Our Fall season features works by four fabulous living composers: Ingrid Stölzel, Mark Winges, Edmund Cionek, and our 8SW 2026 Competition winner Will Jefferies. Suzanne has interviewed most of them, with an interview with Will coming soon. Please do read them — Matt says they are the best thing on the website and that is gigantic praise. (Suzanne thinks these regular blog posts are the most fun thing on our website!)
As we often do, we are also including a work by a composer who is no longer with us. This year we are featuring a beautiful trio by Antoine Taudou.
We found this work on the music score site, IMSLP. There is very little information about Taudou out there. He was French and lived form 1846 to 1935. He was a violinist and teacher of theory at the Paris Conservatory, and had a number of interesting composers as students. He wrote a few pieces. They were published while he was alive but good luck finding them now.
That is about as much information as one can find about Taudou.
This is unusual. I am a good procrastinator. I can spend a crazy amount of time researching obscure composers and works instead of practicing, and generally I find stuff. Sometimes, I’ve found things that require others (Suzanne) to spend lots of time translating…. frequently we find a doctoral thesis…. something.
But not Taudou. He is a mystery. The one blog post devoted to him, in French, basically says ‘nothing to see, nothing new’….1
So why play this work? Well it is beautiful and unusual for us. It is a post romantic work in a standard format: four movements in a “Sonata” format. (For those of you who may have forgotten your Music 101 education, the four movements are an Allegro Sonata form, a slow movement, Scherzo/trio and a fast-ish Finale.)
The French blogger, Fabricio Cardenas, says Taudou is conventional. In a sense Cardenas is correct. Taudou is not rethinking form. He is not breaking compositional rules or coming up with a completely new harmonic vocabulary, like his contemporaries Stravinsky and Schoenberg.
I like this piece. It is lush. It has beautiful melodies and a rich, almost string quartet-y feel. Taudou may be writing inside the 19th century conventions, but he does it with lovely melodies and appealing textures.
Taudou was a skilled string player. When you look at his parts, they work. What do I mean by that? Often (too often) string players need to figure out bowing. What part of the bow should I be in? What do I need to do to achieve what the composer wants musically? (To be fair, wind players have to do this too, but let’s focus on string playing for today)
Matt and I have both found that, in general, if we play what Taudou wrote, things work. Dynamics and articulations come out correctly. Let’s look at a particularly fabulous example.
This passage comes towards the end of the first movement.
Looking at the cello part (the viola is in unison) the measure starts forte on a down bow. The rhythm is asymmetric — meaning that 7/8th of the beat (quarter note) will be on the down bow and only 1/8 of the beat on the up. What this does is force you to the tip of the bow over the course of the four measures.
Imagine for a moment that you are walking across a room. You take one big step forward (both feet) and then a tiny step back. If you do this over and over you will get across the room pretty quickly. The step back may slow your forward progress a tiny bit — but not by much.
Now, what is the advantage of moving from the frog (the part of the bow we hold – and yes that is what it is called) to the tip? Well, the tip is a lot lighter and thus easier to play quietly. You can play loud at the tip, but you need to balance the weight. If you let the bow do what it wants to naturally, you will get quieter as you work your way up. And that is just what Taudou wants — a big diminuendo from forte (loud) to pianissimo (very soft) over the course of these measure.
Do what he asks and Tada!! You get the right result — or maybe it is Taudou!!!
- Fabricio Cardenas (4 December 2016). “Éloge du compositeur Antoine Taudou en 1870”. Musicam scire (in French). Retrieved 19 Sept 2026 ↩︎