Collection context
Summary
- Creators:
- Koechlin, Charles, 1867-1950
- Language:
- English.
Background
- Scope and content:
-
In the following inventory, I have divided the manuscripts into three sections:
- 1. 138 autograph manuscripts by Koechlin (1905-1945) plus one letter to Charles Shatto of 15 March 1946 (MS 139). Of these, only MSS 14 & 134-8 are not Koechlin's own compositions.
- 2. Music by Koechlin copied by Catherine Urner. These compositions (dating form 1895 to 1935) are numbered from I to XII.
- 3. Manuscripts by other composers (1929-35), notably Catherine Urner, Ernest Le Grand and Jeanne Herscher-Clément. These are numbered from i to xiv.
The original manuscripts in section 1 are fully representative of Koechlin's musical activities in the 1930s. They include film music compositions (like the Dances for Ginger Rogers (Op. 163, MSS 68-77) and the Épitaphe de Jean Harlow(Op. 164, MSS 78-9)); symphonic poems (like La méditation de Purun Bhagat at a critical stage in its evolution in mid-August 1936 (Op. 159, MS 54)); chamber music (like the Septuor à vent (Opp. 165 and 165bis, MSS 80-92)); as well as choral works (like Liberté (Op. 158, MS 53) and the Requiem des pauvres bougres (Op. 161, MSS 55, 62-6)) and many other smaller pieces. There are compositions that can be found in no other source, as with the complete Pastorale of 15 Dec 1924 (MS 7) - an unused movement intended for Koechlin's Trio d'anches (Op. 92), or the beautiful Chant du matin of 15 August 1939 (MS 124) - inspired by fine weather and the sound of bells from the church of St Étienne du Mont' near Koechlin's Paris home in the rue des Boulangers. This last is one of several important manuscripts (1924-32) from the wartime gap in Koechlin's opus numbers between Op. 176 (August 1939) and Op. 177 (November 1941), which alone would be sufficient to make the UCB collection one which no scholar of Koechlin's music could afford to ignore.
As well as full scores and piano reductons of major works sent to Catherine Urners in this remarkable display of artistic friendship, there are many final sketches for important compositions which contain unique evidence as to their gestation and intentions. For example, MS 11, thanks to Koechlin's copious dating, traces the evolution of the 12-movement piano suite L'ancienne maison de campagne (Op. 124) over a decade (1923-1933), 3. whilst MSS 23-4 and 29 are the only dated sources of three pieces within Koechlin's 1934 film score Les confidences d'un joueur de clarinette (Op. 141 nos 14-16), with no. 15 (MS 23) containing extra scenic directions found in no other score. The same is true of Le voyage chimérique (Op. 149 no. 5, MS 34), and the dedication to Catherine on the very first of Koechlin's 113 shorter film compositions (Palmolive, Op. 139 no.1, MS 16) suggests that it was his reminiscences of American life in her company in 1928-9 which again sparked off an important aand fruitful chain of events in his compositional career.
Of equal importance is the way that one can trace every stage of Koechlin's complex compositional process by means of the UCB collection. Koechlin usually proceeded by what he described as a 'series of successive approximations', working on individual pieces over quite long periods, but keepng several pieces in train simultaneously. In the case of major symphonic works, he would begin with purely rythmic sketches - like those for Les bandar-log (Op. 176) in MS 123. Then, like Berlioz, he would write a complete melodic line (or chant) which remained unaltered as successive layers of the composition were added in various stages. In less complex pieces the process only involved two stages, chant and realisation (which involved the addition of harmonies and a textural accompaniment). The sketches for the 14 chants pour flûte et piano (Op. 157bis, MSS 47-52) show that these separate stages could be separated by as much as 17 months (in this case, April 1936 to September 1937). Then, again for more complex pieces, Koechlin kept recopying his earlier work and adding further details at each stage, often concentrating on the ending, which invariably caused him as much difficulty as the rest of the piece. The advanced sketch, mentioned earlier, for Op. 159 (MS 54) is complete apart from its ending, and the sort of problems he encountered can be seen in La danse sous les étoiles (Op. 163 no. 4, MSS 75-7), inspired by Ginger Rogers' performance in the film Swing Time(1936). Then Koechlin copied out a penultimate version (dernier brouillon avant le net, or a manuscript which would serve as a piano reduction), to which he added details of the final instrumentation, often note by note, as in MS 4 for the Hymne à la vie (Op. 69). Then (sometimes) he made sketches in full score of difficult orchestral passages, again as in the Hymne à la vie(MS 5). Then finally, he prepared a defininitive orchestral score, as with Sur les flots lointains (Op. 130, MS 13). 4.
In general, I have classified Koechlin's manuscripts chronologically by their earliest dates, so that, by and large, they also follow a course of consecutive opus numbers. However, this does not mean that the ordering here always follows the dates at which each manuscript was writen out or recopied, as Koechlin meticulously recorded the dates of earlier compositional stages on each manuscript. But the actual dates of writing out can usually be ascertained from the final dates in columns 1 and 3 of the following list. Thus, column 1 gives the range of dates covered by each manuscript; column 2 gives the number of pages of music in each manuscript; 5. whilst column 3 identifies each work and gives a brief description of the contents of the manuscript, together with more detailed dates of composition and any other relevant information. Beause Koechlin worked on several pieces simultaneously, a particular problem arose in the prolific years 1936-7, and for reasons of clarity I have classifed the manuscripts of Opp. 160, 161, 163, 164, 165 and 165bis in groups by opus number (MSS 56-92), though even here (as in Op. 160 or Op. 165) it can easily be seen that Koechlin did not compose his larger works in their final performing orders.
As this inventory was intended for publication in Notes, I have kept it as succint as possible. For reasons of space, most of the very large number of teaching exercizes (without opus number) in the Shatto-Urner collection will need to be classified separately on a later occasion. As everything associated with Koechlin proliferates and complicates, there will doubtless be some omissions in such a concentrated list; for these I apologise in advance, and, as always, I welcome suggestions or corrections from interested readers.
Library sigla used below:- F-PnParis, Bibliothhque Nationale, Dipartment de la Musique
- F-PeschigParis, archives of Max Eschig et Cie, 48 rue de Rome,Paris 8
- F-PkoechlinParis, private collection of Yves Koechlin, 26 rue des Boulangers, Paris 5
- US-BEBerkeley, University of California, Music Library
General abbreviations:- orch.orchestrated
- realis.realisation (harmonisation, addition of textural accompaniment)
- recop.recopied
- rev.revised
Other abbreviations are as in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (ed. Stanley Sadie), (London, Macmillan, 1980).
3. This manuscript is especially valuable as the final printer's copy made for Éditions Oiseau-Lyre in 1937 has since disappeared (as far as is known).
4. It need hardly be said that this process forms a fasciniating study in itself, and is one which I explore in detail in my forthcoming life and works study of Koechlin, due to appear in two volumes with Toccata Press, London in 1985-6. It is particularly interesting to trace the evolution of the Danses pour Ginger [Rogers] (Op. 163) from an idea jotted down in a square in Geneva on 13August 1936 (MS 68) through to the final sketches for each of the five dances nearly a year later (MSS 62, 69-77). Also, see MS 62 for an example of Koechlin's later practice of constructing smaller pieces from a series of numbered musical cells, and MS 67 (Note).
5. This was the only method I could adopt in working from xerox copies of the original manuscripts in Liverpool, and it also meant that I was unfortunately unable to distinguish between the uses of ink, pencil and crayon in these manuscripts. Most, however seem to have been written in black ink, often with later additions and corrections in pencil.
- Physical location:
- For current information on the location of these materials, please consult the Library's online catalog.
- Physical description:
- Number of containers: 6 boxes
Access and use
- Location of this collection:
-
Jean Gray Hargrove Music LibraryBerkeley, CA 94720-6000, US
- Contact:
- (510) 642-2623