Jean Barraqué

Jean-Henri-Alphonse Barraqué (January 17, 1928 – August 17, 1973) was a French composer and writer on music who developed an individual form of serialism which is displayed in a small output of highly complex but passionate works.

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Barraqué was born in Puteaux, Hauts-de-Seine. The family moved to Paris in 1931. He studied in Paris with Jean Langlais and Olivier Messiaen and, through Messiaen, became interested in serialism. After completing his Piano Sonata in 1952, he suppressed or destroyed his earlier works. A book published by the French music critic André Hodeir, titled Since Debussy, created controversy around Barraqué by claiming this work as perhaps the finest piano sonata since Beethoven. As the work had still not been publicly performed, and only two other works by him had at this time, the extravagant claims made for Barraqué in this book were received with some scepticism. Whilst with hindsight it is clear that Hodeir had accurately perceived the exceptional features of Barraqué's music?notably its searing Romantic intensity, which distinguishes it from the contemporaneous works of Boulez or Stockhausen?it could be said that at the time the tone of Since Debussy did the young composer some harm and did not improve his prospects for the serious and sustained public exposure which eluded his music throughout his lifetime. Nor can the fact that Hodeir explicitly pitched the work of Barraqué much higher than the extensive achievements of his much better-known contemporary Pierre Boulez have eased relations between the two, at a time when Boulez was arguably the most powerful advocate for new music in France.

French: French can refer to more than one article:...

Composer: A composer is a person who writes music. The term refers particularly to someone who writes music in some type of musical notation, thus allowing others to perform the music. This distinguishes the composer from a musician who improvises. However, a person may be called a composer without creating m...

Serialism: In the music theory of European classical music serialism is a set of methods for composing and analyzing works of music based on structuring those works around the parameterization of parts of music: that is, ordering pitch, dynamics, instrumentation, rhythm, and on occasion other elements into a r...

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