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Tradition and Style in the Works of Darius Milhaud 1912-1939.

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Tradition and Style in the Works of Darius Milhaud 1912-1939. By Barbara L. Kelly. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. [xv, 212 p. ISBN 0-7546-3033-1. $84.95.] Music examples, bibliography, index.

Darius Milhaud's reputation has rested on the popular appeal of the compositions he himself took the least seriously. He blamed his fleeting association with Jean Cocteau and Les Six for both his early fame and his enduring notoriety, and in 1922 he complained, "Must I always write Le Boeuf or the Serenade?" (Paul Collaer, Correspondance avec des amis musiciens, ed. Robert Wangermee [Liege: Mardaga, 1996], 118). Although Barbara Kelly shares Milhaud's frustration, she believes that the ephemeral nature of Les Six is no reason to declare the group irrelevant to Milhaud's career. Previous scholars have had us believe that Les Six was a haphazard group brought together less by aesthetics than by friendship, and that Henri Collet's famous Comoedia article ("Un livre de Rimsky et un livre de Cocteau: les cinq Russes, les six Francais et Erik Satie," Comoedia 16 [January 23, 1920]) was responsible for the group's name and formation. In her first chapter, "Milhaud, Les Six, and Musical Politics in Paris," Kelly convincingly demonstrates that the composers themselves sought the group identity as early as 1918, and that they...

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