Exhibition: "Michel Butor in Music"

To mark the centennial of writer Michel Butor’s birth, the Archipel Butor is presenting an exhibition titled *Michel Butor in Music*, dedicated to the writer’s collaborations with musicians and the intimate connections between literary writing, poetry, and musical forms. According to Mireille Calle-Gruber, writer and university professor at La Sorbonne Nouvelle: “The exhibition offers more than just ‘Michel Butor and music’: it is through music, within music, permeated by sounds, notes, and voices that Michel Butor lives, vibrates, and works, crafting with the same creative impulse the structures of his books, which possess an unparalleled vitality. For, alongside the monumental works of Butor’s oeuvre—novels such as *La Modification* with its labyrinthine plotlines (1957 Renaudot Prize) or *Mobile,* *Étude pour une représentation des États-Unis* (1962)—whose dizzying musical score caused a scandal—there are a thousand and one paths of creation, more secret texts, and not a single one that does not draw upon rhythms and polyphonies. The writer brings music into the workshop of words; he makes the words attuned to a sonic material that transfigures their meanings, endowing them with an inexhaustible freedom of meaning and sensation. Thus, his first “lecture” on music transforms into a sumptuous concert that Michel Butor titled *Dialogue with 33 Variations by Ludwig van Beethoven on a Waltz by Diabelli*, in which he serves as narrator at the piano and where his literary composition offers an interpretation of the score that is both technically precise and deeply sensitive. Regardless of the genre of his writing, Michel Butor turns every work into an adventure of harmonies and rapture—he who, at a concert, describes himself as “quivering with delight at the slightest note,” like a child in a store full of wonderful toys. “Writing to music is the art of discovery, the art of sharing. The art of living.”