THE GROUP OF SIX (“LES SIX”)

The musical culture of the 20th century’s France was substantially formed by a group of six French composers dubbed by music critic Henry Collet the creative group of “Les Six” (1917 -1922).The group was comprised of six innovative composers: Louis Durey, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre. They proclaimed their desire to stand up for the national peculiarity of the musical language and fight against foreign trends (for instance Schoenberg’s atonality). Though they were different in their creative developments, one distinguishing feature made them a unity – their strive for novelty and simplicity at the same time.

The music by Stravinsky along with new timbres and rhythms of the American jazz had a profound impact on them. All members of “The Group of Six” took a great interest in the urbanism and constructivism (Honegger’s Pacific, Milhaud’s Les Machines Agricoles). This explains the desire to find images for their creations in the sounds of the modern city as well as in the new musical forms. Nevertheless, each of them could boast his own original style. Despite sharing the same ideas, in their creative work they often moved in the opposite directions. Durey, for instance, seceded from the group and pursued a career of a public figure, while Honegger, Milhaud and Poulenc continued to work successfully in the field of music.

The young men were devoted to one basic principle i.e. to the creation of works possessing a clear musical language, lacking affectedness, based on real life with all its simplicity.