The music of Jean Françaix drew on the neo-Classic sounds he heard as he came of age, and he kept composing until the last decades of the twentieth century, altering his style but little in the face of successive avant-gardes that sought to have their way with the musical world. Often he seemed to simplify his music, but it was a deceptive simplicity, with jocular or lyrical tonal melodies underlaid with subtle rhythms and finished off with expert workmanship. His chamber music, instantly appealing for anybody, has always ...
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The music of Jean Françaix drew on the neo-Classic sounds he heard as he came of age, and he kept composing until the last decades of the twentieth century, altering his style but little in the face of successive avant-gardes that sought to have their way with the musical world. Often he seemed to simplify his music, but it was a deceptive simplicity, with jocular or lyrical tonal melodies underlaid with subtle rhythms and finished off with expert workmanship. His chamber music, instantly appealing for anybody, has always held a place on concert programs. L'horloge de Flore (1959), for oboe and a small orchestra, offers a good example of his style at its most accessible. The floral clock intended to be evoked in the work is not just the conventional arrangement of flowers in a clock-face pattern, but a rarer type of different kinds of flowers that open at specific times of day. The music seems more suggestive of the dayparts themselves than of flowers (some of it certainly sounds like Prelude to the...
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