Pastorale

Instrumentation

Musical Terms (3)

• L'Album des Six French
  A 1920 collaborative piano album containing one piece by each of Les Six, conceived by Jean Cocteau. Tailleferre's contribution was her Pastorale, one of her most-performed early piano works.
  Tailleferre's Pastorale from the Album is short, light, and pastoral in the French sense — outdoor, sunlit, untroubled. The touch should be delicate and the phrases gently shaped, without sentimentality.
• Les Six French
  A group of six French composers working in Paris in the early 1920s: Tailleferre, Poulenc, Milhaud, Honegger, Auric, and Durey. Championed by critic Henri Collet and writer Jean Cocteau, they reacted against Wagnerian Romanticism and Debussy-style Impressionism in favour of wit, economy, and clarity.
  Music by Les Six tends to favour dry wit over lush sentiment, transparent textures over thick harmony, and rhythmic precision over expressive rubato. Resist over-pedalling and exaggerated dynamics.
• néo-classique français French
  French neo-classicism: a 1920s aesthetic reaction against late Romanticism, drawing on 18th-century clarity, Satie-influenced simplicity, and a characteristically French wit and economy of means.
  Study Couperin and Rameau alongside Tailleferre. The elegant ornaments, clean textures, and dance rhythms of French Baroque keyboard music are close ancestors of her late neo-classical piano writing.