Milhaud divided his time between homes in France and the U.S. He spent a great deal of time absorbing the music of Harlem before writing this strikingly sensual ballet. Jazz elements have worked their way into a lot of twentieth-century music, but rarely as completely as here.

Milhaud was a member of a French group of composers called "Les Six", who took as their mentor the iconoclastic, puckish composer Erik Satie. Three of these, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, and Milhaud developed into fairly well-known composers. There's a perhaps fifty-year lag between the death of a composer and an objective assessment of his work. (It's a simple test--after 50 years, do people still want to listen to it?) My guess is that of these three, Poulenc has the best shot at immortality, Honegger the weakest. I hope Milhaud makes it, if only for this and his orchestral Suite Provençale.

Incidental music for a comic play, in 6 sections:

Introduction (1:11)
Cortege (5:03)
Nocturne (2:16)
Valse (2:48)
Parade (1:48)
Finale (1:48)

Circus screamers, spoofs of such works as Mendelssohn's Wedding March--this is a wonderful counter to those who think classical music has to be serious, and, I think, a great piece to play for kids.

A great deal of classical music incorporates folk melodies and dances, but it's only in this century that the music of Latin America (here, Argentina) has been widely heard.

I fell in love with the riveting, repetitive Estancia from having heard it on the radio.

Rachmaninoff was a dim-witted composer and pianist who never clicked to the idea that as he was maturing into adulthood the century changed. His music is overblown, sentimental pap, and the arbiters of musical taste have been trying to banish him for close to a century now. Even when Rachmaninoff tried to sound modern, he was 50 years behind. At the same time Satie was preaching the virtues of simplicity, Schoenberg was developing a new musical scale, and Ives was experimenting with atonality and structure-destroying rhythms, Rachmaninoff was writing this turkey for nostalgia freaks

And, somehow, this symphony survives.

The Romantic's View: I've shown this section of the description to two people now, both of whom have taken the remarks on Rachmaninoff straight. My assumption was that once you heard that beautiful Adagio, you'd realize that I was being sarcastic--not about Rachmaninoff, but about the intellectuals who keep trying to bury him (as they keep trying to bury Brahms and Tchaikovsky). That diatribe summarizes things I've read about Rachmaninoff all my life (see the MED's copy of the Grove Dictionary's entry for Rakmaninov for remarks very close to those above) and merely shows how far from the essence of their subject these historians can get. The people for whom music is written want music that moves, excites, soothes, amuses, or even gives them a good scare, and as long as it satisfies these cravings, they don't care when or how it was written. And since music is the one art capable of bypassing the intellect entirely, the intellectuals' attempts to kill such appealing music are foredoomed.

P.P.S. Film historians are more realistic. Having failed to convince the public that Casablanca is a bad movie, they're now busy trying to explain its appeal.

To give you roughly comparable pieces, I've been trying to come up with complete works that run 10-15 minutes. The sound people associate with Rachmaninoff, however, is most clearly heard in this symphony and in his long works for piano and orchestra, and so I've excerpted this selection from a four-movement symphony. You can excerpt a movement or two from a ballet without destroying its continuity, but I hate having to excerpt from this symphony (it's nearly an hour in length).

A lot of twentieth-century music looks back to the Renaissance, Baroque and Classical periods for inspiration, sometimes recasting old tunes in new idioms, sometimes freshening them up to bring them to the attention of a modern audience, and sometimes simply using their style to pay homage to the past. The music Respighi reworked for his Ancient Dances and Airs for Lute, Prokofiev's original Classical Symphony (homage to Haydn and Mozart), and the British music writer Philip Heseltine's (his compositions sold better when he used the alias Peter Warlock!) use of sixteenth-century dance tunes all illustrate the antiquarian impulse in twentieth-century music.

Thoinot Arbeau's 16th-century dance treatise (which Heseltine edited and from which he took these tunes) was cast as a dialogue between Arbeau and his student, Capriol. Hence the name of this suite. The dances are:

Basse-Danse (1:26)
Pavane (2:08)
Tordion (1:00)
Bransles (1:51)
Pieds-en-l'air (2:29)
Mattachins (1:07)

Pieds-en-l'air is a lovely, soothing "lullaby for adults"; Mattachins is a dance for armed and armored swordsmen. Pavanes are often used in music--they're rather sober, formal dances.

Ireland wrote the Downland Suite as a suite for brass band (for a 1932 competition). This gentle minuet sounds appalling when played by brass (it sounds like Fantasia's hippos look). Fortunately, Ireland rewrote it for strings.

The terror of concert-goers, champion of dissonance, pianist with fingers of steel? Or maybe Haydn in an adventuresome mood. If Prokofiev had turned his talents to art forgery, museums would still be sorting things out.

The symphony's four movements:
Allegro (4:24) "Spritely"
Larghetto (4:08) "A bit slow"
Gavotte; Non troppo allegro (1:28) "Not too fast" (The gavotte was a dance)
Finale; Molto vivace (4:01) "Finale; real lively!"

This is a beautiful imitation of classical symphonies, even down to the length (the modern symphony is rarely less than 40 minutes long and can last over an hour; up to mid-Mozart, symphonies were quite short). Prokofiev really belongs (and will duly reappear) in another twentieth-century segment (featuring the intimidating side of the 20th-century!), but this popular work had to be included here.