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Les Six
From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist
Les Six is the name of a group of six composers, five Frenchmen and a Swiss, who lived and worked in Montparnasse in Paris. The name comes from two articles that the critic and composer Henri Collet wrote in Comœdia in 1920. The members were Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and Germaine Tailleferre. Their music is often seen as a neoclassical reaction to both Wagner and Impressionism.
Music and breakthrough
The group grew out of the concerts that the writer Blaise Cendrars and the painter Moïse Kisling organised in 1917, when many theatres were closed because of the war. Milhaud later said that Collet chose the six names completely arbitrarily, because the composers knew one another and appeared on the same programmes. Poulenc said that their music was too different for a shared aesthetic: Honegger aligned himself with German Romanticism, Auric and Poulenc followed Jean Cocteau, and they disagreed about Satie, whom Auric, Milhaud and Poulenc admired. Cocteau was eager to become the leader of a musical avant-garde. Together they frequented the bar Le Bœuf sur le toit, named after Milhaud's ballet. The collaborative work Les mariés de la tour Eiffel comes from this circle.
Influence
The group never remained a bloc, but its name stands for a Parisian atmosphere of playful, clear and sometimes ironic music between the world wars. In that circle classical composers mingled with cabaret, jazz and variété.
Listening
Discography
Studio albums
- ?Les mariés de la tour Eiffel
In School of Rock
The chapters, maps and magazine stories of School of Rock are currently available in Dutch only.
- The Dream Factory: Film Reel 1NL Reader
- The Dream Factory: Film Reel 3NL Reader
- After Hours: Session 2NL Reader
Mentioned in other articles
- French poetic realism and Les Six Genre
Georges Auric, a member of the composers' group Les Six, wrote the music for Jean Cocteau's La belle et la bête (1946).