Orchestral Music Catalogue

Film music (1935, dir. Maurice Cloche). Suite no. 1: Latin declamation (Martial), wordless vocalise in 5/4 and 5/8, self-borrowing from Sous les remparts d’Athènes (1927). 5/8 Bacchanale chorus restored as primary text.

Film music (1935, dir. Maurice Cloche). Suite no. 2: wordless vocalise in 5/4 and 5/8. 5/8 Bacchanale chorus restored as primary text.

Alessandro Scarlatti, arranged by Germaine Tailleferre for flute, string orchestra and harp. SACEM deposit stamp: 16 October 1950. No commission, dedicatee, or intended performers are indicated on the manuscript. The scoring — flute, two violins, viola, cello, double bass and pedal harp — suggests a small orchestral string complement rather than a fixed chamber ensemble. The harp part is written throughout for pedal harp, a modern rescoring rather than a historical realization. One plausible context runs through Lily Pastré’s postwar Marseille/Aix network: Tailleferre’s Concertino for flute and piano with orchestra (1953) carries a dedication to Pastré and was premiered by Jean-Pierre Rampal and Robert Veyron-Lacroix, placing composer and flautist within the same circle at a date consistent with this arrangement. No performance parts survive alongside the manuscript, suggesting the work may never have been performed. The present edition offers the work’s probable premiere performance.

Directed by Boris Peskine, completed November 1937, released January 1938. Commissioned by the Fédération Nationale des Travailleurs des Chemins de Fer and produced through Ciné-Liberté, the CGT’s Front Populaire production arm. Its release coincided with the creation of the SNCF from the partial nationalisation of the French railways; the film functions as a hymn to the cheminots at the precise moment the state absorbs the rail network into public ownership. It was the first of three CGT federal films produced that year — alongside Les Bâtisseurs (Jean Epstein, music by Honegger and Hoérée, text by Desnos) and Les Métallos (Jacques Lemare, music by Henri Lavallee) — the choice of composers across the trilogy showing the CGT deliberately drawing on the former avant-garde of the 1920s, and on Les Six in particular, to lend prestige and a modern idiom to its labour propaganda.

Tailleferre’s score belongs to the final, fully sonorized release of André Sauvage’s documentary footage of the Citroën Centre-Asie expedition (La Croisière Jaune), re-edited by Léon Poirier and released by Pathé-Natan in March 1934. Sauvage’s original 1932 cut was silent with intertitles; a second version added postsynchronized commentary; Tailleferre’s music belongs to this third and final stage.
Scored for a large and unusually specific orchestra: piccolo, flutes, English horn, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, alto and tenor saxophone, bassoon, horns, flugelhorn, trumpets, timpani, 2 percussionists, harp, piano, celesta and strings. The two percussionists deploy an wide array of instruments assembled for geographic and ethnographic characterisation: tambourine, triangle, suspended cymbal, wood clapper, Chinese block, sleigh bells (Perc. 1); side drum, sleigh bells, sistrum, suspended cymbal, crash cymbals, gong, tambourin provençal, bass drum (Perc. 2). The saxophones and flugelhorn function as a distinct timbral group rather than being absorbed individually into the woodwind or brass. It appears likely that some thematic material was drawn from melodies collected during the expedition, though this is not indicated on the score itself.

Short documentary directed by Maurice Cloche; SACEM stamp: February 1936. The score opens with an orchestral jingle for « Artisans Associés » (the commissioning sponsor; may be omitted in concert), followed by a prologue and five sequences illustrating Montmartre under the heading « évocation du vieux Paris ». The remaining material reworks orchestral passages from Tailleferre’s 1929 ballet La Nouvelle Cythère. Duration: approximately 18 minutes. Scored for 1·1·1·1/1·1·0·0/timp/1perc/hp/pno/vln1/vln2/vlc1/vlc2; string parts are doubled throughout.