Claude Ballif
French composer
Claude Ballif (22 May 1924 – 24 July 2004) was a French composer, writer, and pedagogue. He worked at a number of institutions throughout more than 40 years of teaching, one of which he had attended as a student. Among his pupils were Raynald Arseneault, Nicolas Bacri, Gérard Buquet, Joseph-François Kremer, Philippe Manoury, Serge Provost, Mehmet Okonsar, Simon Bertrand, Alexandre Desplat, and Claude Abromont. He was described as a French modernist and as "the product of the exciting and turbulent post World War II years of the Western avant-garde" alongside composers Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Biography
Ballif was born in Paris on 22 May 1924, the fifth of ten children. He grew up in a bourgeois family but did not recognize the privilege of his childhood as a rarity until much later. His mother Odette was from the Festugière family, forgemasters and owners of the Château de Poissons in Haute-Marne. Her brother was André-Jean Festugière and her first cousin was George Desvallières. Ballif's father, Colonel Laurent Ballif, was a senior military officer who served in the Tibesti War, World War I, and World War II. Laurent was of Swiss descent. Ballif started music at an early age; though the piano was his first love, he was told piano was for girls and that his fingers would never be able to make the right positions, so he learned violin.
“Claude Ballif” enters the record as french composer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Claude, Ballif and French can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Claude Ballif” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Claude, Ballif and French provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q201159. VIAF identifies the subject as 116577961. The Library of Congress control number is n82025145. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1924 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Claude Ballif” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.