ABSTRACT
The spiritual dimension of music was a prime concern of composers in the post-Second World War period. The group Jeune France had already emphasized the importance of the aspect of music in the mid-1930s, primarily in reaction against the frivolity of much French music of the 1920s. It is true that Bizet's musical orientalism – essentially the use of gapped scales and ostinato figures – can have no counterpart in the post-war musical universe, not least because these musical devices were absorbed into the musical language of French composers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many composers opted for continuity, while some of the younger generation briefly adopted a musical language which both radically broke with traditional rhetoric and eliminated all traces of personal style and expression. Frequently, composers use a pivot note as the focus of an ornamental melodic line which could be compared to a Debussian arabesque in its shape and its rhythmic plasticity.
