Earlier today, I posted that the late Burt Bacharach was a pupil of Darius Milhaud. He also studied with Henry Cowell and Bohuslav Martinu. For Milhaud, he wrote a Sonatina for Violin, Oboe and Piano. I don’t know that the work has ever been recorded. At any rate, I’ve never been able to locate a copy. Bacharach talks a bit more about it in this excerpt from an interview he gave with NPR back in 2014.

“Darius Milhaud taught me at the Music Academy of the West, and he’s this brilliant French composer, wonderful man. I’m taking this composition class with him where I’d written a piece, a sonatina, for violin, oboe and piano. You know, it was very extreme music that people were writing – we were all influenced by 12-tone music, Alban Berg.

“I had this one piece at the end of the semester that I got to play for Milhaud – not with violin, not with the oboe; I just had to just do it at the piano. I was very, very reluctant when it came to the second movement, because it was quite melodic instead of being harsh and dissonant [and] avant-garde. And he took me aside afterward, and maybe he sensed what I felt or maybe just his observation was: Never be ashamed of something that’s melodic, one could whistle. I said, ‘Wow.’ So that was a valuable lesson I learned from him. Never forgot that one. Never be afraid of something that you can whistle.”

It’s advice that served him well. R.I.P.

Coincidentally, today is Alban Berg’s birthday!