John Bird Music Research Seminar - Dr Caroline Rae

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The Cinq églogues in Context: A Microcosm of Jolivet’s Late Style

Spanning the breadth of his career from the 1930s to his final years, Jolivet’s music for strings represents an important yet often overlooked strand of his oeuvre that contains some of his most personal musical statements; Jolivet was himself a cellist. While much has been written about the significance of his piano suite Mana, it was Jolivet’s earlier works for strings – the Violin Sonata, String Trio and String Quartet – that catalysed his innovative new atonal language and first attracted the admiration of Messiaen. Under the shadow of war when Jolivet turned towards his more accessible diatonicism of the 1940s, strings gave voice to intensely emotional expression in the Nocturne for cello and piano, while the more joyful, divertissement-like Petite suite for string quintet, piano and percussion reflected the optimism of post-war euphoria. With the Adagio pour cordes, Symphonie pour cordes and the two Cello Concertos, strings once again provided a workshop of expressive ideas during the 1960s as Jolivet began to refine his now fully developed dodecaphonic language through exploring diverse aspects of timbre, innovative approaches to form, gesture, juxtapositions of strident percussive textures with contemplative lyricism and the, at times, savage expression of the style incantatoire that came to define his late style. During the 1960s, he composed three experimental works for unaccompanied violin, cello and viola that not only explore characteristic features of his string writing of the period, but also reveal new developments in his approach to incantation both as prayer and hypnotic invocation, an idea that culminated in the violently expressive Violin Concerto of 1972. This paper examines the last of the set of unaccompanied works, the Cinq églogues (1967) for solo viola, exploring aspects of musical language and performance technique as a microcosm of Jolivet’s late style. Within the context of other works for strings, it will be shown how Jolivet’s approach to form, pitch organisation, rhythm and gesture has parallels in both Hindemith and Bartók, while his mode of expression is uniquely his own.

The paper will include life illustrations by the violist Charles Bodman Whittaker, and, time permitting, conclude with a complete performance of the Cinq églogues.