Lendall Pitts's video: Darius Milhaud Machines agricoles op 56 1919

"`In light of the high artistic rank of the brilliantly original "Machines agricoles" op. 56 of 1919, it is astonishing that this is its first recording. This vocal curio was all to often misunderstood as a spirited joke. Milhaud's autobiography "Notes sans Musique" shows he had serious intentions when he wrote these pastoral songs: "I had set to music descriptions of machines taken from a catalogue brought back in 1913 from an exhibition of agricultural machinery. I visited the exhibition with Madame de B. and Mademoiselle de S., who were looking for a mowing machine for their country house near Bordeaux. The beauty of these large coloured metal insects, the great modern brothers plough and sickle, had made such an impression on me that I had the idea of glorifying them. I had put some catalogues away in a drawer. In 1919 I found them again. Thereupon I composed a little Suite for a singer and seven solo instruments, in the style of my little symphonies." Each of these short movements is dedicated to a friend from the group "Les Six". Did Milhaud, who could describe "metal insects", also try his hand at portraits? The tender lyricisms of the rendering of a seed drill machine, dedicated to Honegger, seem as suited to his "Helvitic sensibility" as the popular gaiety and liveliness of the figurations in the picture of an underground drainage plough are to Georges Auric's personality. The delicate melodies devoted to a hayturner strongly remind one of the various Pastroles for piano later written by Germaine Tailleferre, after her first offering in the "Album des Six") dedicated to Darius Milhaud and composed in 1919). To great a concentration on the unusual text -- which is neither poetic nor philosophically meaningful -- distracts from the many contrapuntal subtleties and instrumental finesse of this charmingly poetic and colorful music. In his Recollections, the musician expressed what he had been aiming for with his vocal instrumental Pastorales: "Not a single critic understood what had actually moved me to compose these works, or that they were written in the same spirit in which former composers had celebrated harvest time, grape-gathering or the 'Jolly Farmer', in the same spirit in which Honegger had glorified the locomotive and Fernand Léger the world of machines. Whoever wished to illustrate my tendency toward irony and eccentricity quoted the "Machines agricoles". I have never managed to discover what makes reasonable people think an artist would spend his time on fooling a few people, when the creative process is tied to so much pain." In several movements, the composer used the voice like an instrument, just another strand in the partly polytonal web. This prefigurated the three "Chansons madécasses" for voice, flute, cello and piano composed by Maurice Ravel in 1926/26, one of the earliest reactions to Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire" in French music, and harbinger of a new aesthetic sensibility. The instrumental accompaniment utilized by Milhaud in "Machines agricoles," namely piccolo (or flute), clarinet, bassoon, violin, viola, cello and double bass, may well have been inspired by both Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire" op. 21 (1912) and Igor Stravinsky's "Histoire du Soldat") (1918), each written for an ensemble of five to seven instruments. In timbre, these Pastorales (where the strings dominate) are closer to the "Trois Poemes de Stéephane Malarmé" for voice, piccolo, flute, clarinet, string quartet and piano written by Marice Ravel while he was working with Stravinksy on the orchestration of Mousorgsky's opera "Chowantschina" in 1913.