Stlukesguild

Over the past week I have repeatedly been listening... with great enthusiasm I might add... to the music of a recent discovery (for me): Charles Koechlin. Koechlin was a French composer (November 27, 1867–December 31, 1950) whose music was quite individual... even eclectic... although he is commonly placed among the French Impressionists. It is with a certain degree of disbelief that I first listened to this composer... and then sought out more and more by him... especially when one considers my admiration for French music of the period: Ravel, Debussy, Fauré, Satie, Reynaldo Hahn, and many others have been familiar to me for quite some time. But I had never even heard of Koechlin... and this is all the more surprising when I began to look at his biography.



Koechlin studied at the Paris Conservatoire. His teachers included Massenet, with whom he studied composition, and his fellow students included a number who would soon rank among the leading figures of French Modernist music: George Enescu, Reynaldo Hahn, Henri Rabaud and Florent Schmitt. He continued his studies as a pupil of pupil of Gabriel Fauré, where his fellow-pupils now included Ravel and Jean Roger-Ducasse. Fauré was a major influence on Koechlin; in fact Koechlin wrote the first Fauré biography in 1927 and orchestrated the popular suite from Fauré's Pelléas et Melisande. Ravel spoke of Koechlin.

His musical education occurred during of great change and innovation in music. As Koechlin himself would recall, "There were... strange insights, lie windows opening into the mystery of sounds, or like glimpses into that great virgin forest: the Music of the Future." The whole generation including not only Stravinsky and the Viennese circle of Mahler and Schoenberg and Berg, but also the French Impressionists were most profoundly shaken by the experience of one composer: Richard Wagner... and nothing inspired them as much as his complex, unresolved dissonances and virtual polytonalities (or the use of more than one key simultaneously) of his brilliant opera, Tristan und Isolde. The French composer who seemingly grasped the potential of Wagner's innovations most profoundly was, as Koechlin notes, "a strange, mysterious, fellow composer whom Florent Schmidt... praised to the skies: Claude Debussy. To tell the truth, I knew almost nothing of him while I was a pupil... but this 'nothing' was quite a bit. Sometimes a single bar by a colleague of genius is enough to open the door to enchanted gardens, where we might gather other flowers than his."

Koechlin's music is quite varied in genre and style. There are elements of the lush shifting of keys to be found in the classic examples of Impressionism... especially of Debussy. At times there are elements of atonality and even serialism (inspired by Schoenberg and his followers)... but in general, Koechlin is too much of a classicist... deeply admiring of Faure and Chopin... to employ dissonant "noises" to too vulgar an extreme. Inspired by nature, the the Middle-East and Asia (some of his works sound almost Japanese), Hollywood, films, and even jazz, there are moments when Koechlin recalls an American composer such as Copland and other moments when he is as complex and abstract as Bach.

Koechlin composed symphonies and symphonic poems (the most famous forming part of a composition inspired by Kipling's Jungle Book) and a number of other symphonic compositions. He also composed works for chorus and a body of songs, which have only recently begun to be discovered and appreciated as among the finest examples of Modern French song. However, it seems his most admired works are to be found among his many compositions for solo instrument (piano, flute, clarinet, etc...) or small chamber groups.

His exquisite works for solo piano are worthy to stand alongside of those of Debussy and Ravel. The pieces are marvelously poetic and evocative:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofUKzA9Ttqk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG3BJ...eature=related

The composer was also a master of works for clarinet, saxophone, and flute:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBAfgBVLz_8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBOjl...eature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ovi2oUTMryc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akYuKpui59M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQgi8...eature=related