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Musical Terms (3)

• Les Six English
  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.
  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.
• Milhaud and Brazil English
  Milhaud's two years in Brazil (1917–1919), serving as secretary to Paul Claudel at the French Legation in Rio de Janeiro, transformed his compositional language. He encountered the choro (a Brazilian popular street music), the maxixe (a syncopated dance form), and the beginnings of the samba, and recognised in these traditions a rhythmic vitality and a particular kind of popular lyricism that immediately attracted him. The twelve Saudades do Brasil are the most direct memorial of this experience: each piece evokes a specific place in Rio, and the saudade — the Portuguese term for a melancholic longing for what is absent — gives the suite its emotional keynote. The Brazilian influence persisted throughout Milhaud's career: the Brazileira from Scaramouche (1937) and much of the rhythmic character of his mature piano writing shows its continuing presence.
  Brazilian dance rhythms require a different physical engagement from European classical rhythms: the 2/4 should have a sway and a forward lean rather than the vertical bounce of a march or the rotary feel of a waltz. Listen to actual samba and choro recordings before learning the Saudades — the body should know the rhythm before the fingers do. The bitonality of the Saudades is inseparable from their Brazilian character: it is Milhaud's way of 'Frenchifying' these rhythms, adding a European harmonic dimension without losing the Brazilian rhythmic essence.
• Polytonality English
  Polytonality — the simultaneous use of two or more different keys — is Darius Milhaud's most distinctive compositional fingerprint and one of the defining innovations of early 20th-century music. Milhaud discovered the technique around 1914 and used it consistently throughout his career. In the Saudades do Brasil, it typically takes the form of bitonality: the right hand plays in one key and the left hand in another, creating a shimmering, dissonant-yet-tonal harmonic surface that is both modern and immediately accessible. The effect ranges from gently pungent (as in Corcovado, which uses superimposed triads) to vigorously abrasive (as in some of the Rag-Caprices). Milhaud argued that polytonality does not destroy the sense of individual tonalities but enriches it: each key retains its own character while combining with the other to produce a colour that neither could achieve alone. The technique influenced Bartók, Britten, and many others.
  When playing polytonal Milhaud, resist the temptation to hear the dissonances as errors or blurrings of tonality. Each hand has its own tonal logic, and the effect is cleanest when both are played with conviction in their respective keys. In the Saudades, the two-hand independence needed is similar to that of contrapuntal Bach but with a very different harmonic result. The pungency of the bitonality should be accepted as an expressive resource rather than smoothed over by pedal blurring. Practise each hand alone first to establish the individual tonal identity before combining them.