Do you notice a mistake?
For those who like music that is well-organized, André Jolivet may be disconcerting — and that is his virtue. His Piano Concerto provoked an uprising at its premiere in 1951, after which a number of those present finished the evening at the police station. One bold but anonymous listener wrote to Jolivet in 1969 to call him “Maestro Dodec-Cacophonist” and “Chief Cretin and Ear Shatterer” and accuse him of caring only for being “modern.” And yet Jolivet’s output was lengthy, and he received numerous state commissions and official distinctions. Couldn’t these be interpreted as signs of sage academicism? Appearances are insufficient; the question cannot be answered without listening to his music. But even then, opinions may change depending on what one listens to. For example, when the symphonic Les trois complaintes du soldat premiered in 1943, the composer Robert Bernard was shocked by the “essentially direct tone” of the work, as Jolivet had theretofore been known for his “incorrigible quest for aggressive novelty.”1 Jolivet’s trajectory was redirected several times over — from his avant-gardism of the 1930s, to his adoption of established models after 1940, which became sites for renewed experiments after 1958.
In 1936, Jolivet appeared to critics as the most “red”2 of the members of Jeune France, a group of composers united by their desire to produce “works [which are] youthful, free, as far removed from revolutionary formulas as from academic formulas.”3 Jolivet’s earliest compositions eschew rules and constraints on his creativity. In 1923, on a sketch page now preserved in his private archives, the young autodidact wrote: “Can we perfectly apply principles drawn from the work of a genius? Their application is beautiful when done by the geniuses themselves, but it loses its greatness when it becomes a grammatical rule imposed on the ideal.”4 The training he received from Paul Le Flem and Edgard Varèse, outside of any institutional context, did not suppress his iconoclastic instincts. Only sporadically and in polarized contexts did Jolivet use traditional chords, sometimes blurred by polytonality — as in Deux poésies de Francis Jammes (1928) and Three Times No. 1 for piano (1930). Elsewhere he avoids traditional chords altogether in the name of the disciplined atonality advanced by Varèse. Upon discovering Arnold Schoenberg at a 1927 concert, Jolivet became interested in dodecaphony. In 1937, he asked Max Deutsch, in vain, to initiate him in the method, having already tried to appropriate it intuitively in his Quatuor à cordes (1931, revised in 1934).
In the 1930s, Jolivet directed his voice toward Mana, the first work in which he claimed to have tried to “realize [his] conceptions of music.” A reader of Antonin Artaud, Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, and Matila Ghyka, Jolivet also exchanged views with the astrologically inclined Georges Migot and the esoterically inclined Hélène de Callias and Serge Moreux. These exchanges left him with the conviction that music was a “magic process” and that the musician was “an intermediary between Heaven and Earth.” To Jolivet, two civilizations seem to have already conceived of music in this way: the ancients and so-called “primitive” peoples. From Émile Durkheim or Henri Bergson, he encountered the Melanesian notion of “mana,” that “mysterious and active force possessed by certain individuals, the souls of the dead, and the spirits.” The six movements of Mana were each inspired by one of six objects left for Jolivet by Varèse prior to his return to the United States, which thus carried the impulse of his absent teacher. Jolivet’s works in this aesthetic could be described as “primitivist.” They include not only Mana, but also Prélude apocalyptique for organ, Danse incantatoire for orchestra, Cinq incantations for flute, Incantation … Pour que l’image devienne symbole for violin, Cosmogonie for piano or orchestra, and Cinq danses rituelles for piano or orchestra. Jolivet was convinced that universal harmony was revealed and transformed by the physical structure of sound itself, and that only music that took into account acoustical properties could bring about collective listening within a large group. Accordingly, and influenced by the teachings of Varèse, he used the laws of the corps sonore (the “sonorous body”) to demonstrate the “insufficiency of the tonal system” and to allow spectral concerns to govern his harmonic choices. The “primitive” model, meanwhile, imparted developmental procedures based on alternation and repetition (including varied iteration and developing proliferation) for constructing both line and form.
These works were novel and pioneering: post-war aesthetics were present in his use of autonomous musical parameters, irrational rhythmic construction, and experiments with instrumental timbre. For that reason, the pre-war Jolivet contributed significantly to the reputation he enjoyed after 1944. Many viewed him as Varèse’s student, and he was a faithful promoter of his teacher’s music. Having been assimilated by modernists, Varèse was the mediating figure who justified Jolivet’s being performed by the Ensemble Instrumental de Musique Contemporaine de Paris in 1964 and 1970, and invited in 1973 by Itinéraire to join their patronage committee — even as Jolivet’s compositions post-1958 rekindled the primitivist style he had more or less abandoned since 1940. His Cinq églogues for viola and his Ascèses for clarinet (1967) recall his Cinq incantations for flute, with their disjointed intervals over irregular rhythms and an unstable meter. From 1959 to 1974, Jolivet, who was also a former cellist, wrote a significant number of works for string instruments. With the warmth and abstraction of the string timbre, sometimes used as noise, Jolivet produces strange, sinuous, and expressive incantatory lines. These works again share a link to Varèse through a percussive throbbing — as in Cérémonial, a posthumous homage to Varèse, as well as Heptade, the Cello Concerto No. 1 (“Hiératique”), the Symphony No. 3 (“Véhément”), the Concert Suite for Flute and Percussion, and Controversia with its timbal-like harp.
Jolivet’s two primitivist phases were separated by a period during which his inspiration, while ample, was rather less disconcerting, insofar as his creativity drew upon established models. At the Comédie-Française, he demonstrated his conviction that a composer should be able to write “in every style.” He treated music as an element of décor: just as the set of the 1951 production of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme included a reconstruction of a room in the Château de Chambord where the work had premiered, so Jolivet took Jean-Baptiste Lully’s score under his baton. Especially after 1946, he expressed his desire to work toward a “synthesis of all the experimentation, of all the audacities of the past twenty years, enriched by the study of all the theories of the past and of all exotic techniques.” The clash of two traditions embodied in his Piano Concerto — exotic musics and the romantic concerto — ultimately created a memorable scandal.
Committed to “French music,” Jolivet held up Jean-Philippe Rameau as a national musical “prototype” — even while his own writing hardly resembles that of Rameau. And although he cited Igor Stravinsky, Manuel de Falla, Schoenberg, and Béla Bartók (to whom he dedicated his Piano Sonata No. 1) as the “spiritual inheritors of the great liberator, Claude Debussy,” Jolivet used none of these composers as a model either. Meanwhile, he wrote in “obstinate rhythms” under the dual influence of Johann Sebastian Bach (in the “Fugato” of the Concerto for Bassoon, String Orchestra, and Piano) and of bebop (the two trumpet concertos). Frenetic sixteenth-note passages are a stylistic trademark of his post-war style. Though his rhythmic writing rarely ever again approaches the complexity of Mana or Cinq incantations, it is sometimes shaped by extra-European influences (Asia in Concerto for ondes Martenot, Africa in the Allegro deciso of the Piano Concerto, Turkey and the Arab world in “Fluide” from his Symphony No. 2). Jolivet credits Beethoven for “the projection of sound” in his Concerto for ondes Martenot and for the development by “variation of orchestral mass” in his writing for large forces. Jolivet had previously attributed these qualities to Varèse, a fact that demonstrates the extent to which these names invoked to describe his work follow rather than precede the crystallization of his aesthetic convictions — and that the tutelage of one could easily be swapped for that of another.
Jolivet thus made the emblematic genres of the classical and romantic eras — the sonata, symphony, and concerto — his own. His attachment to the concerto genre may be understood in light of his friendship with great French soloists, to whose “transcendent technique and musical subtlety” each concerto pays “homage.” This romantic conception of instrumental supremacy, moreover, helps to explain why Jolivet never composed for the studio — and why his interest in electronic instruments was limited to the ondes Martenot, for which he wrote very early on (Trois poèmes pour ondes et piano from 1935). His heightened sense for timbre is apparent throughout these pieces and is a primary feature of the “twelve-part vocal orchestra” of his Epithalame.
As early as the 1920s and 1930s, the sonata and rondo made their imprint on Jolivet’s approach to form. In the aftermath of the war, he used these models — sometimes again in conjunction with extra-European references (as in the Piano Concerto, which was initially titled Equatoriales) — to structure multiple levels of the work: oppositions between movements and between sections, which he described in his sketches as “punctuations,” “enclaves,” or “sonic corners.” Elsewhere he crossbreeds forms. Whether in his Sonata No. 1 for Piano or in Mandala, many of his movements may be read as embedding several thematic networks. These are elaborated as a series of variations dispersed across the form and interwoven with variations from another thematic network, in a fusion of the sonata and rondo.
Meanwhile, Jolivet’s pitch systems are conceived in a highly syncretic modal framework. He generates his own scales, and borrows as often from liturgical modes (Messe pour le jour de la paix) as from modes of limited transposition, Greek modes (Suite delphique, Le Chant de Linos), and Hindu modes (Étude sur les modes antiques, Piano Concerto). He variously assimilates or contrasts these modes with tonality, whether by orienting the music around one pitch (not always the tonic) or by using the full chromatic range to play up the opposition between the notes belonging and not belonging to the mode (the Allegro molto in Piano Sonata No. 2, “Fluide” from Sonata for Flute and Piano).
In addition to his pursuit of modal continuities, Jolivet identified lyricism as a constant throughout the history of French music. He preferred lyricism to the well-worn qualities of elegance and concision. Lyricism, as it was for Jolivet, is exemplified in the variation lyrique,5 or fourth movement, of his Concertino for trumpet, piano, and string orchestra, and in the chant lyrique that arises in the soloist’s part following the introduction in the Largo cantabile in the Concerto for ondes. His lyricism represents an equilibrium between the demands of measure, rhythm, and expression: emphasis on the downbeat, flexible alternation between binary and ternary rhythms, and alternation between conjunct and disjunct intervals. This approach, used in the voice in Jardins d’hiver and in the slow movements of the concertos (sometimes marked cantabile), reveals how much lyricism is a quest for song. But is this lyricism, with its highly diversified melodic material that cannot easily be defined, really French? If it is not used to evoke France in La Vérité de Jeanne (which Jolivet composed for the fifth centenary of the posthumous pardon of Joan of Arc), it might be because it more logically comes from Austro-German lineage – that of Richard Wagner or Alban Berg.
Jolivet described his stylistic shift of 1940 as a desire to quell his pre-war detractors. Already in August 1937, he had admitted to Migot that he felt a sort of “musical stagnation.” He needed renewal — one that would be more a reformulation of, rather than a rupture with, the aesthetic project of the 1930s.
Thus in place of the fundamental Religion (capital R) of the “primitives,” Jolivet substituted a sense of religion (lowercase r) more in line with Catholic tradition, as in the Prélude apocalyptique for organ, an incantation performed on the instrument of the church. In 1938, the composition of two Kyries and the planned composition of a Mass reveal Christian influences that were encroaching, albeit fleetingly, on his primitivism. The work of the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (whose writings formed the libretto of Cœur de la matière) would later offer the means to reconcile these two tendencies: Jolivet adopted a form of spirituality closely related to primitivist devotion, reflected in a revamped style incantatoire. In place of relatively vague notions of ancient musical tradition, he pursued the more precise tradition of French music, resuming a trajectory he had embarked upon before the war. In the political climate, the threat of fascism from within and without led leftist parties to unite in 1934 in a national project to reverse internationalist discourses. Similarly, Jolivet took up from 1939 a call for a “reestablishment of a true French musical tradition,” with “lyric outpouring” as its touchstone. Finally, in place of “Man” (capital M) understood in its anthropological generality, Jolivet substituted the social role of man (lowercase m) in the contemporary listening public. For Jolivet, a committed activist for leftist causes, music should occupy a place in everyone’s daily life, and only has meaning insofar as it is heard by the greatest number. If his time spent with Varèse had initially inspired in him an idealist notion of soundwaves heard by the body, several public failures led Jolivet to desire communication with his listeners by means of a shared musical language.
Thus many of Jolivet’s shifts in reference are underpinned by a similar structure: the suppression of capital letters, representing disenchantment with utopian thought. He underwent coherent self-development, that of a man who, as he composed, more readily analyzed his own works than those of others, and found in his past the paths toward his own renewal, putting the resources of the avant-garde to his own ends. He was impressed by what Teilhard writes in Hymn à l’Univers, “Nothing is more precious than what is you in others, and others in you,” words that Jolivet used as the epigraph to his own Hymn à l’Universe. He sometimes took it upon himself to update prior works (for instance, Psyché, the second part of a cycle begun with Cosmogonie of 1938, was none other than a profound rewriting of the Danse incantatoire of 1936). In doing so, he was consistent with his self-described approach. “A musician only writes one work that unfolds in time, and that takes the name of several opuses,” he affirmed in 1957. “Yes, one sole work, continually unfolding.”6
1. Robert BERNARD, “La Musique,” Nouveaux Temps, 7 March 1943. ↩
2. André CŒUROY, “Jeune France,” Gringoire, 19 May 1936. ↩
3. Translated in Nigel SIMEONE, “La Spirale and La Jeune France: Group Identities,” The Musical Times 143, no. 1880 (2002), p. 15. ↩
4. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Jolivet can be found in André JOLIVET, Écrits, ed. Christine JOLIVET-ERLIH, Paris, Delatour, 2007, 2 vol. ↩
5. André JOLIVET, draft of letter to Polydor (June 1973), Archives André Jolivet. ↩
6. Henri GAUBERT, “Comment ils travaillent: André Jolivet,” Musica 5 (1957), p. 7. ↩
Do you notice a mistake?