Pierre Mercure

Early Years

Pierre Mercure studied from 1944 to 1949 at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal with the goal of becoming an orchestra conductor and concentrated on harmony and counterpoint with Marvin Duchow and Claude Champagne, as well as on instrumental techniques. His bassoon teachers were Roland Gagnier and Louis Letellier, and he studied conducting with Léon Barzin.

Claude Champagne helped Pierre Mercure discover French music and develop the talent for orchestration which was evident even in his first works, “Kaléidoscope” and “Pantomime.” Before going to Paris in 1949 for further education, Mercure participated in some modern ballet productions with a group of young poets, musicians, dancers, and painters whose artistic views were much influenced by the painter Paul-Émile Borduas. In May 1949, at the Théâtre des Compagnons, he took part with the choreographer Françoise Sullivan, the poet Claude Gauvreau, and the painter Jean-Paul Mousseau, in realizing three works: “Dualité,” “Femme archaïque,” and “Lucrèce Borgia.”

The Paris Years

Philosophically disturbed by Paul-Émile Borduas' Refus global (1948), a proclamation denouncing the conservatism of society and demanding freedom for the artist, Pierre Mercure sought new means of expression. He enrolled in Nadia Boulanger's classes as soon as he arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1949. Increasingly attracted by new music, however, Mercure preferred to work on improvisations, superimpositions of forms, and collective compositions with his composer friends Gabriel Charpentier, Jocelyne Binet, and Clermont Pépin.

His association with Nadia Boulanger was short-lived, but despite this setback he pursued his studies in orchestration with Arthur Hoérée and Darius Milhaud and in conducting with Jean Fournet. Two short works, “Emprise” for clarinet, cello, bassoon, and piano and “Ils ont détruit la ville” for choir and orchestra, belong to this period. The latter, based on a poem from the collection Aire by Charpentier, won him a prize in the RCI competition of 1950.

After a year filled with new experiences, Mercure returned to Montreal, still searching for new means of expression and musical forms. Stravinsky, Milhaud, and Honegger would be some of his models in the coming years. Mercure was not indifferent to American popular music and jazz; several of the themes he used were derived from songs made popular by Glenn Miller and his orchestra.

Studies in Tanglewood, Massachusetts

On a grant from the Quebec government, Mercure spent the summer of 1951 in Tanglewood, Massachusetts, studying composition with Luigi Dallapiccola, who became both a teacher and a friend. Once he had assimilated the principles of the 12-tone method, Mercure was torn between a need for greater creative freedom and a need to organize, to see ahead, to construct. He finally rejected strict 12-tone writing because he saw in it a serious impediment to his flexibility as an artist. His essentially lyrical nature was revealed in Dissidence, three songs which with “Ils ont détruit la ville” formed the core of the Cantate pour une joie for soprano, choir, and orchestra on poems by Gabriel Charpentier. Divertissement, for string quartet and string orchestra, and Triptyque, for full orchestra, were also created during this period.

Radio-Canada and Electroacoustics

In January 1952 Pierre Mercure joined Radio-Canada and became its first producer of TV music programs. From 1954 to 1959 he produced 41 programs in the series L'Heure du concert and several Concerts pour la jeunesse. He also supervised Jazz Workshop, Music Hall, Pays et merveilles, and others. His style became recognizable by its taste and its recurrent ventures into the visual realm, often with a touch of audacity. Starting in this period, his work rose more and more from a need for continual experimentation and a compulsion to grapple with the most up-to-date art forms.

In practical terms, from 1959 to 1962 Mercure sought a new language, exploring the field of electroacoustics. This exploration grew out of his encounters with the Groupe de recherches musicales of the RTF (Radiodiffusion-télévision française) and with Pierre Schaeffer during his second study trip to Europe (1957–58). Répercussions, Structures métalliques I and II, Incandescence, and Improvisation are works built from concrete sounds transformed by means of electronic equipment. The works were accompanied sometimes by choreographic movement and often by projections.

International Week of Today’s Music

Pierre Mercure's intense activity peaked in preparations for an avant-garde music festival, the International Week of Today's Music. The festival was held in August 1961, and Mercure invited, among others, John Cage, Serge Garant, Mauricio Kagel, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Christian Wolff, and Iannis Xenakis. He wanted to show Montreal the latest manifestations of contemporary music, and he looked for new sounds which might build a new audience. This isolated event, which Mercure would have liked to make annual, prepared the way for what in 1966 became the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec.

Notable Works (1960s)

Mercure's third study trip to Europe — to Paris, Darmstadt, and Dartington during the summer of 1962 — allowed him to gain a closer knowledge of music from electronic sources. Structures métalliques III, composed during this period, was presented 16 September 1962 at the Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik in Wiesbaden, Germany.

In the autumn of 1962 Mercure undertook the composition of a cantata for radio, Psaume pour abri, the first of three attempts at a synthesis of electronic and conventional music. This psalm is composed of seven parts, of which the last three are a non-literal recapitulation of the first three. This new avenue continues in Tétrachromie.

In September 1963, Mercure wrote Lignes et points for full orchestra, commissioned by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. A suite of variations on a single theme, the work shows a compositional similarity to the previous two; the same melodic cells of three, four, or five notes are central features in the organization. Most of the sequences are notated graphically by means of colours; in the first two, Mercure used sine-tones transformed with filters, echo-chamber, etc, and in the third he translated the same processes into orchestral terms. Moreover, he tried with Lignes et points to obtain from the orchestra a range of timbres comparable to that achieved through electroacoustic means.

At the time of his death in a traffic accident in 1966, Mercure had scarcely reached maturity. During the previous summer in Darmstadt, he had written H₂O per Severino, for from four to tenor solo instruments, a work in open form, with neither beginning nor end, in which chance events of the moment together constitute a formal entity.

Honours

In 1966 the Montreal Festival du disque awarded the Prix Pierre-Mercure for the best recording of a Canadian composition to the duo pianists Bouchard and Morisset for their performance of Roger Matton’s Concerto. Mercure's manuscripts and papers are deposited at the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec (now Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec). Volume 35 of RCI's Anthology of Canadian Music (5-ACM 35), issued on CD in 1990, is devoted to Mercure's compositions. His status as an associate is maintained by the Canadian Music Centre. Cantate pour une joie has been performed several times, notably during the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal.

A version of this entry originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada.