Context and Preamble

This chapter focuses on an individual French compositional identity in the final decade of the Third Republic—that of the significant, yet canonically ignored member of La Jeune France, André Jolivet (1905–74). Jolivet shared the long-established fascination with the exotic catalyzed by the Exposition universelle of 1889 and reinforced by the Exposition coloniale of 1931. His emergent practice is part of a continuum of non-Western–inspired output by Claude Debussy, Albert Roussel, Maurice Ravel (who also enjoyed fantasy and imagination, hand in hand with a certain literalism), Olivier Messiaen, and others. It is also connected to the primitivism of Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps (1913) and Darius Milhaud's La Création du monde (1923). Jolivet knew Milhaud from the mid-1930s onward and admired La Création to the extent that he conducted the Madrid premiere in the 1950s. Such primitivism, inspired by fetish objects, had flourished visually in the prewar work of André Derain and Pablo Picasso and may be traced back to the seminal oeuvre of Paul Gauguin.

In common with Messiaen (1908—92) and others in the 1930s, Jolivet became convinced that musical creativity should be a spiritual activity with a spiritual purpose, though unlike Messiaen his means were not primarily Christian; rather, he favored the primordial rites of the supernatural, magical, and “primitive.” Spiritual conviction formed part of the aesthetic essence of La Jeune France, a group comprising Jolivet, Messiaen, Jean Daniel-Lesur (1908—2002), and Yves Baudrier (1906—88) that opposed the dryness of later Stravinsky and mid-European experimentation and whose inaugural concert, including Jolivet's influential Danse incantatoire, took place on June 3, 1936. With its motto of “sincerity, generosity, artistic conscience,” the group reacted against the perceived frivolity of the “neoclassical” Groupe des Six, which had dominated French music of the 1920s, although, interestingly, Milhaud and Arthur Honegger were also to embrace La Jeune France's move toward greater spirituality and expressiveness.