This lecture in the Department of Music’s Lecture series is being presented as part of the Department’s and the Music Library’s Celebration of Henri Pousseur’s seminal score “Votre Faust,” which was conceived when Pousseur was the Slee Professor here in 1967, in collaboration with the important French author Michel Butor, who at that time held the Melodia E. Jones chair in French here at the University at Buffalo.

Presenter: Dr Andre Bregegere

Title: “The Utopian Bargain of Henri Pousseur’s Votre Faust”

Abstract: “This presentation focuses on Henri Pousseur’s major work from the 1960s, the opera Votre Faust, written in collaboration with French novelist Michel Butor. After a brief introduction to Pousseur background as a member of the European avant-garde—the so-called Darmstadt school—in the 1950s, I discuss his break to a more original path at the outset of the 1960s, leading to the long elaboration of Votre Faust between 1961 and 1968. I then present a survey of this vast, ambitious work, focusing on its ‘open’ formal design, its complex serial structure, and its introduction of a variety of original harmonic procedures—with a particular focus on the latter, through the analysis of chosen excerpts from Pousseur’s score.”