Betsy Jolas - Style

Style

She first heard Webern's Fünf Stücke op.10 in the early 1950s, a discovery which struck her like ‘a lightning bolt’, and soon, despite Milhaud's misgivings, she was getting to know the music of avant-garde contemporaries such as Boulez and Stockhausen. With their rigorously contrapuntal conception of musical form and their enthusiasm for unusual timbres and previously unexplored means of sound-production, from voices and instruments alike, these composers provided a source for much that was to become characteristic of Jolas's own emerging style. But there were important differences in her outlook, not least her passion for the voice and its expressive qualities. The confrontation of this essentially lyrical impulse with vocal writing, which embraces the full gamut of avant-garde fragmentation, timbral experimentation, and virtuosity gives her vocal works a special intensity. In her Plupart du temps II (1989) she creates a dialogue of voice, tenor saxophone, and violoncello in which, in her words, “The instruments are made to do what the voice does in daily life, but whereby the instruments are stylized, laughing, weeping, calling out.” The work represents a main genre of her work related to the Conservatoire de Paris, that of the morceau de concours in this case for saxophone. Stemming from Jolas’s vocality, the deliberate exploitation of the confusions and complexities of contrapuntal text-setting occupies her in Mots (1963), or the later Sonate à 12 (1970), a tour-de-force of vocal invention and wordless drama. In Quatuor II, for soprano and string trio (1964), the textless voice sometimes opposes the strings, sometimes combines with them in more homogenous textures, but is always treated as fully equal to the other three parts in flexibility and sophistication, pursuing a kaleidoscopic and restless stream of invention. The work was commissioned and first performed by the Domaine Musical, and marked a breakthrough in public recognition for Jolas. D'un opéra de voyage (1967) brings about a complementary transformation, as the instrumental parts are treated like voices. This urge to celebrate the dramatic and expressive qualities of individual musical lines, whether instrumental or vocal, suggests parallels with the music of Berio. Another distinctive feature of Jolas' music which crystallized during the 1960s was her approach to rhythm and metre. Already she had been moved from sources as varied as Musorgsky in Boris Godunov, Lassus, and Delibes in the “Bell Song” from Lakmé, but also Debussy in Pelléas et Mélisande has suggested a prosody that reframes the pulse, whereby she alters the tempo of the beat places notes in unsuspected groupings within the beat, creating her characteristic wave rhythm. J.D.E. (1966) presents one of the first in a long line of inventive and economical solutions to the problem of writing polyphonic music which loosens the ties of conventional rhythmic coordination, without sacrificing the contrapuntal relation of the parts by allowing freely unsynchronized playing. This fluidity is also apparent in her melodic contours, which frequently involve portamento and glissando, and in the textures and larger formal sections of a work, which are often seamlessly transformed one into another.