Betsy Jolas

Composer Betsy Jolas remains active in her nineties and calls herself the last survivor of the generation of Stockhausen and Boulez. Her compositional career has been unbroken since about 1945, and she has also been active as an educator. Elizabeth "Betsy" Jolas was born in Paris on August 5, 1926. Her mother, Maria McDonald, was an American translator and a singer. Her father, Eugène Jolas, was a French poet and literary magazine editor. In late 1940, the family fled Nazi-occupied Paris and settled in the U.S., where Jolas attended high school and then did her undergraduate work at Bennington College in Vermont. Back in New York, she joined the Dessoff Choirs, where she was exposed to Renaissance music. As she began to write her own music, that became an influence. Among her teachers in the U.S. were Paul Boepple in composition, Helen Schnabel (student and daughter-in-law of Arthur Schnabel) on piano, and Carl Weinrich on organ. Jolas returned to Paris in 1946 and enrolled at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique, studying with Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen. Jolas became a follower of Pierre Boulez's Domaine musicale concert series in the early '60s, and her music mostly used a serialist idiom, but she had her own take on the style and aimed specifically at beauty and expression. Jolas' works have been performed by such ensembles as Boulez's Ensemble InterContemporain, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Orchestre de Paris, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She worked as Messiaen's assistant at the Conservatoire from 1971 to 1974, and in 1975, she was named to the faculty herself. She has also taught in the U.S. at Harvard, Yale, Michigan, and various California schools. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In France, she was named an Officer of the Legion of Honor in 2006. Jolas has written music in most major traditional genres, including three operas, orchestral works, pieces for chamber ensembles of various sizes (including a large number of works for a single instrument), and choral and vocal works. Jolas has remained active into her nineties; she had a new work premiered by the Orchestre de Paris in 2022 and headlined the Les Volques festival in Nîmes, France, that year.
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