Michel Butor

Michel Butor (Mons-en-Baroeul, Nord, 14 September 1926) is a French writer whose work shows a persistent interest in the ways we perceive, organise and record periodicity and the passage of time. Diaries, timetables, the names of the months and geological ages all belong to this universe, so his approach to music is hardly surprising. This attention to time has had a marked influence on the treatment of time in his novels.

Butor has written texts intended to be set to music and has collaborated systematically with composers. No collaboration with Pierre Boulez appears in this case; by contrast, his collaboration with Henri Pousseur is recorded, for whom he wrote Votre Faust, a work that gave rise to several derived pieces between 1964 and 1967. Other texts of his were set to music by Claude Shapira, Edgar Brabant, Ramón Koering or Jean Charbonnier. In his dialogue with Beethoven's Diabelli Variations he produced a series of 'interventions' that combine imaginative elaboration with analytical and historical exegesis.

Among his most characteristic stage projects is Midi-minuit Stravinsky, whose structure is organised around a span of twelve hours, explores the 'genius of the place' through different spaces, and draws on Stravinskian symbolic figures such as Pulcinella, Apollo or Noah. Butor also published essays on music, among them 'La musique, art réaliste' and 'L'opéra c'est à dire le théâtre', as well as studies of Mallarmé and of Boulez's work.

His importance lies in having brought literature and music into a close dialogue, in which concern with time serves as the link. His texts for music occupy a singular place within French creation of the second half of the twentieth century.