This first book in English on the French composer Andre Jolivet (1905-1974) investigates his music, influences and activities against a background of the main trends in twentieth-century French music. A pupil of Varese and colleague of Messiaen in La Jeune France, Jolivet is recognised as a major figure in French music of the last century. His music is characterised by its innovative language and deep spirituality, summarised in his self-declared axiom to 'restore music's ancient original meaning when it was the magic and incantatory expression of the sacred in human communities'. Following a...

When Olivier Messiaen died in 1992, the prevailing image was of a man apart; a deeply religious man whose only sources of inspiration were God and Nature and a composer whose music progressed along an entirely individual path, artistically impervious to contemporaneous events and the whims both of his contemporaries and the critics. Whilst such a view contains a large element of truth, the past ten years has seen an explosion of interest in the composer, and the work of a diverse range of scholars has painted a much richer, more complex picture of Messiaen. This volume presents some of the...