Betsy Jolas Turns 100

On August 5, the composer Betsy Jolas turns one hundred. She is one of the last living people who sat in a classroom with Olivier Messiaen and absorbed his musical thinking firsthand, at a time when almost everyone else who did the same is now dead — Pierre Boulez, taught in that same circle, died in 2016. Messiaen built a system of rhythm and harmony so intricate that musicologists still argue over how parts of it actually function: modes of limited transposition, rhythms that read the same forward and backward, birdsong transcribed directly into orchestral notation. Jolas is one of the only people alive who can say what it was like to have it explained to her in person. She is also still composing — the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Philharmonie de Paris have all commissioned new work from her in the past decade.

She came to it sideways. Her mother, Maria Jolas, was an American mezzo-soprano from Louisville, Kentucky, sent to Germany alone at seventeen to study singing; she came home knowing the full Lieder repertoire along with the Spirituals and Creole songs of her own childhood, and taught all of it to her daughter at the piano. Her father, Eugène Jolas, edited the Paris literary magazine transition, which first serialized James Joyce's Finnegans Wake under its working title, "Work in Progress." When the war broke out, the family fled to New York. In Princeton, taking organ lessons, young Betsy had an uninvited audience some days: Albert Einstein, who liked to listen and occasionally played violin with a neighbor, the pianist Gaby Casadesus. Casadesus's assessment of his playing, delivered flatly: "He had a problem. He couldn't count."

Back in Paris after the war, Jolas studied first with Arthur Honegger, then, after his health failed, with Darius Milhaud, whose classes ran out of his home rather than the Conservatoire because rheumatoid arthritis had confined him to a wheelchair. He appeared to doze through lessons. He wasn't: he knew Jolas was terrified of telephones, and made a habit of announcing incoming calls just to watch her answer in front of everyone. Messiaen, meanwhile, wasn't allowed to teach composition at the Conservatoire at all — the institution considered him too radical — so he taught analysis instead, and admitted students from around the world as unofficial "special" cases, in a class meant to hold twelve. Jolas sat in.

What happened after is the accident that shaped her career. She ran, unsuccessfully, for a teaching post at the Conservatoire; Messiaen had promised his vote but missed the meeting where it counted, and she wasn't hired. He apologized, and offered her something bigger instead — his own classroom, the next time he went on tour. She had never taught a class in her life. The students who showed up turned out to be Tristan Murail, Hugues Dufourt, Gérard Grisey, and Gisèle Barreau: the founders, within a few years, of Spectralism, one of the defining compositional movements of the late twentieth century. "It was total luck," Jolas has said of the whole arrangement.

She never founded a movement of her own, despite knowing everyone who did. She was close with Iannis Xenakis and with Karlheinz Stockhausen — who wasn't especially drawn to her music but was delighted the time she lectured five hundred schoolchildren on his — and with Boulez, whom she liked personally while rejecting his central doctrine outright: what he called le devoir d'amnésie, the obligation to forget the musical past. Her own roots, she's said, run too deep in that history to cut loose from it.

Sir Simon Rattle has commissioned her repeatedly over the last decade — A Little Summer Suite for the Berlin Philharmonic in 2015, dedicated to him, and Ces belles années… ("These Beautiful Years"), her most recent orchestral work, co-commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, and the Cleveland Orchestra, and premiered under Rattle at the Barbican in June 2023. She wrote it after Rattle mentioned he'd finally be conducting Tristan und Isolde at Aix, which sent her back to the first time she heard the opera, as a teenager in New York, sung by Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad. She'd decided in advance she wouldn't like Wagner — she was fresh out of a war in which Hitler had claimed him — and found herself "totally taken" anyway. Rattle's own verdict on her: "one of the most extraordinary living composers... funny and wise and imaginative and slightly off the wall, and so is her music."

A hundred years old this week, and by her own account, still saying yes.