“Opera houses should be burned down”, the first one said (Pierre Boulez, 1967). “French contemporary music has drifted away from the city, and the lack of public interest gives the impression that this field is brain-dead”, argued the other (Raphaël Cendo, 2022), attacking the hegemony of the former. As for Jolivet, he was criticised by Boulez for his “aesthetic of fetishes”. Since Jean-Jacques Rousseau, French music has loved polemics and cultivated quarrels. Yet these three composers share a common reference: Antonin Arthaud, whose “Theatre of Cruelty” fascinates them in more ways than one.
Jolivet, or music and magic
Self-taught before meeting Paul Le Flem and then Edgar Varèse, André Jolivet helped found the group of musicians Jeune France (1936) with Yves Baudrier, Daniel Lesur and Olivier Messiaen. At the time, he was the most adventurous of the four. Within the trend of musical primitivism inspired by the thinkers Bergson and Durkheim as well as the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, Jolivet developed an original musical language drawing on both Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique and the acoustic elements passed on by Edgar Varèse.
Composed after Varèse left for the United States in 1933, Mana is inspired by six heterogeneous objects he gave to Jolivet: two contemporary sculptures by Calder, a puppet bought at a flea market, two raphia animals (including Pegasus) and a Balinese doll (La Princesse de Bali). As for mana, “this force that extends us into our familiar fetishes”, writes the composer in the score’s epigraph, it refers to Melanesian culture.
“La Princesse de Bali” is the piece that most closely approaches non-European music. Jolivet organises the music in layers, like a gamelan. The piece ends on a note: “like a very low gong”. “Pégase” provides a striking contrast between the little raphia figurine and the mythical Greek horse. It is the most developed and classic piece in the collection, structured around three themes.
Composed in the summer of 1936, Cinq Incantations (for solo flute) affirms the magical power of music at key moments in social and spiritual life, while renewing flute writing. This cycle of purely melodic pieces live on the literal or varied repetition of motifs, intended to produce a form of trance.
Ravel and spareness
In 1920, Henry Prunières decided to commission a collective work in the memory of Debussy for the Revue musicale. Ten composers contributed pieces, including Stravinsky with a chorale from the Symphonies d’instruments à vent and Ravel, with the Allegretto of his future Violin and piano Sonata No.1 . Rarely has Ravel come so close to Stravinsky in his clarity of line and use of ostinatos. This chiselled sonata gave its composer a hard time, and in early February 1922, he deemed the scherzo “ugly” and reworked it. “It doesn’t look like much, this machine for two instruments,” he confided, “but there’s almost a year and a half’s work in it”.
In his autobiography, Ravel would acknowledge the uniqueness of his sonata: “Pared down to the extreme. Renunciation of harmonic charm; an increasingly marked reaction towards melody”. Boulez confirms: “What Ravel possesses is the genius of contour, which makes it impossible to forget his themes.”
Cendo and saturation
Raphaël Cendo’s music is the antithesis of Ravelian aesthetics, and belongs to the movement promoting saturated acoustics that emerged in France in the 2000s. The idea of saturation goes hand in hand with that of excess for a musician who recognizes the legacies of two composers: Gérard Grisey and Iannis Xenakis. Starting with instrumental saturation, Cendo has extended the notion to density, granular saturation, and even historical saturation, which, in his words, “welcomes the [musical] history of humanity to excess”.
Rokh I – the first movement of the four-part work Rokh (2011-2012) – owes its title to a mythological figure: a “gigantic and fabulous bird mentioned in One Thousand and One Nights, the symbol of renewal and immortality”. The work is classically composed as a quartet with flute and piano. But the flute doubles as a bass flute, and the piano’s playing modes are highly diversified. “This first part alternates between moments of total saturation and more minute, static or rustling states. The elements are multiplied, creating a dense, eventful sound. The extreme gestural writing and energy required give this movement an unforeseen, uncontrolled character.”
Coffin Bubble Blue (2020-2021) was born of the encounter between Raphaël Cendo and female composers from Lithuania, Turkey and the Philippines around the electric guitar and an extraordinary performer, Yaron Deutsch. It could be described as a concerto for electric guitar, but with a very special ensemble, combining modern Western instruments (contrebass flute, harp, accordion, keyboard and modular synthesizer), ancient instruments (theorbo), folk instruments (cymbalum) and non-European instruments (the sheng, a Chinese mouth organ). Moreover, the subtitle of the piece – “Tell el-Amarna 1988” – which refers to a 14th century BC site in Middle Egypt, clearly underlines that a form of historical and cultural saturation permeates this work.
Lucie Kayas
