Of significance as the sole female member of the post-World War I group of French composers known as Les Six, Germaine Tailleferre remained a prominent-if somewhat inaccessible--musician long after the disintegration of that group during the mid-/late-1920s, and she left behind, at her death in 1983 at the age of ninety-one, an extensive body of work representing almost seventy years of active composition.

Tailleferre was born to a family living in the outskirts of Paris on April 19, 1892. Despite having exposed young Germaine to music from an early age, Tailleferre's parents considered music to be an inappropriate activity for a young lady, and it was not until her twelfth year that Tailleferre convinced them to allow her to pursue serious studies at the Paris Conservatoire, where she studied accompaniment, harmony, and counterpoint (eventually taking first prizes in all); during the years following her graduation she received a few informal lessons in orchestration from Maurice Ravel.

While a student at the Conservatoire Tailleferre had met composers Auric, Milhaud and Honegger, and, after the premiere of her String Quartet in 1918, she was invited to join the Nouveaux Jeunes, a group of young composers who identified with the aesthetic of satirical composer Erik Satie and playwright Jean Cocteau which, with the addition of Tailleferre, Durey, and Poulenc, soon became known as Les Six, though not by their own choosing. Tailleferre married twice, a 1926 marriage to American author Ralph Barton being dissolved after a very short while in favor of a new alliance with French lawyer Jean Lageat. In 1974 she released an autobiography, -Mémoires à l'emporte pièce.

Like the other members of Les Six, Tailleferre's commitment to progressive musical ideas during the early 1920s earned her something of a notoriety throughout the Parisian musical establishment. Nevertheless, her music never abandoned its allegiance to the traditional French "voice" as passed down to her from Fauré through Ravel, and the seductive grace and charm of her work are perhaps best summed up by Cocteau's famous assessment of Tailleferre as the musical equivalent to painter Marie Laurencin. The Chansons francaises for voice and piano (1930) and the well-known Overture for orchestra (1932) are sparkling (and quintessentially French) in their light-hearted, rather humorous use of "modernist" tendencies. In later years she experimented with serialism, though this music has not received the attention awarded her earlier works. ~ Blair Johnston, Rovi