1,721,122 research outputs found
Sourcing Jolivet’s compositional aesthetic: Literary influences and his library
No full textOutlining the most influential events that shaped his youth for a short biographical summary in 1950, Jolivet cited his first visit to the Comédie-Française at the age of twelve as being among the decisive moments of his artistic awakening. Literature became one of his most enduring influences and an important source of creative inspiration. After his formal studies of French literature and philosophy at the École Normale d’Auteuil, Jolivet not only devoured a wide range of historical as well as contemporary and avant-garde texts, but also immersed himself in the writings of Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin, authors who profoundly influenced the shaping of his creative thinking as is revealed in his own writings and other public statements. Through investigating Jolivet’s personal library, preserved at the Médiathèque Musical Mahler, and examining the many annotations on his personal copies of significant texts, this essay sources Jolivet’s compositional aesthetic through considering the influence of the French philosophical tradition as well as his interests in non-Western cultures, ancient theologies and rediscovery of Christianity
Introduction: Jolivet in context
No full textProviding a contextual overview of Jolivet’s compositional career, musical style, influences and activities, this essay proposes a new assessment of his placing in twentieth-century French music. Despite widespread international recognition during his lifetime, and the entry of many of his works into the repertoire, Jolivet is perhaps the least understood of his contemporaries and has tended to be overshadowed by his friend and contemporary Messiaen. Through considering the sometimes highly politicised reasons for the comparative neglect of Jolivet’s later works, this study begins the process of overturning the misleading view that following his radical innovations of the interwar years, Jolivet retreated into retrogressive traditionalism. As the musical content of his works of the war years and beyond demonstrate, Jolivet was anything but a traditionalist but remained an innovator for whom humanist thinking was at the heart of his compositional raison d’être
Jolivet and the visual arts: Interactions and influences
No full textIn his conversations with Antoine Goléa, Jolivet underlined the interconnectedness of his composing not only with the writing of poetry but also with painting, asserting that these means of artistic expression represented for him a united whole. This essay explores Jolivet’s involvement with, and practice in, the visual arts and explores, for the first time, the significance of his contact with the Cubist painters Georges Valmier and Albert Gleizes whose respective creative aesthetics helped shape Jolivet’s ideas about religiosity and the spiritual as well as his later use of the Golden Section. Through discussing Jolivet’s paintings and drawings, including those for Mana (1935) and Les Trois complaintes du soldat (1940), which he adapted as covers for the published scores, this chapter demonstrates how the illustrative dimension of the composer’s work represented a creative laboratory that functioned in sympathy with his musical thinking
Chronology of Jolivet’s life and works
No full textThis substantial new chronology of Jolivet’s life and works, the first published in English, outlines the composer’s training, professional activities and international involvements in addition to his significant life and artistic encounters while providing year-by-year listings of works composed together with details of premieres
The magic of timbre: French orchestral sound
No full textThe music of Debussy and Ravel is often described in terms of its luxuriant orchestral colourism, harmonic sensuality and the exploration of sound as timbre, attributes considered quintessentially French. This article considers the distinctive character of French orchestral music from Debussy to Dutilleux through an investigating instrumental texture and sonority
City of light: the French musical milieu
No full textParis has long been dubbed 'la ville lumière', a name evoking its role as a centre of ideas and enlightenment, a promised land of cultural opportunity attracting musicians, artists, intellectuals and creative thinkers of all kinds. This article explores the main developments in French music from 1900 to 1950 against a background of contemporary trends in the literary and visual arts
Echoes of the rite: Jolivet, Ohana and the style incantatoire
No full textAmong the many compositional developments engendered by the icon of modernism that is Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, one has received little scholarly attention yet is vital to understanding the trajectory of music by French composers since; the style incantatoire. Although roots of this tendency can be found in Debussy, notably the flute solos of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and Syrinx, the innovative approach to melodic writing and unbridled primitivism of Stravinsky’s Rite opened new ways of engaging with extra-European musical influences as a means of rejuvenating conventional modes of expression through evocations of the incantatory that extend beyond mere ‘primitivism’. Including works by Varèse, Milhaud, Messiaen and Boulez as well as Stravinsky, Jolivet, Ohana and others, music of what might be called the incantatoire tradition bypasses conventional norms of expression through evoking distant and even prehistoric cultures to create a ‘new’ non-Western present; hence the importance of ritualism in many works of these composers. This essay investigates these issues in relation to André Jolivet and Maurice Ohana while examining parallel preoccupations in the writings of Alejo Carpentier with whom they were both associated. Jolivet’s self-declared quest ‘to rediscover music’s ancient original meaning when it was the magic and incantatory expression of the religiosity of human communities’, is considered in relation to his mature music as well as his so-called ‘magic’ works of the 1930s, while Ohana’s diverse Stravinskian borrowings are explored within his broader symbolism of the primeval
Marius-François Gaillard and his pianistic contemporaries: Interpretation and style in the 78-rpm recordings of Debussy’s piano works
No full textThe surging popularity of Debussy’s solo piano works during the interwar years can be measured by the many eminent pianists who recorded 78-rpm discs for a wide range of European and north American record labels. Debussy’s miniatures were ideally suited to a recording technology that favoured individual pieces of around four minutes’ duration. Following the early disc recordings that were released during Debussy’s lifetime, at least eighty pianists recorded Debussy’s solo piano music on around thirty-six different labels between 1918 and 1939, the advent of electric microphone technology stimulating a recording boom in the late 1920s. While Alfred Cortot, George Copeland and Walter Gieseking quickly established reputations as leading Debussy interpreters, the now largely forgotten Marius-François Gaillard achieved the largest and most diverse body of Debussy recordings released by any individual pianist before 1937, being superseded by Gieseking only at the very end of the 1930s. This article assesses the legacy of Gaillard’s Debussy recordings comparing his interpretative approach, pianistic style and technique with that of his contemporaries and considers the reasons for his subsequent disappearance from the pianistic canon
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