Summary: <br> <a href="https://d3fr1q02b1tb0i.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/07085115/Francis-Poulenc-1899-1963.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a>Frances Poulenc (1899-1963)<br> <br> <br> <br> We celebrate the birth – on January 7, 1899, 120 years ago today – of the French composer and pianist Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc. Long considered a compositional lightweight – a composer for whom (heaven forbid!) traditional tonality, attractive melody and musical charm assumed pride of compositional place – Poulenc’s music was routinely rejected by the academy and by the modernists that dominated the musical scene in the years after the end of World War II in 1945.<br> <br> <br> <br> <a href="https://d3fr1q02b1tb0i.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/07085152/Les-Six-at-the-Eiffel-Tower-in-1921.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a>Les Six at the Eiffel Tower in 1921: left-to-right Germaine Tailleferre, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, the artist Jean Cocteau, and Georges Auric (missing: Louis Durey)<br> <br> <br> <br> Over the last 40 years, my personal opinion of Poulenc’s music has traversed a full 180 degrees. As a young, academy-trained composer working in the 1970s, I adopted my teachers’ various prejudices without question. Among other things, this meant that with the exception of the music of Claude Debussy and Pierre Boulez, pretty much all French music going back to the seventeenth century was considered beneath contempt, and none more so than that of the loose group of Gallic compositional confectioners known as “les six Français et M. Satie” – “The Six French [composers] and Mister Satie”: Georges Auric (1899–1983), Louis Durey (1888–1979), Arthur Honegger (1892–1955), Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), Poulenc (1899–1963), Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983), and the group’s spiritual mentor, Erik Satie (1866-1925).<br> <br> <br> <br> Erik Satie<br> <br> <br> <br> We consider. One of the primary reasons we go away to college at 18 is to escape from our parents and, having done so, to begin the process of molding our own adult personalities. But escaping from the opinions and biases of our undergraduate (and graduate school) teachers is a whole different story. In a field like music, where one’s education is dominated by extremely intense, one-on-one relationships with our primary teachers, the opinions and biases of those teachers are often hard-wired into us: they become intrinsic elements of our own psyches, “givens” we carry around with us for the rest of our lives. Which is why – for example – the prejudice against French music continues to dominate American music departments, music departments founded by German-trained composers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, departments in which an anti-French prejudice has been handed down like a treasured heirloom from generation to generation. <br> <br> <br> <br> My “education” was no different, though thankfully, while it has taken me a while, I have become deeply enamored of most French music, with the notable exception of the music of the previously mentioned Monsieur Boulez. <br> <br> <br> <br> Which brings me back to the birthday boy, Frances Poulenc. In my advancing age, I find his music utterly delightful, a musical reminder that the first half of the twentieth century was not only about death, depravity, and cultural destruction. It’s not that his music is escapist or culturally irrelevant; it is clearly the work of a twentieth century artist. Rather, it is the work of a self-taught-cum-compositional virtuoso who chooses to dwell on the lighter, more brilliant side of human experience and expression, a composer unwilling to abandon such traditional Western musical constructs as thematic melody and tonal centricity.<br> <br> <br> <br> Indulge me for a moment, because I just used a term that must first be defined and then applied...
