Jacques-Louis Monod

Jacques-Louis Monod (born February 25, 1927) is a French-born, naturalized American composer, pianist and conductor of 20th century and contemporary music, particularly in the advancement of the music of Charles Ives, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and uptown music in New York City.

Monod was born in Asnières (now Asnières-sur-Seine), a northwestern suburb of Paris, to an affluent family of privilege and of French Protestant affiliation. Early indications of his musical prowess came when he enrolled in 1933 at the Paris Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique as a child prodigy at the age of six, under the official minimum age of nine. Monod would attend the Paris Conservatoire intermittently but remain registered for nearly 20 years, obtaining his Doctorat from the Paris Conservatoire in 1952. Monod's teachers at the Conservatoire were Yves Nat and Olivier Messiaen; including master classes under the visiting conductor, Herbert von Karajan; he also studied with his godfather, Paul-Silva Hérard, the organist at Paris's St. Ambroise Church.

A decisive turning point for Monod occurred in 1944 and at the age of 17, when he took private lessons in composition and theory for five years, subsequently remaining a lifelong supporter and president of an association promoting the music of the French composer and conductor René Leibowitz, an Webern disciple and émigré from Warsaw, Poland (rumor has it that during the German occupation of France, which lasted until December 1944, the young Monod surreptitiously brought food to Leibowitz, a member of the French Resistance). Leibowitz, who was an outsider among the French musical establishment, and a major catalyst in the promotion of Schoenberg's music and in the subsequent development of serial music in Paris after WWII, became Monod’s principal teacher and mentor within a circle of devoted pupils, including , Antoine Duhamel, Pierre Chan, Michel Philippot, Serge Nigg, André Casanova, Claude Helffer, and for a brief period, Pierre Boulez.

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