ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Maurice Ohana’s works up to 1964. Ohana embarked on his career as a composer at a time when many were engaged in a reassessment of musical language, or experimentation with new compositional method. The early 1960s represented a turning-point in Ohana’s compositional direction and heralded the emergence of his mature style. Although the works composed between 1960 and 1964 contain many features which are characteristic of his compositional maturity, only from the middle 1960s onwards, with Signes and the works of the Sigma Series, did all the techniques of his mature style become fully established. The progressive broadening of Ohana’s compositional interests during his transitional phase is indicated not only by his recourse to Debussy, and techniques borrowed from Medieval and Renaissance vocal repertoire, but by a growing attraction for Classical subjects.
