Denis Herlin - Biography#

Denis Herlin is Directeur de recherche at the IReMUS (Institut de recherche en musicologie), a subdivision of the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), headquartered at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in Paris.

He is author of several major catalogues, including the Collection musicale François-Lang (1993) and the Catalogue du fonds musical de la bibliothèque de Versailles (1995), and he is co-editor (with Sylvie Bouissou and Pascal Dénécheau) of the ongoing Catalogue thématique des œuvres de Jean-Philippe Rameau (3 vol. published). With François Lesure, Herlin collected and edited the first complete edition of Debussy’s letters—Claude Debussy, Correspondance 1872-1918 — a volume brought to completion by Herlin after the untimely death of François Lesure in 2001, and in 2021 a book Debussy. Portraits et Études. Herlin is also editor-in-chief of the Œuvres complètes de Claude Debussy since 2001. He has now supervised twenty-four of the forty volumes projected for this monumental edition. While his publications concern French music from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, his current activity centers upon François Couperin, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and the life and work of Debussy. He has recently published new critical editions of Chambonnières’s harpsichord music (2 vol, with Bruce Gustafson), three volumes of the Rameau Opera Omnia (Dardanus, 1739, Dardanus, 1744, and Castor et Pollux, 1754), and three of the four books of Couperin’s Pièces de clavecin. From 2009 to 2011 Denis Herlin was President of the Société française de musicologie. He took up the position of International Chair in Musicology at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester for six years (2017-2023).