Jim Tobin asks:
>What are the characteristics of his {Milhaud's} later music?
It's all over the map. There's some densely chromatic stuff (the
Sestinas), at least one delightful essay into Americana (Kentuckiana),
music that suggests an attempt at rapprochement with serialism, and
the high seriousness of the 1930s with fewer and less obvious debts to
Stravinsky. The main thing is that there's so much of it. I have no idea
how long it took Milhaud to write twenty minutes worth of orchestral music,
but if more than a couple of weeks, I'd be surprised. He was fast, fast,
fast.
Steve Schwartz