Within & Without: Les Six at 100

Co-sponsored by The Humanities Council, The Department of French and Italian, The Program in European Cultural Studies, The Program in Canadian Studies, and The Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

A THREE DAY CONFERENCE: January 16-18, 2020. <FULL CONFERENCE SCHEDULE> 

Conference events are free and open to the public, but advance registration for the conference is requested. <REGISTRATION LINK>

One hundred years ago, music critic Henri Collet christened a group of young composers as ‘les six Français’ in his column for the Paris daily Comœdia. Celebrating the lives and music of those artists—Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre—whose modern sound changed the course of French musical history after the death of Debussy, this centennial conference offers us a chance to review and reconsider our understanding of this group and its members. Our conference theme, “Within and Without,” will guide these reflections, encouraging questions not only on the nature of the composers’ collective, but also on their individual work in domains that might lie outside of the realm of strictly musical composition, as well as such issues as exclusion, influence, and identity.

Please address all questions and concerns to the conference committee chair, Campbell Shiflett, at cps@princeton.edu.