Marcel Lucien Tournier was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 harp

Harp

The harp is a multi-stringed instrument which has the plane of its strings positioned perpendicularly to the soundboard. Organologically, it is in the general category of chordophones and has its own sub category . All harps have a neck, resonator and strings...

ist, composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

, and pedagogue who composed important solo repertory for the harp that expanded the technical and harmonic possibilities of the instrument. His works are regularly performed in concert and recorded by professional harpists, and they are often test pieces for harp-performance competitions. A student of Alphonse Hasselmans

Alphonse Hasselmans

Alphonse Hasselmans was a Belgian-born French harpist, composer, and pedagogue.-Biography:Hasselmans was born in Liège, Belgium. He composed several dozen original solos for harp, of which his most famous is a concert étude entitled La Source , op. 44...

 at the Paris Conservatory, Tournier won the Second Grand Prize of the Prix de Rome

Prix de Rome

The Prix de Rome was a scholarship for arts students, principally of painting, sculpture, and architecture. It was created, initially for painters and sculptors, in 1663 in France during the reign of Louis XIV. It was an annual bursary for promising artists having proved their talents by...

 in 1909. He succeeded his teacher as professor of harp in 1912, holding that position until 1948, training two generations of harpists from France, the United States, other European countries, and Japan. Tournier composed several dozen solos for harp, a number of chamber works that feature the harp prominently, and a few works for piano and for orchestra.

His wife, Renée Lénars-Tournier (1889–1971), was professor of chromatic harp at the Paris Conservatory from 1912 to 1933. They were married in 1922.

Family life

Born to a family of five brothers and two sisters on January 5, 1879, Tournier grew up around music. His father, Lucien, was a string instrument maker and required all of his sons to play an instrument. Tournier started young and soon became very proficient and entered the Paris Conservatoire at age 16.

Works

• La Roussalka (1909)
• Deux Preludes Romaniques (1909)
• Monde du Feeries (1912)
• Promenade a L'automne (1912)
• Quatre Suites (1897)
• Vers la Source, dans le Bois (1922)
• Sonatine Op. 30 (1924)
• Images 1–3 (1925)
• Images 4 (1932)
• Etude de Concert 'au Matin' (1940)
• L'eternal Reveur (1946)
• Berceuse (1965)
• Soupir (1976)
• Féerie: Prélude et Danse (?)

External links

• Short biography, work list, and CD reviews
• Performance of Sonatine for harp by Emmanuel Ceysson from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
  Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
  The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum or Fenway Court, as the museum was known during Isabella Stewart Gardner's lifetime, is a museum in the Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, located within walking distance of the Museum of Fine Arts and near the Back Bay Fens...
  
   in MP3
  MP3
  MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
  
  format