Welcome
This site is here to introduce you to or deepen your appreciation of the unique and beautiful music of Jean Catoire (1923-2005)
a French composer who lived in Paris and wrote giant pieces of music that are deeply meditative.
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Jean Catoire stands as a unique figure in twentieth century music. Working in isolation and without recognition for most of his creative life, he has produced a prodigious number of works that can, at best, be described as minimalist. When Catoire states that he is merely the transcriber of what he ‘sees’, a listener can sense this because it is as though the composer has no personality of his own. That he has somehow tapped into another dimension of musical time and space that draws the listener into that dimension as an act of meditation. This transportation into such a deep space beyond waking consciousness is partly created by the repetitive patterns as well as the very slow tempos marked. The absoluteness and purity of purpose of the music is further enhanced by the fact that it is in no particular way idiomatic for the instruments and voices. To a great extent he need not bother indicating which instruments should be involved in a performance. If anything in music can be described as ‘archetypal’, it is Catoire’s works. Inherent in its structure is a profound sacred geometry as the music unfolds in its permutations of the basic materials. This applies to all his works in their evolution from those that are freely chromatic to those which contain only permutations of two tones.
In his programme notes for the recording entitled Extasia that he produced of Catoire’s Requiem, Op. 573 (Virgin Classics 7243 5 45324 2 9), Malcolm Bruno states: ‘Unlike most of his contemporaries, Catoire has maintained the language of triad and ritual repetition. But like the ‘thin-bodied’ sculpture of Giacometti’s late period, there is an inexplicable attrition of pace in his mature work towards a continuous, uninterrupted stillness – a stasis which remains increasingly unchallenged. Catoire’s musical thought is essentially Pythagorean; it is the laying bare of pure musical sound, in which a worldly concern for the language of words and the rhythms of speech are of no consequence. As a ‘music of the spheres’ it recognizes only the resonance and pulse of pure being perceived in sound.’
James D’Angelo,
August 2000
Link to Le Phenomene Sonore website, which has a complete list of scores