ABSTRACT
The musical aesthetic of Andre Jolivet, as evidenced in his theoretical writings and music is directed by two relationships which sometimes become conflated: other times and places–the erstwhile and elsewhere. Jean-Philippe Rameau's single most important theoretical work is his Traite de lharmonie, a text whose ideas enable esthesic comparison with Jolivet's theorizing in his much smaller-scaled 'La Magie'. Despite subsequent criticism of his arguments and Vatican accusations of his pantheism, the crucial philosophical referent on time for reading Jolivet on Rameau is Bergson. Jolivet, writing shortly after the Second World War, envies Rameau for supposedly having had sufficient space to pursue his creative discoveries thoroughly in exactly the same way that we, in our overstuffed postmillennial lives, may envy Jolivet. In considering Rameau's stage works composed between 1753 and 1760, Jolivet refers especially to Les Paladins, which in his view demonstrates certain vigour.
