He was trained at the École Niedermeyer in church music rather than at the Conservatoire, and his harmony was different from the start because of it: modal writing used quite naturally inside secular music. He later ran the Conservatoire himself and taught Ravel, Enescu and Nadia Boulanger.
His music almost never raises its voice, but the modulations are extremely bold and usually have taken you somewhere distant before you notice. There is no Dies irae in his Requiem — he cut the judgement entirely, saying he saw death as a happy deliverance rather than a painful experience. He was almost completely deaf by the end, and the last chamber works were written in total silence.
