Louise Hirbour

Hirbour, Louise

Louise Hirbour. Musicologist, teacher, b Montreal 23 May 1938; B MUS (Montreal) 1964, Certificat d'études supérieures (Sorbonne) 1966, L MUS (Montreal) 1969, D MUS (Montreal) 1975. After music studies in Montreal, she spent the years 1965-68 in Paris where she studied at the Schola cantorum with Olivier Alain (analysis) and at the Institut de musicologie de la Sorbonne. On her return to Montreal she worked with Jean-Jacques Nattiez on the new-fledged discipline of the semiology of music. Her doctoral thesis was a paradigmatic analysis of Debussy's 24 Préludes. She began to teach at the University of Montreal in 1972 and is mainly known for her research on the French composer Edgard Varèse. She contributed an anthology of the writings of Varèse to the collection edited by Pierre Boulez and Jean-Jacques Nattiez published in 1983 by Christian Bourgois (Paris), and she wrote an article on his correspondence in the Revue musicale (Dec 1985). The major contribution of her research is found, though, in the re-issue of Fernand Ouellette's book Edgard Varèse, in which she compiled a complete bibliography and discography of the composer (Paris 1989). She wrote the chapter 'La musique du XXe siècle' for Initiation à la littérature musicale (Quebec City 1987) by Hélène Paul and Louise Bail Milot.