The music of France has a broad range of different styles and genres such as nouvelle chanson and electronic music. French music went through different classical music periods including medieval, renaissance, baroque, and opera. Folk French music is still popular in the remote areas such as the island of Corsica and the Auvergne mountain villages.
Traditional French Instruments
Camille Saint-Saëns | 1835-1921
Like Mozart, Camille Saint-Saëns was a child prodigy. At age 2 ½ he could pick out tunes on the piano; at the age of 3 he composed his first piece; and by age 7 he was giving public concerts as a pianist and organist. When he was 10, he made his public debut and offered to play any one of Beethoven's 32 sonatas from memory. He had total recall of anything he had ever read.
Saint-Saëns was also a conductor, critic, music scholar, teacher and composer. Working in Paris, he founded a society that supported an entire new generation of French composers. Despite these talents, he never quite lived up to expectations. While he composed operas, none were very popular. His style of music was traditional and conservative and for the most part followed Classical traditions. His best-known works are several concertos, an organ symphony, The Carnival of the Animals and Danse Macabre.
Saint-Saëns was also a conductor, critic, music scholar, teacher and composer. Working in Paris, he founded a society that supported an entire new generation of French composers. Despite these talents, he never quite lived up to expectations. While he composed operas, none were very popular. His style of music was traditional and conservative and for the most part followed Classical traditions. His best-known works are several concertos, an organ symphony, The Carnival of the Animals and Danse Macabre.
DANSE MACABRE
CARNIVAL OF THE ANIMALS
Like a trip to the zoo or an uncle's bad jokes, The Carnival of the Animals is supposed to be fun. So fun, in fact, that composer Camille Saint-Saens feared it would ruin his image. Though he banned most of it from public performance until after its death, it is among his biggest hits today. The French composer was supposed to be working on his third symphony when he took a break to compose Carnival in a small Austrian village in 1886. Though he had a great time writing it, he worried the humorous piece would harm his reputation as a serious musician. Insisting the work be performed in private, he allowed only the iconic cello movement The Swan to be published during his lifetime.
Impressionism in Art
The aim of Impressionist art was to suggest rather than to clearly draw objects. Impressionist music does much the same thing, focusing on creating a sense of the piece's topic by using blurred harmony and delicate shadings of sound rather than relying on standard forms and a strong, clear rhythmic beat. There is an air of mystery, magic and wonder that surrounds Impressionistic music.
Famous Impressionist Artist:
Claude Monet
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Famous Impressionist Composer:
Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy really had a double first name: Achille-Claude. He was born in a suburb of Paris, and it was his aunt who first noticed how musical he was. She got him started taking piano lessons. When he was only ten, Debussy started studying at the very strict Paris Conservatory.
As a child, Debussy was fascinated by visual art, and as he grew up, he loved the new style called "Impressionism." Instead of painting realistic, lifelike paintings with hard outlines, Impressionists used thousands of dots, or many different shades of color to create the "impression" of what they wanted to depict. Debussy took that idea and applied it to music, creating Impressionism in music. |
Claire de Lune |
Claire de Lune |
Claire de Lune
Claire de Lune |
Flowers |
First Arabesque |
Debussy Dots: Masques from Alexander Chen on Vimeo. Masques |
Reverie
Maurice Ravel
Miroirs |
Landscapes |