Composers

André Jolivet (1905-1974) was born in Paris on August 8th, 1905. His mother took an amateur interest in music, and his father in painting. He first intended to be a teacher and, after studying in Paris Lycée Colbert, and the Auteuil Ecole Normale, he began teaching in a Paris State Grammar School.

But he was gifted artistically and felt drawn to poetry, literature and the theatre, as well as to painting and music and sought to make his way in this direction. His real vocation was revealed to him at the age of thirteen when he tried to compose music for one of his own poems, a Romance Barbare.

At fifteen, he had already composed a whole baller and designed the sets for it. Unsatisfied with these personal experiments, he studied piano and cello with Louis Feuillard and music (organ, improvisation, analysis) with Père Aimé Théodas of Notre Dame de Clignancourt.
In 1928, his singer and painter friend, Georges Valmier, sent him to Paul Le Flem with whom he studied harmony, counterpoint, fugue and all classical forms until 1933.

But it was as early as 1930 that he also became the pupil - the only European pupil - of Varèse, then living in Paris. It was Varèse who initiated him into new techniques and languages, into researches in acoustics and who taught him the use of percussion instruments. This meeting with Varèse confirmed Jolivet in what he had always felt to be the direction he should take.

The performance of one of his work at the Société Nationale carried him Messiaen’s friendship.

In 1935, he created “La Spirale”, an avant-garde chamber music society where he met N. Lejeune, O. Migot, Daniel Lesur. At the same time, he met Henri Prunières at the Tuesdays of the “Revue Musicale” and A. Artaud and Florent Schmitt at Varèse’s.

In 1936, Yves Baudrier, Messiaen, Jolivet and Lesur founded the group “Jeune France” (Young France) which remained the most dependable and active musical group until the beginning of World War II.

A that time, Jolivet composed his first very personal works :
- Sonata for violin and piano (1932) (recently discovered in the Archives left by A. Jolivet and given its first public performance in 1989) ;
- String Quartet (1934) in which he first applied his principles of atonal composition ;
- Mana, 6 pieces for piano solo (1935) a synthesis of esoteric, incantatory and magical elements composed for piano on a basis of natural resonances ;
- Five incantations for flute solo (1936) ;
- Incantations for Martenot waves (1937) “for the image to become a symbol”.

Those works were soon followed by :
- Trois chants des hommes (Three songs for Man, baryton and orch., 1937) ;
- Cosmogonie (orch., 1938) ;
- Cinq danses rituelles (Five ritual dances, piano solo and orch., 1939).
All those works were inspired by the search for new themes, new technical means ans new languages.

From then on, Jolivet’s fame as an avant-garde composer never stopped growing. His works were performed at the Société Nationale, at the Concerts du Montparnasse, at the evenings of the “Revue Musicale” and in any public concerts. He became chief editor of the musical section of a literary and artistic magazine, “La nouvelle saison”.

Then came the war. Jolivet enlisted at Fontainebleau, where he composed a Mass for the day of the peace, before being sent to the front, where the defeat did not interupt his creative work. After his liberation he composed :
- Les trois complaintes du soldat (baryton and orch., 1940) ;
- a ballet, Les quatre vérités (scénario by H.R. Lenormand, 1941) ;
- Stage and film music, and then his first opera Dolorès in 1942.

In 1943, he was choosen to conduct the Comédie Française production of Paul Claudel and Arthur Honegger’s Soulier de Satin. That was his first contact with the House of Molière where he was soon to become musical director, a position he kept until 1959.

Meanwhile, thanks to Georges Duhamel, he was given a scholarship by the Association for the Diffusion of French Thought, which enabled him at last to abandon his teaching and to dedicate himself fully to music. From then on he produced music uninterruptedly : ballets with Guignol et Pandore (Paris Opera, 1944), L’inconnue (Paris Opera, 1950) ; stage and film music, music for broadcasting, symphonic works (Psyché, 1946) ; First Symphony (1953) ; Suite transocéane (1955) ; 8 concerti ; choral pieces and an oratorio.

From 1959 to 1962, he was technical adviser to the Direction Générale des Arts et Lettres and, afterwards he taughts composition at the Paris Conservatoire until 1971. His titles, honours, rewards and distinctions, as well as his activities as chairman of several organisations (The Concerts Lamoureux, The French Musician’s union, etc...) and also a member of several distinguishes juries, make him one of the most unstanding figures in French music. Staged at the Paris Opera, performed by the most famous French and international symphonic orchestras, often heard on the radio and eagerly expected by critics, the works of André Jolivet have long crossed the frontiers of his own country._He himself has often conducted or lectured about his own music in Belgium, Denmark, Egypt, England, Germany Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, Soviet Union, Spain, Switzerland, U.S.A. and Yugoslavia.

It is to Père Théodas, and even more to Paul Le Flem that André Jolivet awes the firm foundation on which he has built up his technical mastery, but it is certainly Varèse who provided him with the “psychological shock” which definitely revealed to him the way he had to follow to become one of the most - maybe the most- “commited” composer of our time.

Once his vocation was strongly established, he never hesitated about the meaning and possibilities of the art to which he dedicated himself. To him, “Art is a means to express a vision of the world which is an act of faith”. It cannot be considered as a mere hobby, for “it is a vital, cosmic necessity”.

Art is the picture of the ancestral struggle between spirit and matter, and music, “Man’s song”, plays one of the main parts in it. Starting from a magic and primitive incantation (Mana, 5 incantations, Danses rituelles), it leads on the one hand to the simple, direct, breathtaking language of the Trois Complaintes or the Poèmes intimes, and on the other to the ever changing images of the same struggle, of the same inspiration (Concerto for Ondes, Concerto for piano), to the balance between magic and everyday life (Sonates) to the synthesis of Man and the Universe (Symphonies), to the peace of the Epithalame.

To these various goals and aims there corresponds an appropriate variety of means of expression : an atonal language pivoting on notes, chords and groups of sounds around which the moving mass of music organizes itself and opens up ; renewed forms in which development takes a predominant role, an expanded development which commands by opposition melody and harmony as well as rhythmic groups or even masses of sound ; renewal of the instrumental writing, too, by the use of exotic or new (electronic) instruments.

In his later works, the composer propounds the serial use of an enlarged modal language based on the essential principles of primitive music.

Jolivet’s aims and the means he uses to attain them provide sufficient explanation for his specific and isolated position in French contemporary music.

André Jolivet does not belong to any group or clan ; his innate musical instinct and his acquainted technical mastery are his only guides.

André Jolivet died in Paris, on December 20, 1974.