Les Six
Definition
Les Six was a loose association of six young French composers — Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Louis Durey, and Germaine Tailleferre — who were grouped together by the critic Henri Collet in 1920, following an essay that drew an analogy with the Russian Mighty Five. The group never had a common manifesto or style, but they shared certain aesthetic sympathies: a preference for clarity, economy, and wit over the density and grandeur of late Romanticism; an interest in popular music (music-hall, jazz, cabaret) as raw material for art music; and the influence of the poet Jean Cocteau and the composer Erik Satie, whose Gymnopédies and iconoclastic aesthetic pointed away from Wagnerian and Debussyan richness toward a leaner, more ironic manner. Milhaud was the most prolific and harmonically adventurous of the six; Poulenc the most lyrical and the most enduringly popular.
Interpretive Guidance
Understanding Les Six as a cultural and aesthetic movement rather than a stylistic school helps clarify what Milhaud is doing in the Saudades and the Rag-Caprices. The embrace of popular and vernacular rhythms — the Brazilian samba, the American ragtime, the French music-hall tune — is not superficial appropriation but a principled aesthetic stance: an insistence that the vitality of popular music belongs in the concert hall. Playing Milhaud with too much Romantic heaviness or interpretive portentousness misrepresents this fundamental lightness.