Through the winter and spring of 1942, Koechlin composed a remarkable trove of music for accompanied wind instruments—14 Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 178; 14 Pieces for Oboe and Piano, Op. 179; 15 Études for Saxophone and Piano; and the 12 Silhouettes de comédie for bassoon and orchestra, Op. 193. Among these richly varied, if uneven, collections, the 15 Pieces for Horn and Piano, Op. 180, composed in April, take their cue from the first piece, Dans le forêt romantique, signaling a return to the ambience of the Horn Sonata, Op. 70, completed in 1925. Nostalgia for the haunted forest of German Romanticism—celebrated in such things as the young d'Indy's tone poems La Forêt enchantée (after Uhland, 1878) and Saugefleurie (1884), or Duparc's Lénore (1894-1895)—persisted for Koechlin through the several sets of Sonneries for hunting horns and trumpets composed in the 1930s. The elaborations, attenuations, and refinements of the fully realized expression of the horn sonata seem to have provided a refuge from popular culture, whose music he denigrated for its "music-hall atmosphere, imbued with a lower form of jollity," and whose audience he deplored as "those whose feelings are crude, and who enjoy the habitual repertoire of songs broadcast (alas!) on the radio (which dispenses poison rather than intoxication)." The Great War effectively buried Romanticism, and following the war came the jazz age, with American jazz bands in Paris prompting crossover works such as Milhaud's Le Boeuf sur le toit (1919), a bandwagon jumpstarted by the runaway success of Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper (1928). It was through Milhaud's good offices that Koechlin received a commission to orchestrate Cole Porter's ballet Within the Quota, which received its premiere with Milhaud's La Création du monde on October 25, 1923—American critic Paul Rosenfeld thought Koechlin's orchestration "made Debussy out of it: very charming, but not in character." Koechlin at least knew, hands-on, whereof he spoke. Koechlin's chronicler Robert Orledge remarked of the Op. 180 Pieces, "While they are harmonically more interesting than the oboe and clarinet pieces, they lack their variety as a collection, and the irregular phrase structures of the long, fluid lines are no substitute for rhythmic variety within the phrases themselves. Indeed, there are times when one would have liked to have looked over Koechlin's shoulder as he was composing and whispered the word 'syncopation' in his ear. But he had always abhorred the strident rhythms of jazz and may have avoided any hint of these deliberately."

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi