"Shameless plugs" are more than allowed, Roly - they're welcome. It's the shameful ones that get binned.
Best wishes for the performance.
Best wishes for the performance.
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I'm sure nobody on this forum will object, Rolmill; I'm always plugging jazz gigs I am about to attend, then reporting on them afterwards, and no one pays the blindest bit of attention!Originally posted by Rolmill View Post
Thanks though for reminding me - I must get on with my introductions here: plenty of opportunity is presented by the weather keeping me indoors!Comment
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Jean Cartan (1906-1932) died tragically young from tuberculosis. He had studied with Dukas alongside Messiaen and Duruflé at the Paris Conservatoire in the mid to late 1920s, but followed a Neo-classical aesthetic influenced as much by Roussel, who strongly championed him, as by Stravinsky, as is well illustrated in the attractive diminutive Introduction & Allegro for oboe, horn, clarinet and piano of 1928 below. At one and the same time, in common with many of his contemporaries, one can speak sharing a common immediatly identifiable aesthetic outlook turned to personal ends specific to himself:
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Also born in 1906 and an alumnus of the Paris Conservatoire, where he would become a professor of chamber music, Pierre Capdevielle, who lived untl 1969, shared Roussel's influence with Jean Cartan, but his was a very different spirit, inspired by other concerns. He was for many years France's representative at the prestigious ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music), and in 1961 was made a Chevalier of the order of the Légion d'Honneur. Some idea of his stylistic breadth can be sampled from the tumultuous late-ish piano and orchestral Concerto del Dispetto (1959) - spoiler: this is poor audio quality:
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Jacques Chailley (1910 - 1999) lived a particularly rich musical life - one too detailed to go into in depth here; but from Wiki we find out that he studied composition in the round with Nadia Boulanger and Claude Delvincourt, and subsequently conducting with Pierre Monteux, Willem Mengelberg and Bruno Walter, became a musicologist specialising in Mediaeval music, co-founding a theatre group devoted to antique plays, and in his field elucidating the evolution of musical language from the Baroque to the Romantic. Controversy persists over allegations of role in the blocking of Jewish students from entering the Paris Conservatory in 1942 while under his charge, but Chailley is szaid to have protected his students from press-ganging into work for the Nazis, was involved in the CP-led Resistance against the Nazi occupation, alongside a number of fellow composers, and escaped POW imprisonment. Further prestigious official posts fell to him during the remainder of his life.
Chailley's compostional background in Ravel and Roussel was refracted through a lifelong passion for Mediaeval music, though he himself can best be described as Neo-Romantic. Here is his triumphant First Symphony of 1945:
http://www,youtube.com/watch?v=-aVRLCyPRWoLast edited by Serial_Apologist; 28-10-19, 18:39.Comment
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Chailley's closeness to the Jeune France group of composers reacting against the prevalent Satie/Stravinsky aesthetic in the late 1930s chimed with André Jolivet's acknowledgement of that first symphony's first movement's influence over his first symphony. Growing awareness of Jolivet's importance to French modern music in Britain disqualifies him from the thread discussion, as also Daniel Lesur; not so the remaining founder member of La Jeune France, Yves Baudrier (1906 - 1988), whose name in the concert-going public's mind has it seems been eclipsed by his short-lived reputation as film composer. His short tone poem Le grand voilier was composed in 1939:
Possibly Baudrier's most celebrated score was that for the gripping Résistance film LaBataille du Rail, of 1944
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Elsa Barraine (1910 - 1999) is the one woman composer included in this résumé. She studied composition under Dukas at the Conservatoire, achieving First Prize there in harmony at age 15. At 19 she won the Prix de Rome for a cantata, La vierge guerrière, only the fourth woman composer to do so since the competition's inception in 1803, and seems to have garnered sexist put-downs for her music not being "feminine" enough, forcefully countered by her championing issues of sexuality and gender in her music and chosen subjects, among them ballet music on Colette's Claudine à l'école (1950). Barraine, of Jewish heritage, was fully involved in French musicians' resistence to the Nazi occupation in WWII through the Front National des Musiciens, having already composed an anti-fascist symphonic poem titled Pogromes in 1933. The style of her music, with the exception of a single work written using serialism - Musique rituelle (1967) for organ, gongs and xylorimba inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, her music is described as tonal with a strong personal sense of harmonic colour, and if the linked piece below, Crepescules & Fanfare for horn and piano, written in 1936, is characteristic, one senses anticipations of Henri Dutilleux:
A symphony is also available on youtube.Comment
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Jean-Luis Martinet (1912 - 2010), the last composer of the generation under consideration for mention, studied under Messiaen; he is the oldest composer of a group with strong left-wing political inclinations in the late 1930s. Martinet's relationship to the up-and-coming school of Boulez and Barraqué is an interesting and paradoxical one. In 1959 Claude Rostan wrote:
"J.I. Martinet, a late convert to atonality, had previouisly undergone the influence of Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartók and Messiaen (Orphée, La Trilogie des Promethées, Sept Poèmes de Rene Char). He then made his debut in twelve-note music with some remarkable pieces for string quartet which attracted a lot of attention. Here he seemed to have found himself more effectively than ever before. Then suddenly, in the course of the last two years , he turned to the kind of music derived from the so-called 'progressist' aesthetic recommended by the official Soviet theoreticians - that is to say, 'music that can easily be understood by the masses'". (Rostand, C, 1960 Trends and Tendencies in Contemporary French Music, in Twentieth century Music: A Symposium, Ed Rollo Myers, Calder, London, P.153).
Here are two illustrative examples; firstly the hyper-exotic Orphée, from a pre-serial 1944/45:
and from the Mouvement Symphonique No 1, the first example of the post-serial turnaround: listeners may detect echoes of Panufnik, Lutoslawsky or Bacewicz in the vigorous strings writing of the main part, and what one can only describe as wholesale borrowings from the conclusion of Honegger's Liturgique, presented in the spirit of a transcendental Messiaen organ coda:
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Three composers remain to be covered - I shall try and finish this project tomorrow.Comment
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Many thanks, S_A - looking forward to investigating the work of these composers.
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Apologies if this has been covered above but Samazeuilh's string quartet is a stunner... Sounds a bit like Debussy's work in the same genre. You'd never say that this was by an almost unknown composer...
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Thanks, mathias. Gustave Samazeuilh falls rather before the period I had in mind for this thread, but not having previously heard of him I am grateful for your mentioning him, and I will investigate sometime.Originally posted by mathias broucek View PostComment
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And thanks in return for the appreciation ferney. I find the music of that particular sub-generation of French music particularly rich and potentially enduring, and given the accessibility of most of it to the lover of, let's say, Prokofiev or Martinu, I find it surprising that Radio 3 has overlooked most of these composers for as long as I can remember.Originally posted by ferneyhoughgeliebte View PostMany thanks, S_A - looking forward to investigating the work of these composers.Comment
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Of Polish descent, the music of Marcel Landowski (1915 - 1999) lies firmly within what might be described as a post-Rousselian French symphonic tradition, and in style is close to Honegger, who recognised his abilities and gave encouragement from the start of Landowski's compositional career. As such he continues a lineage that withstood the qualitative aesthetic shift represented by Messiaen's serially-orientated students - if not by Messiaen himself, whom they respected - and, as Honegger pupil Harry Halbreich has said, voiced its criticism of the new trends towards abstraction in no uncertain terms. Inspired by religious subjects, Landowski did not share Honegger's growing scepticism. The symphonies available on youtube show the evolution of thought: here are the first and third, respectively from 1949 and 1964:
How sad that music of such sturdiness, grace and beauty should not be known about!Comment
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Just started my first subscription to a thread here - this looks really interesting.Comment
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