Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Duclair, Normandy, France
About Pierre Villette
- Pierre Villette (7 February 1926 – 6 March 1998) was a French composer of choral and instrumental music. Villette was born into a musical family in 1926 at Duclair, Normandy.
- He studied with Maurice Duruflé before attending the Paris Conservatoire.
- Pierre Boulez was a fellow student but their careers followed very different paths.
- In 1957 Villette was appointed director of the Conservatoire in Besançon, the capital of the Franche-Comté region.
- He was dogged by ill health and had a lung removed while still in his twenties.
- His bad health forced him to move from mountainous Besançon to a warmer climate, and he became director of the Academy at Aix en Provence in 1967.
- He held this position until he retired in 1987, and he continued to live in Provence until his death in 1998. Villette's music is a product of a French musical heritage that includes Fauré and Debussy as well as Poulenc and Messiaen, and a French cultural legacy that includes Catholicism and the Order of Saint Benedict.
- Villette was not interested in the avant-garde direction taken by Boulez's circle, and instead his music drew on influences as eclectic as Gregorian Chant, medieval music, jazz (he composed an orchestral piece titled Blues), and Stravinsky.
- His catalogue has eighty-one opus numbers, (full list via this link) and he wrote chamber and orchestral music as well as better-known choral works. Villette's compositions are performed around the world.
- His choral music was championed in England by Dr Donald Hunt in the 1970s when he was director of Worcester Cathedral Choir, and Villette's Hymne Ă la Vierge, which is probably his best-known work, has been performed in the annual Service of Nine Lessons and Carols at King's College, Cambridge.
- Choirs in the US, Japan, and Germany are also familiar with Villette's compositions.
- Strangely, however, he has never been widely performed in his native France, probably because he held regional positions in a country where artistic life is dominated by Paris.
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