Initiation to Modernity: Pierre Mercure’s Triptyque and Lignes et points
Pierre Mercure’s orchestral works Triptyque (1959) and Lignes et points (1964) illustrate various ways in which the composer grappled with his desire to embrace musical modernity. One of the fundamental traits of music in a modernist vein—one that unites the preoccupations of composers of the first decades of the twentieth century (Bartók, Stravinsky, Berg, Hindemith, Honnegger, etc.) with those of the avant-garde music of the post-war decades—lies in its use of different forms of symmetry. Mercure too makes use of symmetrical forms to structure the two works studied here at various levels. In Triptyque, the surface of the music remains completely traditional, while several somewhat hidden aspects of its structure are manifestations of a resolutely modernist sensibility. In contrast, in Lignes et points, the surface of the music—the sounds, colours and textures—are imbued with a thoroughly modern or even avant-garde character, while its ’subterranean’ structure is revealed to be an eminently classical theme and variations (even if it cannot necessarily be heard as such). Other aspects of these works reveal the influence of Mercure’s contemporaries like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Earle Brown and John Cage, whose works were performed at Mercure’s Semaine international de musique actuelle (SIMA) in 1961.