Honegger, Arthur (1892–1955)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Waters
Keyword(s):  
Francis Poulenc ◽  
Darius Milhaud ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Harmonic Language ◽  
Arthur Honegger ◽  
Acceleration And Deceleration ◽  
Les Six ◽  
French Composers ◽  
Erik Satie ◽  
Symphonic Work

Composer Arthur Honegger was one of a group of six young French composers, known as Les Six, in the forefront of post-WWI Parisian musical modernism. Les Six (Honegger, Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), Georges Auric (1899–1983), Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983), and Louis Durey (1888–1979)) frequently presented their work together. They were championed by author Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) and loosely associated with composer Erik Satie (1866–1925). Contemporary critics noted a seriousness and profundity to Honegger’s music that contrasted with that of the other members. Honegger’s instrumental compositions, such as his chamber and symphonic works, often cultivated large multi-movement formal structures. Several of his oratorios (for orchestra, chorus, and soloists) treated biblical topics. He also wrote operas, songs, music for ballet, and film scores. Early works, such as the 1921 oratorio Le Roi David and the 1923 symphonic work Pacific 231 (which musically depicts the acceleration and deceleration of a steam locomotive) helped seal Honegger’s international reputation as a modernist whose music was nevertheless eclectic and accessible. Much of Honegger’s music is characterized by strong motoric rhythms, use of counterpoint and contrapuntal devices (imitation and fugue), and an inclusive harmonic language that uses tonality, extended tonality, and atonality.

Germaine Tailleferre

Music ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis K. Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Maurice Ravel ◽  
Francis Poulenc ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Darius Milhaud ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
French Music ◽  
Arthur Honegger ◽  
Les Six ◽  
Paris Conservatoire ◽  
The Many

Germaine Tailleferre (b. 1892–d. 1983) was a prolific composer of symphonic, chamber, film, and radio music who participated actively in French and international musical life for more than six decades. Tailleferre is most commonly remembered as the sole female member of Les Six, but her association with that group was relatively brief in the broader context of her career. Displaying early brilliance as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, Tailleferre won all the major prizes in her disciplines—Premier Prix in Harmony, Counterpoint, and Accompaniment—but never had the opportunity to compete for the Premier Prix in composition due to the suspension of the competition during the First World War. After leaving the Conservatoire, she studied with Charles Koechlin and Maurice Ravel. The latter in particular inspired her early efforts to imbue her music with neo-Baroque and neoclassical qualities. Tailleferre’s devotion to Ravel in the early 1920s, and her independence from the more capricious, experimental aesthetics pursued by Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Georges Auric, led her away from the sphere of Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie, who had helped usher Les Six into existence. In her first full-length ballet, Le Marchand d’oiseaux, composed for the Ballets Suédois in 1923, and in her Concerto for Piano commissioned by the Princesse de Polignac in 1924, Tailleferre demonstrated a propensity for pastiche and emulation, combining allusions to J. S. Bach, Chopin, Poulenc, and Stravinsky. From the beginning through the end of her career, many works reveal her attachment to perpetuum mobile rhythms and Bachian counterpoint. Although her music was widely performed in the 1920s and 1930s, and although she continued to earn accolades throughout her life, including one of the first state commissions from the French government (1938), the Prix de l’Académie des Beaux Arts (1973), and the Grand Prix Musical de la Ville de Paris (1978), her writings and her friends’ reminiscences reveal Tailleferre to have been extraordinarily modest. Due in part to her modesty, Tailleferre left behind far less music criticism and autobiographical writing than most other members of Les Six. Indeed, after Louis Durey, who left Les Six in 1921, Tailleferre is the next most meagerly documented member of Les Six, as a comparison between this article and those of her peers will attest. (See the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles “Arthur Honegger”, “Francis Poulenc”, and “Darius Milhaud”.) And those sources that do treat her output focus disproportionately on her interwar works to the exclusion of the many works she produced later in life, including Paris-Magie (1948) and Concerto de la fidelité (1981). But numerous sources touch on her contributions to French music and on her relationships with artists, composers, patrons, impresarios, and others.

Guitar – a Sound Episode in the Output of Les Six Group

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 121-135
Author(s):  
Wojciech Wojtuch
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Francis Poulenc ◽  
Darius Milhaud ◽  
Specific Approach ◽  
French Music ◽  
Les Six ◽  
French Composers

The article aims at presenting the guitar output of the composers who were members of Les Six group. It may trigger further, detailed research into the guitar works of composers for whom this instrument became a mere sound episode in their oeuvre. Four of the six French composers included in this group: Georges Auric, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre dedicated a part of their oeuvre to the guitar literature renascent in the first half of the 20th century. Their interest in the instrument was the result of the activity of the great masters of the time, Andrés Segovia and Ida Presti. It also resulted from their specific approach to creation - among other things, a desire to oppose the previous aesthetics or to write simple and humorous music, in which the guitar proved to be an excellent medium. The article contains an analysis of selected compositions and the genesis of their creation. The analysis also focuses on the role of the guitar in French music throughout the ages and the programmatic ideas of the group known as Les Six.

scholarly journals A New Gloria for Satie's Messe des pauvres

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Erich Schwandt
Keyword(s):  
Darius Milhaud ◽  
Erik Satie ◽  
Contemporary Account

Erik Satie worked on his Messe des pauvres from 1893 to 1895 but never completed it. After Satie's death, Darius Milhaud selected movements from the composer's notebooks and published them in 1929 as the Messe des pauvres for organ and voices. The Mass is missing its Gloria; however, the only contemporary account suggests that the Gloria was in existence in 1895. The object of this article is to propose a new Gloria based on one of Satie's contemporaneous piano préludes. As well, to involve the singers more fully, two very short movements are furnished with Latin texts.

Israeli Folk Music

1994 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
Aaron Copland ◽  
Darius Milhaud ◽  
Arthur Honegger ◽  
Kurt Weill

During the 1930s several of Europe's most distinguished composers received commissions to arrange Hebrew songs collected from early settlers in Israel and circulated on postcards. In this edition, fifteen songs appear in voice and keyboard arrangements by Aaron Copland, Paul Dessau, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Ernst Toch, Stefan Wolpe, and Kurt Weill, making the volume a resource for performer and scholar alike. In addition, ten melodies are presented in facsimiles of the original postcards. An afterword is devoted to the significance of folk-song collecting and to the diverse uses of folk music during the period of nascent Israeli national identity.

Parade

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliet Bellow
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Production Team ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Cabaret Songs ◽  
Erik Satie ◽  
One Act

A one-act ballet on the theme of a fairground sideshow, Parade was produced by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and premiered on May 18, 1917 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. According to Jean Cocteau, the poet who wrote the ballet’s libretto, the impetus for Parade originated in 1912 with Diaghilev’s command, ‘‘Astonish me!’’ To fulfill Diaghilev’s mandate, Cocteau assembled a production team drawn from the Parisian avant-garde: for the score, he recruited the composer Erik Satie, known for experimental piano compositions such as Gymnopédies (1888) and for cabaret songs performed at the Montmartre cabaret Le Chat Noir. In 1916, Cocteau secured the participation of Pablo Picasso, a painter associated with the Cubist movement of the early 1910s, to design the overture curtain, set, and costumes. Working with the choreographer Léonide Massine, this group produced a ballet-pantomime featuring familiar characters from the circus, variety shows, and cinema. Mixing various forms of art and entertainment, Parade used dance to explore the unstable relationship between elite and popular culture.

scholarly journals Phone-Crossed Lovers: Dehumanizing Technology in Cocteau's and Poulenc's La Voix humaine

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-104
Author(s):  
Lynette Miller Gottlieb
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Technological Progress ◽  
Narrative Theory ◽  
Francis Poulenc ◽  
Joint Work ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Negative Side

Forty years after his previous collaboration with his former mentor Jean Cocteau, Francis Poulenc embarked on another joint work with the playwright, the opera La Voix humaine (1958). The sole character is a woman known as Elle, who converses with her former lover on the telephone, a device representative of the negative side of technological progress made during the first few decades of the twentieth century. This study considers the nature of the collaboration between Cocteau and Poulenc, then employs narrative theory to interpret the telephone's power in this drama.

Massine, Léonide (1896–1979)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Straus
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Popular Theater ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Erik Satie

Russian-born Léonide Massine’s career flourished in the cities of Western Europe, where he made his name as a lead dancer and choreographer for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1909–29). Massine’s choreographic development coincided with and helped to define the Ballets Russes’s modernist period. As Diaghilev’s protégé, Massine absorbed principles of Cubism and Futurism, consequently developing an angular, distorted movement style, heralded for its intensity and polyrhythmic complexity, along with its satiric and cinematic elements. Massine’s Parade (1917), in collaboration with Pablo Picasso (decor and costumes), Erik Satie (music), and Jean Cocteau (libretto), is recognized as a landmark of ballet modernism. Like other modernists, Massine incorporated national and folk material (commedia dell’arte to flamenco) and popular theater forms (including film) as tools for creative innovation. Following his departure from the Ballets Russes, Massine became interested in formalism and abstraction, which he expressed in a series of symphonic ballets. The most recognized dance artist of the 1920s and 1930s, Massine’s magnificent presence as a performer, even an aging one, can be seen in the film The Red Shoes (1947).

Post-War and Post-Apollinaire

Georges Auric ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Colin Roust
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Louis Aragon ◽  
Tristan Tzara ◽  
Philippe Soupault ◽  
Les Six ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One

After World War I, Auric’s many friendships placed him in a unique position in the Parisian avant-garde. On the one hand, he was alongside Louis Aragon, André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Tristan Tzara for the rise and fall of Paris dada. On the other, he was a member of Les Six, the group of composers led by Jean Cocteau who came to represent Parisian art music in the 1920s. Throughout the feuds between the dadaists and Cocteau, Auric preserved his friendships and functioned as an ambassador of sorts between rival avant-garde groups. In the meantime, his scores for Cocteau’s Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel (with the rest of Les Six) and Molière’s Les fâcheux would lead to bigger and better opportunities in the mid-1920s.

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