Ask a culture vulture to name their favorite French composer, and chances are the answer will be Claude Debussy or Maurice Ravel. The pair’s popularity is such that they’ve become representative of French music at large—with Debussy’s shimmering atmospheres and Ravel’s sensuous melodies immediately evoking, for many, a country known for elegance and refined pleasures, from fine wine and haute couture to manicured public gardens.

But while composers often channel the sights and sounds of their homeland, music is never created in a nationalist vacuum. That’s especially true for those working in fin de siècle Paris, a hotbed of cross-cultural pollination, where the sounds of Harlem jazz and Balinese gamelan wafted through the air alongside those of classical and cabaret.

Just as Ravel was inspired by Basque folk dances and Debussy embedded in his scores the aesthetics of Japanese music, so too did their Parisian contemporaries interweave musical traditions on a global scale. And on tonight’s program, we’ll experience works by four generations of French composers who ventured outside their nation’s borders for inspiration—whether the expressiveness of German Romanticism, the mysterious medieval chants of the Roman Catholic Church, or the ancient spirituality of African drumming.

André Jolivet (1905–74) is the most contemporary of tonight’s composers, but his music reaches the farthest back in time. Although he studied with the modernist Edgard Varèse and came of age as Arnold Schoenberg shredded the tonal systems that had dominated music for 400 years, Jolivet sought to reignite music’s role in mysticism and ritual. “I seek to return music to its original state,” he wrote, “when it was that of magical expression and an incantation of spirituality.”

To manifest such music, Jolivet often turned to the flute, one of humankind’s first instruments, which he associated with “the breath of life.” And in his second concerto for solo flute, Suite en concert pour flûte et percussion (1965), he pairs the instrument not with an orchestra, but another “primal” voice: drums.

Each of the work’s four movements conjures its own variety of enchanting colors and characters from the flute and percussion quartet. But Suite en concert remains unified in the ways Jolivet marries the ancient and modern, tradition and innovation—from infectious rhythms inspired by the African drum circles Jolivet heard while traveling the continent to the soaring lyricism of the flute, which sings like a sorceress casting a spell before scurrying into a flight of wild, flutter-tongued fantasy.

Compared with Jolivet’s cross-continental style, the music that inspired Vincent d’Indy (1851–1931) hews closer to home—just over the border in Germany. D’Indy’s interest in the operas of Richard Wagner began during his studies at the Paris Conservatoire, but after seeing the first production of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung at Bayreuth, he became a “fervent Wagnerian.”

That fascination led to d’Indy’s belief that more German music should be performed in France, and in his position as secretary of the National Society of Music, he overturned the group’s long-standing rule that only French composers could be programmed on its concerts. Such a shake-up was controversial during a period of heated nationalism—sandwiched between the Franco-Prussian War and the powder keg of World War I—and yet, d’Indy persisted in his cause.

We can hear that siren song of German Romanticism laced throughout d’Indy’s Chansons et danses (1898) for seven wind instruments, a chamber ensemble that had become popular with audiences of the late 19th century. While the dances that permeate the second movement enchant the ear with the naivete and nostalgia of a cherished folk tune, the opening chanson calls to mind not the melancholy song of a French troubadour but the tranquil lullaby of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, which reappears after the final dance to close the work with a moment of delicate beauty.

Although some hear the sounds of North Africa and the Middle East evoked in the music of Marcel Tournier (1879–1951), the composer himself never traveled outside of France. In fact, of the four composers featured on this program, Tournier remains the most quintessentially French in his garden of inspiration, which remained rooted in the homegrown sounds of Ravel, Debussy, and Erik Satie.

But Tournier wasn’t just a prolific composer, with nearly 100 scores produced during his career—he was also a gifted harpist. At just 32, he was appointed harp professor at his alma mater, the Paris Conservatoire, and over his four-decade tenure, Tournier trained generations of harpists from around the world. As such, the harp features prominently in his compositions, whose innovation lies not in his musical style but in the ways he expanded the instrument’s technical possibilities at a time when the harp became an increasingly popular figure on the concert stage.

Tournier composed his first Sonatine (1924) for solo harp and drafted the version performed tonight for harp, violin, and cello about 15 years later. (Never published during the composer’s lifetime, the handwritten trio version was only recently discovered and recorded for the first time by Emmanuel Ceysson, the LA Phil’s principal harp.)

While the Sonatine’s three-movement form harks back to the Classical period, the work is truly Impressionistic in character. From the bubbly twists and turns of the first movement’s shifting harmonies to the central movement’s profound calm and an energetic finale in which the harpist’s fingers dance feverishly across the instrument’s strings, the voluptuous soundscapes Tournier creates quickly call to mind the music of his idols Debussy and Ravel.

Finally tonight, we come to Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924), the elder statesman of French music at the turn of the century, who set himself apart from his contemporaries in two ways. First was the intimacy of his music: Unlike those working furiously on symphonies and grand opera, Fauré focused almost exclusively on chamber music, art songs, and works for solo piano.

Then there’s the driving force of melody in his work. Fauré rejected one of the principal tenets of Western music theory, in which the bass line informs harmony. Instead, he composed from the top down: Melody, in addition to being the music’s lyrical top layer, drives the harmonic activity below. This technique likely stemmed from Fauré’s interest in Gregorian chant—monophonic sacred songs of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. But when it comes to Fauré’s String Quartet in E minor (1924), his only work in this genre, another influence lurks behind the scenes: Ludwig van Beethoven.

The German giant’s shadow loomed large over Fauré, whose friends begged him throughout his career to compose a quartet. But it wasn’t until his final months—at which point Fauré, like Beethoven, suffered from total hearing loss—that he began work on his only statement for four stringed instruments.

Like Beethoven’s final quartets, Fauré’s quartet resides in a realm of quiet contemplation, its ethereal harmonies and restrained, floating melodies—mirroring the meditative Gregorian chants that so fascinated Fauré—contributing to an ever-present sense of blossoming as the music progresses. The quartet moves through our minds like a hazy dream we long to piece together after waking, its mysteries captivating us long after the music fades to silence.

Composing such an austere swan song during the Roaring ’20s speaks to Fauré’s unshakable commitment to his individual style. For at the same time Fauré’s quartet closed the book on French Romanticism, Parisian audiences were increasingly swept away by a tidal wave of Modernism, from the fiery orchestral scores composed for the Ballets Russes to the humorous dance-hall-inspired music of the young composer collective Les Six—the latest contributions to the ever-evolving sounds of France.

—Michael Cirigliano II