Masquerade Chez Cocteau

I've been a full-blown Francophile for many years now. My passion for the music of the French Modernists especially Milhaud, Ibert, Tomasi, Messiaen, and Tailleferre goes all the way back to high school. My love of French food, wine, spirits, literature, and the country itself came somewhat later. Though my personal experience of France is largely limited to the south, that golden age of the avant-garde in the Paris of the 1910s, 20s, and 30s has a certain appeal. What wouldn't I do to chat with Darius Milhaud about jazz; to have a drink with James Joyce and the Fitzgeralds; to listen to Gertrude Stein tell a story; to share a cigar with Erik Satie? So many of the paradigm defining names of the 20th century saturated that Paris Josephine Baker, George Orwell, Alice Toklas, Cole Porter, Arthur Rubenstein, Nijinsky, Apollinaire, Curnonsky, Marie Laurencin, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemmingway, Marianne Oswald, Coleman Hawkins, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, James Beard, Virgil Thompson many of them meeting at the city's cabarets (especially Le Boeuf sur le Toit), often informally organized by the writer-turned-impresario Jean Cocteau. The unabashed hedonism, the intellectual freedom, the adventurous creativity, the openness, diversity, and unapologetic queerness of that era some of this is doubtless the rosy distortion of time all has a magnetic pull for me. Masquerade Chez Cocteau is my mental soundtrack to an imagined evening where all of those monumental figures get together for a decidedly anachronistic masquerade ball hosted by Cocteau. Great food, rivers of Champagne and cocktails, music of every style imaginable, dancing, art, flamboyant clothes, and a variety of other mind-altering substancesThe piece is a slightly surreal melange of different styles and concepts, all translated to fit my voice and to create a cohesive tapestry of sound. A few elements of the composition pay deliberate homage to the music of that era, including the instrumentation, which is loosely based on that of Milhaud's La Creation du Monde. Instrumentation: 2.1.2(BCl).ASX.1-1.2.1.0-3-strings