controversial frenchman Jolivet pays his first visit to the United States

By RAFAEL KAMMERER

Andre Jolivet, the distinguished French composer and musical advisor to the French Ministry of Culture headed by Andre Malraux, visited the United States for the first time in November. During his brief ten-day stay, Mr. Jolivet conducted the American premiere of his Second Symphony with the Detroit Symphony, heard Frank Glazer give the first American performance of his Piano Sonata, and lectured on trends in contemporary French music at the French Alliance and the French Institute in New York.

A prodigious composer whose music was for long a controversial subject in France, Mr. Jolivet is a mild-mannered, quiet-spoken man of medium height in his mid-fifties.

As a teacher, Mr. Jolivet has strongly influenced the younger generation of French and Japanese composers. Of the former, he mentioned three at his press conference who were worth wa:tching- Jacques Bondon, Even de Tissot and Petigirard (he couldn’t recall the first name) , a pupil of Darius Milhaud. The Japanese, Mr. Jolivet said, turned to a tonality because they were tired of traditional Western music and because they have an excellent tradition of their own.

Atonality, he pointed out, is the only system that permits the Japanese to fuse Western techniques with their own musical ideas. He mentioned too that the Japanese have taken Latin-American rhythms and American Rock and Roll music and adapted them to their own purpose and temperament. Asked whether he had written atonal music himself, Mr. Jolivet replied with typical Gallic wit: “I wrote atonal music for thirty years. Nobody suspected it until I told them. There are only two ways of writing atonal music. Either you shout it from the housetops, in which case it ceases to be music, or you just use it.”

Radio and records Mr. Jolivet believes are bound- to be a boon to the concert business. “There comes a time,” he said, “when radio and records are not enough.”

Having recently relinquished his post as musical director of the Comédie Française to devote more time to a project that is close to his heart, Mr. Jolivet, as founder and director of the French Center of Musical Humanism at the University of Aix-en-Provence, is currently working with Mr. Malraux on the overhauling of the French system of musical education and the propagation of French music abroad through the various consulates.

The year 1945—the year in which his Piano Sonata was composed—“marked a turning point in the life of the world,” Mr. Jolivet maintained. In composing the Sonata under the pressure of events that year, Mr. Jolivet “applied ideas that I had developed before the war in which I tried to restore to music the magic it once had.” He was, he continued, “seeking a new musical language that would speak to all peoples, white or black. It is necessary now to write in a universal language that will be comprehensible to all.

“Composers of the past have been concerned with music of their own countries. Albeniz was one of the first to write Spanish music that would appeal to all. Others, like Villa-Lobos and Aaron Copland, have used native folk material in their compositions and have made them universally comprehensible. France has not learned to make use of its folklore as well as other countries. There is no doubt that jazz expresses the musicality of an inspired people. The jazz records that are popular in France, however, are not the same as here in the United States.”

The French, Mr. Jolivet then went on to say, have a great admiration for Jerry Mulligan, “a fine musician.” Even before World War I, Mr. Jolivet pointed out, ragtime had exerted a strong influence on French music. Debussy, Ravel, Milhaud, Stravinsky, Honegger and Poulenc were among the composers influenced by what Mr. Jolivet referred to as “half-time” writing. Among his own works in which jazz influences play a decisive part, Mr. Jolivet mentioned his first and second Concertos for Trumpet.

Mr. Jolivet also discussed at some length what he called “algorhythmic” music but which can better be described as “computer” music. This consists of a program of numerical formulas which, fed into an electronic brain, will be translated into music. This will require, in Mr. Jolivet’s words, “as much work as the writing of a conventional score. The mathematics must be prepared in advance. It will not just be a matter of pushing buttons.”