serialism is more ambiguous. While he has always paid attention to the developments of contemporary music and has incorporated some serialist techniques into his own compositions, he has also criticized the more radical and intolerant aspects of the movement ("What I reject is the dogma and the authoritarianism which manifested themselves in that period"). As an independent composer, Dutilleux has always refused to be associated with any school. Rather, his works merge the traditions of earlier composers and post-World War II innovations and translate them into his own idiosyncratic style. His music also contains distant echoes of jazz as can be heard in the plucked double bass strings at the very beginning of his First Symphony and his frequent use of syncopated rhythms.

Dutilleux was greatly enamoured by vocalists, especially jazz singer Sarah Vaughan and the great French chanson singers.

Some of Dutilleux's trademarks include very refined orchestral textures; complex rhythms; a preference for atonality and modality over tonality; the use of pedal points that serve as atonal pitch centers; and "reverse variation," by which a theme is not exposed immediately but rather revealed gradually, appearing in its complete form only after a few partial, tentative expositions. His music also displays a very strong sense of structure and symmetry. This is particularly obvious from an "external" point of view i.e., the overall organisation of the different movements or the spatial distribution of the various instruments, but is also apparent in the music itself (themes, harmonies and rhythms mirroring, complementing or opposing each other). "A passage may be conceived as a symmetrical shape of notes on paper and only later given musical substance. He loves symmetrical musical figures such as palindromes or fan-shaped phrases..."

Dutilleux's music has often been influenced by art and literature, such as the works of Vincent van Gogh, Charles Baudelaire, and Marcel Proust. It also shows a concern for the concepts of time and memory, both in its use of quotations (notably from Béla Bartók, Benjamin Britten and Jehan Alain), and in short interludes that recall material used in earlier movements and/or introduce ideas that will be fully developed later.

A perfectionist with a strong sense of artistic integrity, he has allowed only a small number of his works to be published, and what he does publish he often revises and adjusts many times subsequently.