Serious composers as diverse as Fauré, Busoni, Schoenberg, and Koechlin were expanding the boundaries of tonality well before the First World War, while after it the old aesthetic conundrums were given a fillip by such "answers" as Schreker's ripe expressionism (e.g., Die Gezeichneten, 1918), Schoenberg's first dodecaphonic composition (Five Piano Pieces, Op. 23 -- 1923), Stravinsky's neo-classicism (Concerto for Piano and Winds, 1923-1924), the noise music of Varèse (Hyperprism, 1923) and Antheil (Ballet mécanique, 1923-1924, premiered in Paris 1926), and, above all, the pervasive influence of jazz, naturalized in Milhaud's ballets Le Boeuf sur le toit (1919) and La Création du monde (1923). When pianist Clément Doucet, at Paris' Boeuf sur le toit cabaret, exuberantly jazzed themes from Chopin and Wagner the Romantic inheritance was liquidated before one's ears. Constant Lambert's 1934 Music Ho!, subtitled "A Study of Music in Decline," chronicles this fragmentation in wittily searching and generally disapproving detail, though the burst of creativity characterizing the period -- including that of a number of originals who hardly achieved a hearing (such as Matthijs Vermeulen, Kaikhosru Sorabji, Bernard van Dieren, and Tibor Serly, among others) -- is anything but a symptom of decline. It is indicative of Koechlin's failure to establish himself that he escapes mention in Music Ho!, though as he composed his unique, if deceptively slight, Nouvelles Sonatines over 1923-1924, he was bringing to completion his mammoth symphonic poem La Course de printemps -- arguably the most radical music of the decade, if not of the century. Not until the latter third of the twentieth century did the music of Sorabji, Vermeulen, Koechlin, and others begin to be heard. Of the early piano works, including the Nouvelles Sonatines, Wilfrid Mellers noted, "Indeed, it might be said that Koechlin has transmuted the spirit of the vocal school of Janequin or of Claudin de Sermisy or Guillaume de Costeley -- perhaps the most fastidiously aristocratic composers in an age of French musical aristocracy -- into terms of the keyboard; for the piano writing, usually in two or three parts, has a lovely translucence which in sonorous effect is closer to French sixteenth century vocal writing than to anything usually intimated by the phrase 'keyboard technique.'" Koechlin wrote with the past in his bones -- he had no need to "return" to it with the too imitable gestures of a Stravinsky. Being inimitable, he had no followers. Marius-François Gaillard premiered the fourth and second sonatinas on March 16, 1927, at the Salle des Concerts de l'Hotel Majestic. ~ Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide
