Jean Catoire (Paris, 1923-2005) composer (Continued)
In the same category, there is also Alexander Scriabin, a composer with whom Jean Catoire had neither affinity as to ideology nor as to the culmination of his musical research, but whose works, however, he esteemed highly and from which he learned, notably the “Divine Poem”, the “Poem of Ecstasy” and the last six piano sonatas which helped him later, after 1943, when he was for the first time faced with a personal archetypical sound.
On the other hand, composers such as Pérotin, Guillaume de Machaut (in the Notre Dame Mass), Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (in their instrumental music), Schubert (in his quartet in G major and his quintet for strings in C major, Schumann (in his symphonies) and Mussorgsky (“the last true transcriber of ante-sound into sound”), used a technique not necessarily of writing, but of structuring of ante-sound inside the sound, organising the initial energetic connections followed by purely formal connections, a technique of previous prehension that Jean Catoire had not needed to learn, as the faculty of “seeing” the ante-sound phenomenon had been given to him. However, he still learned progressively that this technique of writing must not be studied in the “letter” but in the “spirit” and that in the works of composers with whose styles he felt an affinity, it was not necessary to look at the perfect form, but rather to seek a principle that would generate primarily the musical idea of ante-sound, then sound.
From 1957 with his tenth symphony (opus 98), Jean Catoire felt free to abandon the style which he had been taught. He knew that it was possible for him from then on to proceed with the research of a way of writing in which the structural elements could, without evolution of development and without variations (in the musical sense of the term), structure themselves in reversible counterpoints in which certain elements would be in shorter value than others. It was not the repetitive form (repetitive music) as, in that, the repetition is an intention of the composer in the conception of the work while in the compositions especially in those that would come later it is the fundamental elements of the archetype that instead of developing a temporal basis appear to us in an unchanging non-temporal present made clear by the continual presence of the same sound image in which the mobile and immobile functions are always present and always simultaneous in the relative absolute (the written) intimately associated with the absolute absolute (the seen).
