Les Six
“Group of Six” – association of six young French composers formed in Paris in 1918.
What it means
Les Six, the “Group of Six,” was an association of six young French composers who came together in Paris around 1918. They were Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre. The name goes back to a newspaper article by the critic Henri Collet of 1920.
Musical use
The group turned against the heaviness of late Romanticism and the tone-color aesthetic of Impressionism and sought a clear, plain, and witty tone. Intellectual stimulus came from Erik Satie and the poet Jean Cocteau, whose text Le Coq et l'Arlequin (1918) formulated the program of a simple, down-to-earth art. The music of the Six takes up elements of jazz, music hall, circus, and folk song. It was never a fixed, uniform school; the members soon went their own ways.
Les Six should be distinguished from Impressionism, against which they turned, and from the Second Viennese School, which pursued an entirely different, atonal direction. Neoclassicism, which pursues similar aims of clarity, is also a broader current that the group embraced only in part.
Performance practice
Listen to works of the Six with an eye to lightness and wit: clear lines, simple harmony, surprising turns. Play them with precise articulation and without Romantic indulgence, since the dry, ironic tone belongs to the music.