The sources of Jolivet's musical language and his relationships with Varese and Messiaen. (Volumes I and II).
Item
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Title
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The sources of Jolivet's musical language and his relationships with Varese and Messiaen. (Volumes I and II).
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Identifier
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AAI9417454
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identifier
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9417454
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Creator
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Conrad, Bridget F.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Stephen Blum
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Date
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1994
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Music | Biography
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Abstract
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Although Andre Jolivet (1905-1974) was an active, internationally celebrated and commissioned composer, his music has been surprisingly neglected by scholarly commentators. This is partly because Jolivet was an individualist who in the course of his career wrote in vastly different styles that met with mixed reactions, and partly because he was not perceived as being on the cutting edge of musical developments after World War II.;However, his early works of the 1930s were quite innovative and placed him among the avant-garde composers of the inter-war period. Deeply influenced by intellectual currents of inter-war Paris, particularly a rising interest in ethnology and exoticism, Jolivet set out to define a ritualistic, "primitive" musical style that would recapture the original power of music as incantation. This fascination with incantation, magic, and non-Western cultures led to a musical language exhibiting sensitivity to resonance, careful structuring of registral space, highly personal pitch organization based on both atonal and modal principles, incorporation of golden section proportions and number symbolism, and use of rhythmic ostinatos, insistent repetition, and other procedures related to non-Western musical practices. The resultant works often present radical spatial and temporal configurations and an intense exploration of different kinds of musical motion and stasis, revealing close ties to the concerns of Varese and Messiaen.;An examination of Jolivet's musical ideas and techniques in relation to those of Varese and Messiaen reveals several heretofore unrecognized connections. The common suggestion that Varese had no musical followers is challenged, for Jolivet, who studied with Varese from 1929-1933, integrated many of Varese's techniques, if not Varese's most characteristic sound, into his own musical language. The relationship between the ideas of Jolivet and Messiaen is also much closer than has generally been acknowledged. Messiaen discovered and championed Jolivet's early works while he was still developing his own style, and the shared concerns of the two composers led not only to friendship but to mutual influence.;Jolivet is shown to be both an innovative and interesting composer in his own right and an important source of further insight into the music of Varese and Messiaen.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.