His death was announced by his music publisher, Schott Music.
Guillou (pronounced ghee-YOU) never lost the capacity to shock in a career of nearly eight decades, from his beginnings as a church organist while still a child through the half-century he spent in one of the most important organ posts in France, at the church of St. Eustache in Paris.
He bucked performance traditions; transcribed music by composers who could seem an odd fit for the organ (including Stravinsky, who had dismissed the organ by saying that âthe monster never breathesâ); wrote ambitious organ works in his own idiom; and helped design new organs that challenged conceptions of how the instrument should look and sound.
âGuillou proved that organists need not follow the orthodox path,â Cameron Carpenter, a young American organ star with a punkish demeanor and unorthodox approach of his own, wrote in an email.
Critics, and other organists, sometimes harrumphed at the interpretive liberties and flights of fancy that Guillou took in a time in which the trend, especially in early music, was toward historical fidelity.
After a performance at Riverside Church in New York in 1982, New York Times music critic Allen Hughes, while praising Guillouâs âastonishingly fleetâ fingers, complained in his review that Guillou had âlet his enthusiasm for organ gadgetry and color possibilities take precedence over the rhythmic solidity and interpretive scale and poise that make for art in performance.â
But his flamboyant style was a revelation to many. Michael Barone, host of Pipedreams, the American Public Media radio program about the organ, recalled that Riverside performance as thrilling.
âWhen he would sit at the organ, it was almost as if the organ would explode, or burst into flames,â Barone said in an interview. âHe would reach deep into the depths of the spirit of music, and he challenged the dynamic and technical capabilities of the instrument.â
Guillou shrugged off the criticism. Stephen Tharp, an organist who studied with him, said Guillou had âplayed the organ repertoire with ideas that were very individual, and he did so without apology.â
He recalled Guillou telling him, âIf youâre still upset with anything that happens in the organ world, you havenât spent enough time in it.â
Although Guillou passed much of his life playing in churches, he also saw it as his lifeâs mission to âemancipate this instrument from the bonds of the churchâ and make it part of the larger music world, his biographer, Jörg Abbing, said in an email.
His transcriptions were colorful â including organ versions of Bachâs âGoldbergâ variations and works by Liszt and others. He once wrote of his transcription of Mussorgskyâs âPictures at an Exhibition,â one of his most popular, that it could âonly be justified to the extent that it makes us forget that it is a transcription at all, with the new instrument merging into the essence of the work.â
And his own compositions were often daring â including âLa RĂ©volte des Orgues,â scored for nine organs and percussion, which became something of a cult organ piece, and âAlice in Organ Land,â for organist and narrator.
Organist Paul Jacobs, who is chairman of the organ department at Juilliard and has played Guillou works, said that despite his reputation as an enfant terrible, Guillou exhibited great refinement in his music.
âHis music can be shocking, full of crashing dissonances, with a carnal, rhythmic energy to it,â Jacobs said in a telephone interview. âBut Iâve always found that thereâs just that French sense of proportion, of knowing when you donât go beyond a certain point.â
Jean Victor Arthur Guillou was born in Angers, France, on April 18, 1930, to Victor and Marguerite Guillou. His father was a natural gas salesman.
Jean was pressed into service playing the organ at a local church before he was even a teenager. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Marcel Dupré, Maurice Duruflé and Olivier Messiaen, spent time in Lisbon and Berlin, and was appointed organist at St. Eustache in 1963.
Survivors include his wife, Suzanne, a professor and writer, and a daughter, BĂ©ryl Zuccarelli, said Giampiero Del Nero, president of Augure, an association devoted to Guillouâs work.
Guillou was always thinking about ways to modernize the organ. His designs were incorporated into new instruments around the world, including one shaped like a giant hand at a church in LâAlpe dâHuez, France, and another (now being replaced) that was used for nearly three decades at the Tonhalle concert hall in Zurich. His book âThe Organ, Remembrance and Futureâ (2010) traces centuries of organ history while making the case that organists should not be hampered by tradition.
Guillou recorded for the Philips, Decca and Dorian labels among others. His recordings preserve many of his performances of Bach, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms and his own compositions, and he appeared as the soloist in a recording of Saint-SaĂ«nsâ Symphony No. 3, the âOrgan Symphony,â with the San Francisco Symphony.
He taught hundreds of organists, giving master classes in Zurich regularly. Jean-Baptiste Monnot, who studied with him there and became his assistant at St. Eustache, said that Guillou had urged his students to find their own approaches to music, telling them, âEvery time you interpret a work, you should have the sensation that youâre premiering it.â
As Guillou himself put it in 1996 in an interview with Barone for Pipedreams, âNothing is worse than to play in such a way that the organ seems to be a dead machine.â
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.