Written for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chamber Music Series. Not to be reprinted without permission.
Bohuslav Martinů was born in 1890 and grew up in the belltower of a church in Polička, Bohemia, where his father was a lookout and bell-ringer. At age 10, he composed his first string quartet, and at 16 he entered the Prague Conservatory, which expelled him for “incorrigible negligence” and absenteeism. He eventually found work as a violinist with the Czech Philharmonic and fell in love with Paris while on tour there in 1923. He relocated and established himself as a composer within the French musical scene, writing in a distinctive neoclassical style. Miloš Šafránek, Martinů’s biographer and friend, recalled that his Paris apartment was “filled with scores of Bach choral music and the operas, symphonies, and sonatas of Mozart, as well as works of Palestrina, Corelli… and many other compositions which never grow old.”
Another influence, however, was quite new: by the 1920s, jazz could be heard in Parisian cafés and nightclubs, often performed by Black American musicians drawn to a country with less racial prejudice than the United States. Their music influenced French composers including Maurice Ravel and Darius Milhaud, as well Martinů, who wrote a jazzy ballet, La revue de cuisine, in 1927, followed by a Jazz Suite in 1928, and Les rondes in 1930.
All these pieces are scored for large chamber ensembles that mix woodwinds, brass, strings, and piano—a sort of classical impression of a jazz band. Les rondes is for a treble-heavy septet, and the title refers to round dances, suggesting an additional source of inspiration: Czech folk music. Martinů distanced himself from his homeland upon moving to Paris, writing almost entirely like French composers of the time. But in these dances, he allowed himself a rustic Central European pizzazz, like a modernist Dvořák. And so Les rondes glides between second-hand bits of Harlem, memories of Moravia, and real-life interwar Paris.
