Jean-Jacques Nattiez. Un hommage sous forme épistolaire
Margaret Bent
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Dear Janjac,
Welcome to your ninth decade! Well into mine, I wish you good health and continuing productivity. I well remember our first meeting at Raffaele Pozzi’s conference at Latina in 1990, magical tours in the surrounding terrain, with Leo Treitler, Joe Kerman, Reinhard Strohm, and others. That was also where I first encountered your work in summary form, soon after the publication of the ground-breaking Musicologie générale et sémiologie. Your work on and collaborations with Boulez affirm the high status and regard you have earned at the pinnacle of our profession.
Since then, you have visited Oxford, and I Montreal in 2010, when you so generously arranged for me to receive an honorary degree and extended memorable hospitality. On that visit, I gave a series of illustrated lectures on “Grammatical and Rhetorical Models and Parallels in Late-medieval Music”, a subject that approaches our shared interests, albeit from different perspectives. I was honoured by the invitation to collaborate on your massive Enciclopedia della musica for Einaudi (2001-2005). Our sometimes feisty exchanges during the preparation were always collegial and stimulating. Your fundamental work in semiology has profoundly influenced many areas of our discipline, notably analysis and ethnomusicology and, beyond it, Proust studies. You even ventured into fiction with your delightful Opera, a “fantaisie romanesque” with a serious undercurrent.
Our interests also converge on Wagner, on whom, unlike me, you have published over the widest range, analytical (a 450-page book, no less, graced with a preface by Boulez, exploring the 42 bars of the cor anglais solo in Tristan from every conceivable point of view), philological (the expert 2004 study of the sources of Wagner’s 1850 sketches for Siegfrieds Tod), and psychoanalytical (Wagner androgyne, 1990).
A famous essay by Isaiah Berlin divided writers and thinkers into two categories, hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea, and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea. Could that broadly if inadequately characterise your enormous versatility, productivity, and wide range over so many genres and fields? Congratulations, dear Janjac; long may you flourish.
Meg
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Citation
- Référence papier (pdf)
Margaret Bent, « Jean-Jacques Nattiez. Un hommage sous forme épistolaire », Revue musicale OICRM, numéro hors série, 2026, p. 31.
- Référence électronique
Margaret Bent, « Jean-Jacques Nattiez. Un hommage sous forme épistolaire », Revue musicale OICRM, numéro hors série, 2026, mis en ligne le 12 mars 2026, https://revuemusicaleoicrm.org/rmo-hors-serie/nattiez-hommage-epistolaire/, consulté le…
Author
Margaret Bent, All Souls College
Margaret Bent is an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Between 1975 and 1992, she taught at Brandeis and Princeton Universities and served as President of the American Musicological Society. A Fellow of several international academies and the recipient of many awards, she has published extensively on English and Continental music of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, most recently The Motet in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford University Press 2023). Most of her articles are available on academia.edu.