Michel Phillipot

French composer Michel Philippot was among the first generation of musicians to come under the influence of the pioneering Olivier Messiaen. Philippot was born in 1925 and, after studying mathematics for a few years, entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1945. He supplemented his Conservatoire training with private lessons from René Leibowitz and after leaving the Conservatoire in 1947, he continued working under Leibowitz for two more years. Starting in 1949, Philippot worked for ten years as a recording engineer for Radio-Television France, all the while composing music and slowly gaining some recognition for his efforts. In 1959, he was named director of the Groupe de recherches musicales (a body associated with Radio-Television France) and during the 1970s, he simultaneously filled three different roles: professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire (a post he held until retiring in 1990), professor of music at the University of Paris, and head of music at Radio-Television France. He spent some time in South America during the late '70s, teaching at universities in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. His contribution to French music was recognized in 1987 with the award of the national Grand Prix du Musique. Michel Philippot died on July 28, 1996, at the age of 71. Philippot, like Pierre Boulez (another Messiaen disciple), had a real passion for serialism, applying its governing principles equally to pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and form. He authored several books, including an analysis of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, a text about Stravinsky, and a book about electronic music. For all his work in radio, as an engineer, and as a writer on electronic music, Philippot was a remarkably conservative musician when it came to instrumentation: only a half-dozen or so works involve tape/electronics, the rest are composed for traditional ensemble types (orchestra, piano trio, piano solo, string quartet, and so on). Many of his pieces go by the generic title "Composition."