A French-American composer born in Paris on 5 August 1926, Betsy Jolas grew up in the artistic circles of the Paris literary review transition (1927-1938), which was founded by her parents.

From 1940 to 1946, the family lived in New York, and Betsy Jolas earned her Bachelor of Arts from Bennington College. She sang in and was an accompanist for the Dessof Choirs, directed by Paul Boepple, who also ran the Dalcroze School, which she attended. It was through her work with Boepple, who also taught her counterpoint and harmony, that she discovered the polyphonies of the Middle Ages and the Rennaissance. Additionally, she studied organ with Carl Weinrich and piano with Hélène Schnabel.

Upon her return to Paris, she enrolled in the École Normale, where she studied with Arthur Honegger. On the advice of André Marchal, Jolas entered the Conservatoire de Paris, where she received high honors (Deuxième Prix) in fugue (1953), in the class of Simone Plé-Caussade. After winning the Besançon Orchestra Conducting Competition in 1953, Jolas continued studying analysis with Olivier Messiaen (Première Mention, 1954), and composition with Darius Milhaud (Deuxième Accessit, 1955).

From 1955 to 1970, she worked as a radio programmer, and, with the support of Henri Dutilleux, received numerous commissions for radio cantatas and orchestral pieces. Between 1971 and 1974, she was assistant to Olivier Messiaen at the Conservatoire de Paris, succeeding him as professor of analysis there in 1975 and of composition from 1978-1992. Starting in the early 1970s, she also taught in the United States, at Yale, Berkeley, Harvard, and Mills College (where she held the Darius-Milhaud Chair).

While Monteverdi, familiar to her since before the Second World War, and Debussy, discovered on record in New York, were strong guiding forces in her work as a composer, Jolas, although fascinated by the early works of Webern, maintained a certain distance from the Vienna School, and did not seek the break with Romanticism for which it called. She was also attentive to the work of composers on both sides of the Atlantic. Decisive to her work, too, were her encounters and enduring friendships with composers such as Iannis Xenakis, Gilbert Amy, Jean-Claude Éloy, and André Boucourechliev, and, in the 1970s, with Earle Brown, Elliott Carter, George Crumb, Morton Feldman, and John Cage, among others. She was in frequent contact with Pierre Boulez, who featured her Quatuor II (1966) at the Domaine musical concerts, as well as with Luciano Berio and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Her compositions have been performed in many festivals, including Royan, Avignon, Paris, and Strasbourg, and she has received major commissions from such institutions as the French Ministry of Culture, including for Schliemann (1982-1993), with support from the Opéra de Lyon, the Tanglewood festival (Tales of a Summer Sea, 1977), and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (A Little Summer Suite, 2015).

From childhood, Jolas was sensitive to reciprocities in the arts and to European-American dialogue, doubly questioning music through the ambiguity of vocality and poetic utterance, and the attribution of speaking voices and even personalities to instruments. The titles of her scores upended genres and formations: D’un opéra de voyage (1967), for twenty-two instruments, or Sonate à 12 (1970), for twelve solo vocalists with no text. This was one source of the attention Jolas gave to poets, writers, and members of the theater world, including Pierre Reverdy, André du Bouchet, Jacques Dupin, Bernard Sobel, and Bruno Bayen, as well as to artists such as Sam Szafran, Diego Giacometti, Jean-Paul Riopelle, or Joan Mitchell. The composer’s rich catalogue, because she sought the unpredictable fluidity of a “building without seams,” made use of a variety of formations that evoked known genres and forms (opera, motet, concerto, sonata, for example), as well as indefinite ones (figures, tranches, states, or episodes, for example).

Jolas has received numerous awards, prizes, and honors, including from the Copley Foundation award (Chicago, 1954), the ORTF (1961), the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1973), and the Koussevitzky Foundation. She has been honored by France’s Grand Prix National de la Musique (1974), the Grand Prix of the City of Paris (1981), the Grand Prix de la Sacem (1982), the Prix international Maurice-Ravel, and France’s “Personnalité de l’année“ award (1992), as well as the SACEM Prize for best premiere of the year (1994), the Prix René-Dumesnil (2003), and the Prix du Président de la République (2012). Betsy Jolas is also an honorary professor at the Conservatoire de Paris, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1983) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1995), a Commandeur des Arts et Lettres (1985), an Officier de l’Ordre national du mérite (2001), and a member of the French Legion of Honor (2011).