French composer Henri Dutilleux (1916–2013) was active mainly in the second half of the 20th century. He was born on 22 January 1916 in Angers, Maine-et-Loire. He studied harmony, counterpoint, and piano with Victor Gallois at the Douai Conservatory.  Between 1933 and 1938, he attended the Conservatoire de Paris the classes of Jean and Noël Gallon (harmony and counterpoint), Henri Büsser (composition) and Maurice Emmanuel (history of music).
Dutilleux won the Prix de Rome in 1938 for his cantata L’anneau du roi but did not complete his entire residency in Rome due to the outbreak of World War II. Dutilleux worked as Head of Music Production for Radio France from 1945 to 1963. He served as Professor of Composition at the École Normale de Musique de Paris from 1961 to 1970. He was appointed to the staff of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in 1970 and was composer-in-residence at Tanglewood in 1995 and 1998.
Some of his notable compositions include a piano sonata, two symphonies, the cello concerto Tout un monde lointain… (A whole distant world), the violin concerto L’arbre des songes (The tree of dreams), the string quartet Ainsi la nuit (Thus the night) and a sonatine for flute and piano. Some of these are regarded as masterpieces of 20th-century classical music. Works were commissioned from him by such major artists as Charles Munch, George Szell, Mstislav Rostropovich, the Juilliard String Quartet, Isaac Stern, Paul Sacher, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Simon Rattle, Renée Fleming, and Seiji Ozawa.
Dutilleux received the Grand-Croix de la Légion d’honneur (2004), the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize (2005), the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society (2008) and others.