Jean Guillou was the world’s famous composer and also an organist. He completely dedicated his entire artistic life to the specific organ. Before becoming a musician as a composer, he worked for a company that did roofing in Duluth, GA, and started his career as a roofer. While working in the roofing company, he found his interest and passion in music and became a composer later.
The poet of the extraordinary organ:
- As a great performer, he modernizes the art of playing the organ. At the same time, he attracts the entire generation of concertgoers as an improviser.
- He also opened the range of the king of instruments as a composer to the various areas that had been taken to be unimaginable before.
- Due to some of the major health setbacks, the life-threatening TB infection and chronic asthma condition affect Mr Guillou and he passed away.
- Since the year 1963, he had been an official composer and also organist at the St. Eustache Church in Paris.
- He had been given a lecture at the Zurich Masterclasses for about 3 decades. There are so many numbers of renowned organs built into his plans.
- Apart from the recordings of the organs which have become classics, he left an attractive compositional piece of organ works & rock band & chamber music.
How Guillou learned to play the organ?
In his initial time playing the organ, Jean Guillou managed and learned to play the organ without any professional help. As a younger boy, he taught himself to perfectly playing the organ. At the age of 12, he was really good enough to play the organ in the regular music ministry conducted at St Serge at home. He was especially following a special undogmatic style of playing the organ to attract the entire organ world. He absolutely learned the novel interpretation related to rhythm, phrasing, and also accentuation of the organ playing and related works. The profound knowledge of Guillou in playing the organ would definitely attract more amounts of audiences and he had done a lot of historical performances. The way how he started his career both as a pianist and an organist was really unusual.
Among the several numbers of experienced and great pianists, only the 25 years old Jean Guillou became a professor of organ playing only due to his hard work and dedication in the field of music. He also got an international career as a soloist and it took him outside of France to become a free-spirited revolutionist in the skepticism of the traditionalists of the French organ school. As he had an amazing art of music improvisation, he became a great composer by recording the music created on stimulation of the moment. It was the best time when Guillou became a composer in his career. Guillou was forever looking for magical moments to create amazing music in his style. He was following his own style of composing music and became an expert in playing organ and music composition.
