These young composers did not band together like the “Russian Five,” but a French critic called them “The Six,” and the name stuck! They were not united by oneness of purpose or by ideal, they just happened to be friends and their music was often presented on the same programs and Erik Satie “who had been throughout thirty-five years the instigator of all audacity, the manager of all impudence” was their confidential adviser. The six are Germaine Tailleferre who played her piano concerto in America (1925) and has written two charming ballets; Louis Durey (1888); Georges Auric (1899), and François Poulenc (1899), both of whom have written ballets; Darius Milhaud (1892) and Arthur Honegger (1892).
Of these, Milhaud and Honegger are by far the most important. Milhaud has written ballets, chamber music and orchestral works with great fluency, often showing fine gifts and flashes of beauty. Born into this age of storm and stress, Milhaud has written brutally, but he is at heart a romantic composer and will probably change as we get further away from the war.
Honegger has had a sensational success with a work in oratorio form, Le Roi David (King David), and with a tone poem, Pacific—231, which is a type of locomotive. Honegger has broken from the Group, and has gone his own independent way, writing beautiful songs, orchestral and chamber music, and giving promise of being one of the most important composers of the period.
There are many other young French composers showing the different tendencies of the day, some are writing in classic form, some in romantic, but all are very independent. Some have wiped out the past and are trying to build anew, not realizing that they are building on sand, for there can be no skyscraper without a foundation deep enough to carry it!
Alexander Scriabin
Alexander Nicolai Scriabin (1871–1915) was born in Moscow, Russia, and was sent to a military school; instead of becoming an army officer, he turned to music, and was a pupil of Safonov, for several years conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and of Taneiev. His early works show the influence of Chopin and Arensky, but he soon developed a style of his own, that has made him one of the important composers of the beginning of the 20th century. An English writer, Eaglefield Hull, thinks that “the sonatas of Scriabin are destined in the future to occupy a niche of their own, together with the forty-eight Preludes of Bach, the thirty-two Sonatas of Beethoven, and the piano works of Chopin.” To explain in a few words the innovations of Scriabin would be impossible, but he broke away from fixed scales and tonality, and opened new roads to composers following. He used neither polytonality nor atonality, although his methods border on the latter. He built new chords, not major and minor as we know them, but in intervals of fourths. Here is a typical Scriabin chord which he used as we use a major triad (c-e-g) as the center around which to build a composition:
Won’t you be surprised to hear that Scriabin went back to Pythagoras and his theory of harmonics or overtones to get this chord? He called these combinations “mystic chords” for he was a student of Theosophy, and wanted to use music as a means to express occult ideas. With this in mind, he wrote a tone-poem, Prometheus, which, according to Scriabin’s directions, Modest Altschuler played in New York with a color organ throwing colors on a screen while the orchestra was playing the music. Two other of his large works for orchestra Le Divin Poème and Le Poème de L’Extase show his extraordinary harmonic originality.
Besides the ten sonatas in very free form, he wrote hundreds of shorter piano pieces, disclosing his deep poetic, mystic nature. Composers have imitated him, but his music is so tagged with Scriabin’s individuality that, like the whole-tone scale of Debussy, imitation is easily detected.