Germaine Tailleferre

Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983), French composer, best remembered as a member of the group known as Les Six. Born in Parc-St-Maur, near Paris, she was educated at the Paris Conservatoire. Early in her career she was described by Erik Satie, the father-figure of Les Six, as his “musical daughter”. She collaborated with the other members of the group—Auric, Durey, Honegger, Milhaud, and Poulenc—on a collection of piano pieces called Album des Six (1920), and with four of them on the ballet Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (1921). Les Six, being essentially a journalistic creation, did not survive long as an entity. However, its aesthetic, of lightness and freshness, continued to inform Tailleferre’s music, along with the thorough technical grounding she had gained as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, and an inquiring mind which led her to experiment with polytonality and the twelve-tone system. She lived in the United States from 1942 to 1946, but then returned to France. Her works include operas, ballets, chamber music, and songs. She had a particular interest in unusual combinations of voices and instruments, for example in her concerto for two pianos, wordless chorus, saxophones, and orchestra (1934), later rewritten as Concerto des Vaines Paroles for baritone, piano, and orchestra (1958).