Contemporary Music 135
in certain passages of Beethoven, and in the definite use
thereof by Richard Strauss). If we consider broadly one
of his larger works, the llChoephores", we soon discover
that on attaining the climax of a series of utterances tragic
in character, in the course of which the most sweeping use
is made of all the resources of musical composition, includ-
ing polytonal writing, Milhaud nevertheless reaches still
profounder depths of his own artistic consciousness in a
scene where a strong pathetic psalmody is accompanied
only by percussion. Here it is no longer polytonality which
expresses Milhaud, and yet this is one of the pages where
Milhaud most profoundly reveals himself. Of similar sig-
nificance is the fact that in one of his latest works, Les
Malheurs d’Orphée, in its recent American première at
one of the New York concerts of Pro Musica, Milhaud’s
occasional use of polytonality is so intricately interwoven
with lyric and poetic elements as to be scarcely distinguish-
able, while his acknowledged artistic personality reappears
clothed with a certain clarity of melodic design altogether
Gallic in character. Again, we might note the singularly
dramatic qualities of Delannoy, the facile and popular mu-
sical content of works of Poulenc, the accuracy of form and
elegance of orchestration in Roland Manuel, and the pecu-
liar tendency on the part of G. Auric to etch his music
sharply, often to the point of an acute and satiric vein. Such
inherent and widely divergent traits appertain to different
individuals rather than to a single school; and this could
also be said of the genial music of Germaine Tailleferre.
In Arthur Honegger, still another member of what a
French critic has labeled the Groupe des Six, we find,
not only individual traits, but hereditary and racial char-
acteristics altogether different from those of the four com-
posers just mentioned, and this racial consciousness of