Dutilleux was born into an artistic family; a great-grandfather, Constant Dutilleux, was a painter and friend of Delacroix and Corot, and his maternal grandfather, Julien Koszul, was a composer, organist and lifelong friend of Faure. Koszul was director of the Roubaix Conservatoire, where his pupils included Roussel, whom he persuaded to leave the navy and devote himself to music. Dutilleux was brought up in Douai, studying harmony, counterpoint and piano with Victor Gallois at the local conservatory until 1933, when he moved to Paris. Gallois also encouraged Dutilleux to play percussion in the local orchestra, an interest which later bore fruit in the elaborate timpani parts of many of his orchestral works. At the Paris Conservatoire, he studied harmony with Jean Gallon, fugue with Noel Gallon, history of music with Maurice Emmanuel, conducting with Gaubert and composition with Busser; he won the Prix de Rome at his third attempt in 1938 with the cantata L'anneau du roi. He was aware of the limitations of his Conservatoire education, which did not feature much contemporary music and lacked an analysis class. To fill the gaps in his education, he studied d'Indy's composition treatise on his own during the war years (d'Indy's analytical approach to early music interested him), and discovered works by Stravinsky and Roussel. He did not become familiar with the music of the Second Viennese School or Bartok's later works until the postwar period. Dutilleux spent only four months in Rome as a Prix de Rome winner, returning to France before the outbreak of World War II. He was enlisted as a stretcher-bearer in September 1939. Demobilized in August 1940, he worked as chef de chant at the Paris Opera for a few months (replacing the permanent member of staff) under the Occupation. From 1945 he was director of music productions at French radio, resigning from this post in 1963 to devote himself to composition. Dutilleux has had few formal teaching posts; he was professor of composition at the Ecole Normale de Musique (1961--70), and taught at the Paris Conservatoire (1970), but he has frequently attended summer schools (including Tanglewood) as a guest teacher.

Dutilleux disowned almost all the music he composed before the Piano Sonata (1946/48), which he considers to be his op.1. During the Occupation, he wrote a number of test pieces for wind instruments, commissioned by Delvincourt for Conservatoire competitions, and four melodies to texts by Jean Cassou, a poet imprisoned for his Resistance activities. The Sonatine for flute (1943) shows the influences of Ravel, Debussy and Roussel on his early works, and Dutilleux later expressed reservations about its unoriginal musical language.

With the Piano Sonata (1946/48), written for the pianist Genevieve Joy whom he married in 1946, he produced a substantial work which demonstrated this growing detachment from tonality. The musical language is as much modal as tonal, and the final pages of the last movement, a Chorale and Variations, perhaps show Messiaen's influence in their combination of F# major and the octatonic mode. But non-French music was perhaps the determining influence on Dutilleux' mature style. Bartok's methods of musical organization and the 19th-century Germanic concept of the large-scale masterpiece were two of the factors which enabled him to move away from the attractive yet derivative style of his early works. His two symphonies, written in the wake of the Piano Sonata, demonstrate his enthusiasm for traditional, large-scale forms and his rejection of the view that French music is essentially frivolous and charming. The spirit of the variation was to permeate Dutilleux' subsequent works, though after the Piano Sonata he tended to avoid the conventional set of variations using contrasting figurations. His First Symphony opens with a Passacaglia based on a theme which gradually moves from the double basses up to the treble register of the orchestra; this upward movement is a characteristic feature of Dutilleux' music, and he has acknowledged its spiritual symbolism. The jazzy inflections of this movement betray another influence on Dutilleux, one which has persisted up to the final section of The Shadows of Time, the appropriately bluesy 'Dominante bleue'.

Although the work was uncommissioned, the First Symphony was given its first performance, soon after its completion, by the ORTF orchestra under Desormiere. Most of his major works from the Second Symphony onwards were commissioned by American organizations (the Second Symphony by the Boston SO). Many later pieces were written with specific performers in mind (the Cello Concerto Tout un monde lointain... was composed for Rostropovitch, the Violin Concerto L'arbre des songes for Isaac Stern), and Paul Sacher commissioned Mystere de l'instant and was the inspiration behind the Trois strophes sur le nom de Sacher for solo cello, based on the musical letters of his name.

Dutilleux has a tendency not to expose a theme in its definitive state from the beginning, distinguishing this process of progressive growth from cyclic form, where the theme is determined from the start. He has acknowledged the crucial influence of Proust on this technique: in the third movement (Intermezzo) of his First Symphony, a theme appears in several related, but slightly different forms, paralleling Proust's evocations of the instability of the human personality. The third and fourth movements of this symphony are both thematically and temporally linked; indeed, Dutilleux dislikes breaks between movements because they 'spoil music's power to enchant us'. There is a similar connection between the slow second movement and the finale of his Second Symphony, subtitled Le double. Moreover, the opening of the finale of this symphony bears a strong resemblance to the first bars of Dutilleux' next major orchestral work, Metaboles, suggesting that the technique of 'progressive growth' applies across different works.

The multiple plays on time in Dutilleux' music reveal the influence of Proust's concept of memory, which embraces anticipation and variation as well as the straightforward recollection of material. Four 'parenthesis' sections are included in the string quartet Ainsi la nuit; these act as reservoirs of material for the seven movements of the work, either foreshadowing or recalling musical ideas. Interludes with a broadly similar function separate the four movements of the violin concerto L'arbre des songes.

With Mystere de l'instant, Dutilleux' conscious aim was to move away from 'progressive growth' and the interrelationships between movements typical of his previous works. It consists of ten brief sections which have no musical connections with each other, and its original title was Instantanes (Snapshots). Stylistically, the work does not represent a new departure, but Dutilleux did introduce a new technique in other works from the 1970s onwards: the quotation of music by other composers. Dutilleux deliberately chooses quotations which blend well with his own musical style. The brief extract from Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta which appears in the first of the Trois strophes sur le nom de Sacher is a dual homage to the work's composer and its commissioner and dedicatee (Paul Sacher). The extracts of music by Britten, Janequin and Alain used in Les citations for oboe, harpsichord, double bass and percussion are also used without ironic intent, but as homages to their composers.

Dutilleux' musical style has remained remarkably consistent since his Second Symphony. The symphony originally ended on a major triad, but Dutilleux decided that this was too conclusive, and it now finishes with an ambiguous chord, which emphasizes the spirit of questioning in the work. Although he tends to avoid perfect chords, the impact of polytonality is discernible, and although he admires the rigour of dodecaphonic writing, he once said that he is 'at heart, not a serial composer'. Only one movement, Obsessionnel, the third movement of Metaboles, uses a note row, but it does not provide the source for all the musical material, and the wide leaps and offbeat rhythms he uses give the row a parodistic quality. What Dutilleux feels uncomfortable with in serial writing is the lack of hierarchy: he frequently organizes music around pivot notes, which provide stability in an otherwise chromatic harmonic context. Pivot chords, which generally appear in several related forms, are also used as a recurring device to ensure unity, notably in the Second Symphony and the piano prelude Sur un meme accord.

Dutilleux is not an innovator in instrumental technique, but demonstrates a concern with the spatial element of music in Le double. Here, a conventional orchestra surrounds a group of 12 soloists, drawn from each of the instrumental families; the small ensemble frequently exchanges musical material with the large orchestra, and sometimes prolongs the resonances of a chord played by the large group of instruments. Many of Dutilleux' later piano works could, similarly, be considered to be experiments in sonority. The other arts have proved an important stimulus for Dutilleux. A project for a ballet based on Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal did not materialize, but instead Baudelaire's poetry inspired the cello concerto Tout un monde lointain...; all five movements feature a Baudelaire epigraph at the head of the score. Dutilleux denies that the movements should be viewed as illustrative of the poems which inspired them, but he tends to choose poems featuring a strong visual image which can have a musical equivalent, as is the case for the fourth movement, Miroirs, a tour de force of musical shapes which are symmetrical around either the horizontal or the vertical axis.

A great lover of painting, Dutilleux claimed to have van Gogh's La nuit etoilee always in mind when writing Timbres, espace, mouvement, and later added the title of the painting as a subtitle to his work. The whirling motion in the painting is given a musical equivalent, and Dutilleux uses the extreme registers of the orchestra to convey the chasm between the earth and sky. Moreover, he aimed to reflect van Gogh's state of mind in the work, in particular his yearning for spiritual certainty. Dutilleux' choices of titles for movements of various works perhaps reveal something of his own spiritual concerns: Litanies and Constellations are titles first used in the string quartet Ainsi la nuit which are re-employed in later works. The commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II was one of the stimuli behind his orchestral work The Shadows of Time, given its premiere in Boston in 1997; the third movement, Memoire des ombres, is dedicated 'to Anne Frank and to all innocent children of the world' and features three children's voices in unison.

Dutilleux is very concerned about the physical appearance of a score; his manuscripts are marvels of calligraphy, and there is a strong visual stimulus behind certain passages in his works. Manuscript evidence reveals that a passage may be conceived as a shape, and only later given musical substance, and his fondness for symmetrical musical figures (palindromes or fan-shaped phrases) again suggests Bartok's influence. Dutilleux' reputation rests on a small number of works; he is a highly self-critical composer who is almost obsessively concerned about the integrity of his output. Stylistic unity is evident from frequent self-quotations or allusions to previous works, and the general avoidance of new notational devices introduced by his contemporaries. He has often revised scores, adding an interlude and titles for each of the two movements to Timbres, espace, mouvement 12 years after the premiere, and making minor adjustments to several pieces. Dutilleux' feeling for instrumental timbre and continuing attachment to modality place him securely within the French tradition, and his exquisite craftsmanship and infallible ear for orchestral sonority secure his position as one of France's leading 20th-century composers.

Caroline Potter, from the New Grove.