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He also wrote remarkable music for the organ, including a concerto that became a minor masterpiece. Apart from his fine songs and piano pieces, Poulenc revealed himself as an inspired composer of religious music, of which his choral works Stabat Mater and Gloria are notable. Among his other important artistic contacts was the ballet impresario Diaghilev, who commissioned him to write music for his Ballets Russes. Futuristic projections had little interest for him he was content to follow the gentle neo-Classical formation of Ravel’s piano music and songs.

He never experimented with the popular devices of “machine music,” asymmetrical rhythms, and polyharmonies as cultivated by Honegger and Milhaud. Compared with his fortuitous com-rades-in-six, Poulenc appears a classicist. An excellent pianist, Poulenc became in 1935 an accompanist to the French baritone Pierre Bernac, for whom he wrote numerous songs. Poulenc served in the French army (1918–21), and then began taking lessons in composition with Koechlin (1921–24). Although quite different in their styles of composition and artistic inclinations, they continued collective participation in various musical events. The 6 musicians included, besides Poulenc: Auric, Durey, Honegger, Milhaud, and Tailleferre. In a gratuitous parallel with the Russian Five, the French critic Henri Collet dubbed the “New Youths” Le Groupe de Six, and the label stuck under the designation Les Six. Deeply impressed by Satie’s fruitful eccentricities in the then-shocking manner of Dadaism, Poulenc joined an ostentatiously self-descriptive musical group called the Nouveaux Jeunes. A decisive turn in his development as a composer occurred when he attracted the attention of Erik Satie, the arbiter elegantiarum of the arts and social amenities in Paris. He was born into a wealthy family of pharmaceutical manufacturers his mother taught him music in his childhood at 16, he began taking formal piano lessons with Ricardo Vines. Poulenc, Francis (Jean Marcel), brilliant French composer b.