Milhaud, Darius

Darius Milhaud
(b. Aix-en-Provence, 4 September 1892 – d. Geneva, 22 June 1974)

Concerto pour batterie et petit orchestra, op. 109
[Concerto for Percussion and Small Orchestra]

Preface
Darius Milhaud was a French composer associated with a number of influential musical movements and aesthetic paradigms of the early 20th century. He is perhaps best remembered as a member of “Les Six,” a group of somewhat arbitrarily assembled French composers whose approaches to composition differed but whose music—from the post-war period onwards—followed collectively in the footsteps of Eric Satie, rejecting the then-dominant paradigms of the French Impressionists and post-Wagnerians to include elements of jazz and the avant-garde.

Milhaud’s music in particular draws upon jazz, which he first encountered in the 1920s, and also includes explorations in polytonality, polymodality and aleatory. It also demonstrates a strong predilection for percussion, something he had in common with a number of important avant-garde composers of the early 20th century, including Edgar Varese and Henry Cowell. He was an extremely prolific composer, and wrote music in virtually every genre, notably a considerable amount of solo vocal, choral and dramatic music, along with many chamber works. In the realm of orchestral music, Milhaud composed a remarkable 21 concerti, including the well-known and frequently-performed Concerto pour batterie et petit orchestra, op. 109.

Milhaud composed his Concerto pour batterie et petit orchestre in Paris in 1929-30. It received its premiere in 1930 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels—it was written as an examination piece for a Belgian music school. As Milhaud himself insisted, he was always “very interested in percussion problems,” and he used substantial percussion forces in many of his works. His op. 109 Concerto, however, is for a single percussionist, using a vast array of instruments and accompanied by modest orchestral forces. Milhaud provided a map with the score, indicating the percussion components and their layout: the piece requires the soloist to be completely encircled by instruments, including four timpani, tom-toms, cymbals and suspended cymbals, a bass drum with a cymbal attachment on a foot pedal, castanets, ratchet, slapstick, triangle, cowbell, tambourine and wood block. In addition to the percussion, the score calls for four violins, two violas, two cellos, one double bass, two flutes, two clarinets, one trumpet and one trombone.

The Concerto is remarkable not for the rhythmic virtuosity of its solo part, but rather for the demands it makes on the solo percussionist to simply navigate all of the instruments. One might have expected a French percussion-based work from the late 1920s to be virtuosic by dint of a strong jazz influence—given the popularity of jazz in Paris at the time—but this is not the case; in fact, Milhaud had largely eschewed jazz as a resource for his art music by this time, and made a particular point of avoiding references to jazz in this concerto. Instead, the focus is on the interplay between the soloist and tutti, and in particular on the sheer athleticism required from the soloist, who is constantly transitioning between instruments.

Concerto pour batterie et petit orchestre is cast in a fairly straightforward two-part form: an aggressive and rather dissonant opening section, marked “Rude et dramatique,” followed by a contrasting softer, more lyrical section marked “Modéré.” The work begins with a brash, fanfare-like motive in the tutti, which the soloist echoes on the timpani. This followed by a softer, woodwind-dominated passage, with the soloist beginning to explore the full range of instruments and timbres, introducing the triangle, wood block, metal block and suspended cymbal. Serpentine figuration from the winds and strings is interspersed with ritornello passages that bring back the opening fanfare motive, as the percussion part becomes more active, introducing even more instruments, including the tambourine and castanets. Dense, Stravinskian ostinati build to a raucous climax, signaled by cymbals and the ratchet, which is then followed by a brief pause.

This pause marks the start of the second part of the concerto. The strings drop out, leaving the flutes, clarinets and brass to provide a new texture and some new ideas, combining wavy arabesques from the winds with a simple trill motive in the brass comprised of the same rhythmic head motive that characterizes the opening fanfare. The soloist picks up this rhythmic motive, passing it back and forth between instruments as muted strings enter, providing a soft ripieno homophonic accompaniment.

A muted trumpet obbligato enters, playing with the soloist, is perhaps the only oblique hint towards jazz in this piece (other than the presence of the kick drum)—the trumpet tune has the distant, haunting quality of a Gershwin melody, though it is missing the obvious jazz inflections. The clarinets picks up where the trumpet leaves off, playing gently-arching chromatic melodies in counterpoint until the orchestra coalesces into an unexpectedly sweet tonal cadence. The sinewy trill motive returns as an ominous growl in the low strings, before the punchy fanfare of the opening suddenly re-appears. The orchestra briefly goes quiet again, only to be interrupted by one more eruption of the tutti fanfare, which is echoed a final time by the timpani as the piece concludes.

Milhaud’s Concerto pour batterie et petit orchestre continues to be regularly performed today, often as a school piece. As the composer himself recalled, he was always “pleasantly surprised to see that this concerto is often performed in high schools in the United States by young students who play by heart and brilliantly.”

Alexander Carpenter, 2018

For performance materials please contact the original publisher, Universal Edition, Vienna, (www.universaledition.com). Reprint with the kind permission of Universal Edition AG, Vienna, 2018.