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(Är-tür’ Ô-ne-gâr’) 1892–1955 Swiss composer Honegger studied in Paris, and was soon bracketed with five French contemporaries as ‘Les Six’, but his idiom was tougher and less Gallic than theirs. He made his name with a powerful, neo-Handelian scenic cantata Le roi David (‘King David’; first performed at an outdoor festival in Switzerland, 1921). He wrote orchestral works ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Modern Era

, this monophonic instrument was placed on a table. The right hand turned a knob controlling the pitch of an oscillator, while the left hand controlled volume and timbre. Honegger wrote for four dynaphones and a piano in his ballet score Roses de metal; despite his interest, Varèse himself never collaborated with Bertrand in developing new electronic instruments. In 1931 ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Modern Era

sliding mechanism for glissando, and a range of seven octaves. It is probably best known for its appearance in Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie and Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine. Honegger, who wrote for it in Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, recommended that it should replace the double bassoon! Another electronic keyboard was developed by Brune Helberger: a first ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

in 1965. Zimmermann travelled outside Germany just once, when he was sent to France during the war. Here, he familiarized himself with the musical scores of Stravinsky, Honegger, Poulenc and Milhaud. On his return in 1942 he decided to study traditional composition with Jarnach, a former pupil of Busoni, but by 1950 he was using ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

familiar from many film and TV soundtracks, including as the theme tune of the 1950s science-fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment. Introduction | Modern Era | Classical Personalities | Arthur Honegger | Modern Era | Classical ...

• Personalities
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• Composer
• Contemporary Classical

(Yan’-nis Ze-na’-kis) 1922–2001 French/Greek composer Xenakis took up the formal study of music late, having lessons with Honegger, Milhaud and Messiaen in Paris in the early 1950s. He developed a technique in which masses of sound were manipulated according to laws of mathematical probability. This can be clearly heard in the accumulation of overlapping string glissandos in Metastasis (1954), ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(Zhak E-bâr’) 1890–1962 French composer Ibert won the coveted Prix de Rome, and shocked those who awarded it with the non-academic levity of the pieces he wrote in Rome. His best-known work is the uproarious Divertissement (1930), but it has distracted attention from an accomplished opera (L’Aiglon, ‘The Young Eagle’, 1937, written in collaboration with Honegger), some fine ...

• Classical
• Modern Era

Cocteau became occasionally involved with a loosely knit group of composers known as ‘Les Six’. Though generalizing about these six very different composers (Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Germaine Tailleferre, Louis Durey and Georges Auric) is difficult, most of them experimented in the 1920s with popular musical styles either borrowed from the newly imported American ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Modern Era

generation, notably a group of French composers dubbed ‘Les Six’ by the critic Paul Collaer in analogy to the Russian Five. The six composers, Poulenc, Milhaud, Honegger, Auric, Tailleferre and Durey, enjoyed but a brief collective identity, giving just a handful of concerts together and collaborating as an entire group on only two ...