MESSIAEN AND THE NOTION OF INFLUENCE

Extract

In 1989, I bought a CD in Paris of the early piano music of André Jolivet. Like many non-French musicians, I had read the name of Jolivet but heard little of his music. Jolivet's reputation as Varèse's leading pupil and the extreme avant-gardist of the pre-World War II group La Jeune France seemed completely at odds with his conventional post-War music occasionally broadcast on Radio 3, such as the Concertos for Trumpet, Piano or Ondes Martenot–music which suggested not fully assimilated influences of Honegger or Hindemith, with little obviously adventurous about it in its rhythmically conservative phrasing and standard formal shapes.