Darius Milhaud

• Born: September 4, 1892, Aix-en-Provence
• Died: June 22, 1974, Geneva, Switzerland
  

La création du monde (“The Creation of the World”), Op. 81

• Composed: 1923
• Premiere: October 25, 1923, Paris, by the Swedish Ballet
• Instrumentation: 2 flutes (incl. piccolo), oboe, 2 clarinets, alto saxophone, bassoon, horn, 2 trumpets, trombone, timpani, bass drum with pedal, cowbell, crash cymbals, snare drum, tambour de Basque, tambourin Provençal, tenor drum, wood block, piano, strings
• CSO notable performances: First Performance: March 1970, Erich Kunzel conducting. Most Recent: February 2021, Louis Langrée conducting.
• Duration: approx. 16 minutes

[Note: This program note uses historical quotes. Many of these quotes use words we no longer consider acceptable to use.]

In 1920, Darius Milhaud was in London to oversee performances of his “divertissement,” Le Boeuf sur le toit ("The Ox on the Roof"). “It was during this visit,” he recalled in his autobiography, Notes Without Music, “that I first began to take an interest in jazz. Billy Arnold and his band, straight from New York, were playing in a Hammersmith dance hall.... I tried to analyze what I heard.” He went on to note the music’s “extremely subtle use of timbre,” its “complex rhythms” and “contrapuntal freedom,” but admitted that its “technique still baffled me.” Back in Paris, he became re-acquainted with Jean Wiéner, an old friend who was playing jazz piano in a bar in the rue Duphot, and Milhaud spent many hours listening to and talking with him about this fascinating, brash, new American import, just then becoming all the rage in Europe. In May 1921, Milhaud composed his first jazz-influenced piece: Caramel mou for clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, trombone and percussion, a "shimmy" (“It was like a foxtrot, danced with shaking movements of the shoulders or entire body,” according to the Harvard Dictionary of Music) to be performed by a Black dancer named Graton at a private entertainment arranged by Pierre Bertin.

Milhaud was on tour to the United States in 1922 as composer, lecturer and pianist. “When I arrived in New York,” he wrote, “I told the newspaper men interviewing me that European music was being considerably influenced by American music. ‘But whose music?’ they asked me; ‘MacDowell’s or Carpenter’s?’ ‘Neither the one nor the other,’ I answered, ‘I mean jazz.’... Of course, my opinions won me the sympathy of Negro music-lovers, who flocked to my concerts. The Chairman of the Negro musicians’ union even wrote me a touching letter of thanks.” Milhaud sought out jazz performances at every opportunity. He heard Leo Reisman’s band (which played, he recorded, with “extreme refinement”) and the famous orchestra of Paul Whiteman (“a sort of Rolls-Royce of dance music”), the ensemble that would help George Gershwin “make a lady of jazz” (said Walter Damrosch) two years later with the Rhapsody in Blue.

Milhaud’s strongest impressions of American jazz, however, were not received in the swanky mid-town hotels and night clubs, but further uptown: “Harlem had not yet been discovered by the snobs and aesthetes: we were the only white folks there. The music I heard was absolutely different from anything I had ever heard before and was a revelation to me. Against the beat of the drums melodic lines crisscrossed in a breathless pattern of broken and twisted rhythms. A Negress whose grating voice seemed to come from the depths of the centuries sang with despairing pathos and dramatic feeling. This authentic music had its roots in the darkest corners of the Negro soul, the vestigial traces of Africa, no doubt. Its effect on me was so overwhelming that I could not tear myself away.... When I went back to France, I never wearied of playing over and over the Black Swan records I had purchased in a little shop in Harlem.”

“As soon as I came back from the United States,” Milhaud continued, “I got in touch with [the designer] Fernand Léger and [the writer] Blaise Cendrars, with whom I was to work on a new ballet for Rolf de Maré [impresario of the Swedish Ballet]. Cendrars chose for the subject of his scenario the Creation of the world, going for his inspiration to African folklore, in which he was particularly deeply versed, having just published a Negro anthology.... Léger wanted to adapt primitive Negro art and paint the drop-curtain and the scenery with African divinities expressive of power and darkness.... At last, in La création du monde, I had the opportunity I had been waiting for to use those elements of jazz to which I had devoted so much study. I adopted the same orchestra as used in Harlem [two flutes, oboe, two clarinets, E-flat saxophone, bassoon, horn, two trumpets, trombone, much percussion, two violins, cello and bass], and I made wholesale use of the jazz style to convey a purely classical feeling. I wrote La Création in the new apartment I had just taken at 10, Boulevard de Clichy.”

The premiere of La création du monde took place on October 25, 1923 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, scene of the riotous unveiling of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring a decade earlier. The choreographer was Jean Borlin, who had been studying African civilizations for several months in preparation for the production. Though Satie (Ragtime du Paquebot), Auric (Adieu New York) and Stravinsky (Ragtime for Eleven Instruments) had created small-scale experiments joining jazz and concert music, La création was the earliest large-form piece in such a hybrid style. The critics accused Milhaud of writing music better suited to the cabaret or the dance hall than to the ballet. (“A more brutal accusation of sinning against the spirit of true art is difficult to find. In our times of prevention of cruelty to animals, this sort of thing should really be prevented,” fumed Max Chop over a subsequent performance in Berlin.) “Ten years later,” Milhaud noted with a certain lip-smacking glee, “these selfsame critics were discussing the philosophy of jazz and learnedly demonstrating that La création was the best of my works.”

Robert Lawrence gave the following synopsis of the scenario of La création du monde in The Victor Book of Ballets:

“The chaos of pre-Creation is seen on a darkened stage as the curtain rises. Three aboriginal deities move among a tangled mass of bodies, muttering incantations. The mass responds to their charms. First a tree rises and lets fall one of its seeds, from which rises still another tree. Now animals appear, every one of them springing—as in the process of evolution—from a more primitive predecessor. Finally, as the three deities pronounce new spells, Man and Woman emerge. They perform a dance of desire, excited by the presence of primeval sorcerers and witch doctors. At last the frenzy of the celebrants subsides; the dancers disperse; and Man and Woman are left alone in a symbolic embrace which assures the fertility of human life.”

Wrote Milhaud’s friend Edward Lockspeiser of this work, which so brilliantly reflects the era of its composition, “La Création du monde turned out to be one of the most powerfully inspired of Milhaud’s works, a European homage to both the tenderness and the fierce vitality of African music, and of an intensity hardly matched in any of the later sophisticated jazz works of this kind.”

—Dr. Richard E. Rodda