Les Six: The French Composers

During the 1920s many French composers reacted against the Wagnerian influences of the late nineteenth century, the impressionism of Debussy, and the dominating atmosphere of the circle round César Franck, and turned instead to the everyday world – the circus, the music hall, the fairground and jazz – for inspiration. The two French ballet scores presented here combine many of these elements and being collaborative efforts, provide a unique cross-section of the work of a dozen composers – some well-known, others barely mentioned in textbooks on the period……..

'Les Six' (so named in 1920 by critic Henri Collet) hit the classical music scene with almost the same outrageous force with which the punk movement slammed into popular music in the 1970s and early '80s. It consisted of a group of six composers working in France: Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Germaine Tailleferre and Louis Durey. Their music was largely a reaction against Impressionism and Wagnerism and incorporated the ideas of Satie and Cocteau with the popular styles of the time: French vaudeville, American jazz and café music.

This collection of chamber works by French female composers helps to consolidate our understanding of how important these musicians were to French culture during the period 1860-1960. Some of these names will be more familiar to the public than others, Germaine Tailleferre being perhaps the best known, mostly for her membership of Les Six. Others ought to be far more renowned than they are now.