Charles Koechlin: Compositeur et humaniste ed. by Philippe Cathé, Sylvie Douche, and Michel Duchesneau (review)

For most English-speaking musicians on either side of the Atlantic, the early twentieth-century French modernist Charles Koechlin is known, if at all, as the polytonalist par excellence and unofficial mentor to that other main French exponent of polytonality, Darius Milhaud (1892–1974). Neglected for many years, despite the innovative nature of his theoretical thinking, as evidenced in his major article, ‘Evolution de l’harmonie: période contemporaine’, published in Albert Lavignac’s Encyclopédie de la musique (Paris, vol. 2, 1925), and his Traitéde l’harmonie (Paris, 1927–30), it was the British musicologist Robert Orledge who originally raised Koechlin’s profile. Orledge’s intensive research culminated in the first extended biographical and musical study: Charles Koechlin (1867–1950): His Life and Works (Chur, 1989, revised 1995).

As part of his longer-term commitment to promoting Koechlin, Orledge continued to edit the composer’s works such as Les Chants de Kervéléan and the film score Le Portrait de Daisy Hamilton for performance. Unfortunately however, major musicological coverage of Koechlin during the intervening couple of decades may best be described as patchy, even while the disciplines of musicology and music theory have shifted and developed quite considerably. Nonetheless, we should note Aude Caillet’s biography Charles Koechlin (Anglet, 2001); some detailed enquiries about polytonality that credit his pioneering role, such as that by François de Médicis, ‘Darius Milhaud and the Debate on Polytonality in the French Press of the 1920s’ in Music & Letters,86 (2005), 573–91; and Michel Duchesneau’s valuable editing of Koechlin’s writings: Esthétique et langage musical (Sprimont, 2006). (All three writers have articles in the new volume.)

It is therefore a particular pleasure to witness a further substantial flourishing of interest in the composer symbolized by the appearance of Charles Koechlin: Compositeur et humaniste, which, perhaps curiously, is the first appearance in French of a large collection of wide-ranging studies. With one overseeing editor (Marie-Hélène Benoit-Otis), three contributing directors and twenty-one other contributors, this is very much a team effort, supported by French-based research centres on both sides of the Atlantic: the impressively productive Observatoire Interdisciplinaire de Création et de Recherche en Musique (OICRM) under the auspices of Montreal University, jointly with the group Patrimoines et Langages Musicaux at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne. An important connecting thread between past and present is provided by Orledge’s presence among the contributors. One inevitable consequence of the scale of the undertaking is the corresponding size of the book: just over 600 pages. This volume is by its nature one for dipping into rather than reading from cover to cover, and is still some way off the epic proportions reached by Marcel Marnat’s monograph Maurice Ravel (Paris, 1986, 2nd edn. 1995) which ran, amid various structural idiosyncrasies and repetitiousness, to some 800 pages.

One of the ways that the musicological landscape has developed since the 1990s has been its long-overdue embracing of interdisciplinarity. In this spirit, the approach employed in Charles Koechlin: Compositeur et humaniste, which recognizes the impact upon Koechlin’s musical art of his concurrent interests in theory, philosophy, sociology, and politics, is consistent with that of other recent studies of French composers, such as Paul-André Bempéchat’s Jean Cras: Polymath of Music and Letters (Aldershot, 2009) and Sylvia Kahan’s In Search of New Scales: Prince Edmond de Polignac, Octatonic Explorer (Rochester, NY, 2009). In a sense, Koechlin’s position is similar to that of Edmond de Polignac, since their earlier pioneering researches into polytonality and octatonicism respectively have been rather eclipsed by successors such as Milhaud and Stravinsky.

The volume begins with the first of two introductory chapters, in which Philippe Cathé, Sylvie Douche, and Michel Duchesneau jointly present their initial case for the interdisciplinary model. A second chapter follows logically enough with a chronological overview...