No 1: Minuit passe No 2: La ruelle No 3: Le cimetière No 4: La
mer He wrote the pieces between 1900 and 1907, but they were not
published until 1913. Whatever the reason for the delay (perhaps
no other publisher would take them seriously?), Decaux’s teacher
Massenet died in 1912 and so was spared what would surely have
been a rude shock, not so much at the technique—as Richard
Taruskin has pointed out, everything stems from the two falling
bell motives at the outset (major second, major third; minor
second, minor third)—as at the extraordinary harmonies and the
no less extraordinary syntax. Whole tone aggregations (as at the
beginning of ‘La ruelle’) and consecutive fifths were nothing so
out-of-the-way around 1900, but some of Decaux’s chords seem to
have been taken from a source such as the songs in Schoenberg’s
Das Buch der hängenden Gärten; the only problem being that these
weren’t written until 1909. Throughout, major and minor triads
are scrupulously avoided or else, as in ‘La mer’, coloured
persistentl