Jean Catoire is a reclusive prolific composer of a unique kind of sacred music whose full importance has yet to be recognised. Born in Paris in 1923 and nephew of the Russian composer Georges Catoire (1861-1926), Catoire was a student of Olivier Messiaen and the conductor Leon Barzin. The composer eventually rejected the aesthetics of Messiaen in favour of those of Bartok and Hindemith. From this point on he marginalised himself within the fashionable French musical circles. He found himself drawn to an altogether different sacred mysticism from Messiaen’s and between 1948 and 1955 wrote more than 30 choral religious works.

By the late 1950s his music was becoming increasingly stripped of embellishment to the point where it was anticipating the minimalist music of the late 1960s. Thus his first creative period (102 works of which 24 were destroyed) closed followed by two years of silence (1959-60). The second creative period (1961+) consists of 502 opuses for every standard instrumental and vocal combination plus works for synthesizer and Tibetan bowls. The volume is even greater when one considers that most of the works are over 30 minutes long, many lasting much longer (a few could continue up to 12 hours). Because he had to devote himself to much teaching and because of the labour and energy it took to write down what he calls his “auditive visions” (the works are seen, not heard), he had no time left to promote performances of his music. He realised too that musicians would be reluctant to play music that seemingly left no room for ordinary expressiveness.

If one had to identify his sacred phenomenon of sound world with that of an established composer, it would be the music of Arvo Part. His last days in Paris saw him doing some teaching and preparing his voluminous essays on the phenomenon of sound and other esoteric subjects for future publication. Catoire, who did not claim the title of “composer” but rather “transcriber”, has stated that his works “…were realised with the objective of revealing sound in its pure state before it has passed through the filter of musical conception.

The works are a juxtaposition of sounds characterised by a synthesis of structure and regular rhythmical values in a dynamic continuum, thereby creating elemental forms which represent the anterior, pre-sound values before their integration into any kind of musical conception or mould. This phenomenon of sound gives birth to a different sense of time and duration; it also lends to the structural elements a value and dimension beyond anything one finds in ‘music’ so-called.”

James D’Angelo