Numbers

Les Six

• Auric, Georges
• Durey, Louis
• Honegger, Arthur
• Milhaud, Darius
• Poulenc, Francis
• Tailleferre, Germaine

"Les Six" were a group of French composers in the early part of the 20th Century.

How It's Used

"THE TUNESMITHS (Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen) -- Old values: Tinsel makers unless they went classical. New values: The real Les Six.

"One of the persistent dreams of 20th-century art music was the creation of non-art music, music that would fit right into everyday life. Satie, the godfather of the French composers known as Les Six, called it 'musique d'ameublement,' furniture music, wallpaper music. Hindemith called it 'Gebrauchsmusik,' useful music. Most of Les Six (including Poulenc and Milhaud) also pursued this goal, but they were doomed to failure. No matter how hard they tried to produce non-art, it came out as art music, for better or worse. We listen to Satie's furniture music, even though we know we are not supposed to, and Poulenc's intentional banalities are far too elegant and cleverly contrived to remain banal. Hindemith's useful music has turned out to be pretty useless, except for violists."

"Every Saturday night for two years, at the beginning of the 20s in Paris, a litttle restaurant at the top of the Rue Blanche would always be full. The customers all arrived together, already merry from the cocktails they had been drinking; later, this crowd of musicians, painters and poets would leave for Montmartre fair and amuse themselves among the carousels, shooting galleries and gambling games. There was a mechanical organ that blared out all the latest tunes from the music hall, tunes that would sometimes find their way into the music of the six composers at the heart of the group.

"The composers were known as Les Six, but they had little in common musically. The main thing was that they were friends. They were Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honneger, Georges Auric, Germaine Tailleferre and Louis Durey. Poulenc is the only one who is really well known now; Milhaud and Honneger rather less so. Auric, who in the 20s wrote three ballets, including Les Matelots for the Ballets Russes, went on to write numerous film scores. Five of them were for Jean Cocteau movies, including the bewitching La Belle et La Bete. Tailleferre and Durey are, frankly, obscure."

"Love songs all, André Jolivet's Epithalame, Jean Yves Daniel-Lesur's Le Cantique des cantiques and Olivier Messiaen's Cinq rechants were originally commissioned by L'ensemble Vocale Marcel Couraud, a virtuoso vocal ensemble based in France in the middle years of the 20th century. At the time these three spiritually minded composers were founding members of a group known as La Jeune France, a response to that more urbane collective of French composers, Les Six. This is exotic, ecstatic, erotic music, difficult and intricate, not repertoire one expects a group that specializes in early music to tackle."

"Ross [in his book All the Rest Is Noise] relocates some of the key musical developments of the 20th century to the United States. Aaron Copland's flirtation with 1930s socialism is the fascinating flip side of Dmtiri Shostakovich's tussles with Stalin. While Bartok was obsessively collating the Hungarian folk, Charles Ives was merging gospel hymns into Three Places in New England. And as the hipster members of Les Six moved their music into the jazz and cabaret clubs of 1920s Paris, so Duke Ellington was taking the form in the other direction - to Carnegie Hall, for Black, Brown and Beige, his 'swing symphony'."

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