Jacques Lenot - Biography

Biography

Jacques Lenot was born in Saint-Jean d’Angély (Charente-Maritime, on the Atlantic coast of France), to a family of small tradespeople. His father, a clock-maker, came from the Doubs region, his mother originated from Champagne. Music held only a small place in his family's life: his father seldom took his violin out of its box, and his mother rarely felt the urge to play the upright piano that occupied a place of honour in the house. Nonetheless, little Jacques learned the basics of piano and solfeggio in the family circle. His parents had been regular subscribers to La Guilde du Disque, which allowed Jacques to discover in text and on records the classical works of the repertoire.

At age eight, he secretly began to compose music in the style of Frédéric Chopin, Claude Debussy and Béla Bartók. He filled whole schoolboys' exercise books with music pieces bound to remain unfinished. His compositions have remained predominantly for the piano and the organ, though he has written in diverse genres (Michel 2001).

In the autumn of 1961, he was admitted to the Ecole Normale d’Instituteurs (the schoolteachers' formation school) of La Rochelle. Thanks to the music teacher of the school, the pupils tackled difficult works. Jacques suffered a lasting and inspirational shock while listening to a recording of The Rite of Spring. At the beginning of the 1965 term, he began what remains his only teaching position as schoolteacher, at La Tremblade. His teaching career lasted for ten years (Michel 2001).

In 1963, the first edition of the Festival de Royan had taken place, devoted exclusively to 20th-century music. For the first time, Lenot experienced this music with his inmost senses. He made the acquaintance of Cécile Midas, met again Maurice Fleuret, whom he had met formerly in La Rochelle, and bound with him a profound and lasting friendship. He confessed to them his vocation as a composer, a secret which he had kept to himself up to that point.

In 1966, he spent his holidays attending the Darmstadt classes, in particular those of György Ligeti on Anton Webern’s Bagatelles. There he also attended lectures by Mauricio Kagel and Karlheinz Stockhausen (Michel 2001), (whose Gruppen and Klavierstücke he was very fond of). On his return from Darmstadt, he composed his first completed work, Diaphanéïs, for sixty real parts of strings and metal percussions. Unknown to him, Cécile Midas, who happened to know Olivier Messiaen (both being part of the organization of the Royan Festival) laid down the score on Messiaen's office, in Paris. Messiaen had the score played during the Festival international d'art contemporain de Royan in 1967 (Michel 2001).

In 1968 and 1969, he profited by the advices of Sylvano Bussotti, whom he worshipped as a master, and who tried to alienate him from the influence of Darmstadt. Thanks to Bussotti, he made the acquaintance of Goffredo Petrassi and Franco Donatoni. Through Donatoni he got acquainted with Giuseppe Sinopoli. Donatoni advised him to leave Bussotti’s sphere of influence.

In 1973, he tendered his resignation from the Education Nationale to devote himself entirely to composition. In 1974 he was a prize-winner of the Fondation de la Vocation (a French privately funded prize whose aim was to recognize and financially help young and gifted talents in varied fields of knowledge and creation). In the very same year, he attended the famous classes of Donatoni at the Accademia Chigiana in Sienna (Michel 2001).

In 1975, Harry Halbreich commissioned him a string quartet, to be played at the Royan Festival, and at the same time a work for the famous Orchestra of the Südwestfunk Baden-Baden (Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra). Both works were premiered in the spring of 1977.

In December of that year, Lenot moved to Paris. He signed an exclusive contract for the publication of his works with the Editions Salabert, for whom he also worked as a transcriber (mainly of his own scores, but also of some of other composers).

In 1980, the Ensemble Intercontemporain under Pierre Boulez played the first performance of Allégories d’exil IV: Dolcezze ignote all’estasi.

In 1983, Jacques Lenot got a scholarship from the Ministère de la Culture.

In 1992, he obtained from the Department of Gers (southwestern France) a post of resident composer and moves to Plaisance-du-Gers. There he organized conferences and training sessions, and composed his main body of works for piano and organ.

In 1997, he settled down in Groffliers in the Calais region, in the mostly inoccupied small house of the care-taker of a big property. He received a commission from the Orchestre National de Lyon. Then, after Lenot had sent him his (not for sale) CD Pour Mémoire, the then director of the Opéra de Nancy Jean-Marie Blanchard asked him for a work to be played by the Orchestre Symphonique et Lyrique of the Lorraine town, as, so to speak, the forerunner of a future opera. Blanchard and Lenot together chose a play by Bernard-Marie Koltès, Roberto Zucco, as the subject-matter of the future opera. After his departure from Nancy, for the Grand Théâtre de Genève, Blanchard included the work into the programme, upon which the legal beneficiaries withdrew their authorization. Blanchard and Lenot then agreed on a new subject-matter for an opera: J’étais dans ma maison et j’attendais que la pluie vienne, based on the play of Jean-Luc Lagarce.

Since the year 2000, Lenot has lived in Roubaix, in northern France.

In 2003, upon a suggestion of SACEM and with the help of a private funder, Jacques Lenot created a music publishing society L’Oiseau Prophète. The society has published on all his later music, including a number of scores reassigned by his former publisher. At the same time, he created a non-profit organization Ciels traversés for raising and managing grants, with the sole purpose of printing scores and paying for performance material.

Since 2004, preferential links have developed between Lenot and the Intrada CD publisher, created by-and-large around the composer Eric Tanguy. Helped by private but also public funding (MFA, FCM, ADAMI) it gave birth to four CDs dedicated only to Lenot’s piano and chamber music.

In March 2005, Jacques Lenot made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.

At the end of January 2007, the opera J’étais dans ma maison et j’attendais que la pluie vienne was premiered at the Grand Théâtre de Genève. Hearing about the event, Joséphine Markovits, the musical art director of the Festival d’Automne à Paris, suggested that Jacques Lenot think about the creation of a sound installation with the collaboration of IRCAM. Supported in this step by IRCAM’s new director, Frank Madlener, Lenot decided to immerse himself into the strenuous learning of the computerized musical environment...

In 2008, the Musica Festival of Strasbourg dedicated him a musical portrait by creating no less than eleven of his works, among which was his fourth string quartet, played by the Arditti Quartet.