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.
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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

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.
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Claire de Lune

​Claire de Lune

​Claire de Lune

Reverie

Maurice Ravel

Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer best known for his piece Bolero (1928), which he considered a trivial piece of music.

​Ravel became friends with Claude Debussy and they often compared works.  He died in France in 1937 after an experimental brain surgery.
References:

https://www.classicsforkids.com/composers/composer_profile.php?id=22