Jacques-Louis Monod

Jacques-Louis Monod was born in Asnières-sur-Seine on 25 February 1927 and is among the French musicians who, from the mid-twentieth century, combined performance practice with the dissemination of avant-garde music. He entered the Paris Conservatoire before the official age. In 1944 he attended Messiaen's seminars and then studied theory, composition and analysis with René Leibowitz until 1950.

In 1951 he accompanied Leibowitz to the United States, where he studied composition with Wagenaar at the Juilliard School and conducting with Rudolf Thomas at Columbia University. That same year, on 8 May, he conducted the first concert ever devoted entirely to Webern. He later completed his training in Berlin with Boris Blacher and Josef Rufer. He made his debut as a pianist in Paris in 1949, in a concert conducted by Leibowitz to mark Schoenberg's seventy-fifth birthday. As a performer he frequently accompanied the American soprano Bethany Beardslee, then his wife, and premiered works by Schoenberg, Webern, Berg and Babbitt.

Between 1960 and 1966 he presented several American works in Europe for the first time and recorded much of the twentieth-century repertoire. His compositions, published by Boelke-Bomart, reflect his interest in French poetry, with numerous songs setting texts by Éluard, Valéry, Renard and René Char. As a teacher he worked at the New England Conservatory and at the universities of Princeton, Harvard and Columbia.