Loading details…
Artist
Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray
5+ albums
frenchClassicalImpressionistromanticImpressionism
about
Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray (2 February 1840 – 4 July 1910) was a French Breton composer, pianist, and professor of music history/theory at the Conservatoire de Paris. He was born at Nantes and died at Vernouillet, near Dreux. Among his many pupils were Charles Koechlin and Claude Debussy. His bucolic upbringing near the family estate of Grézillières certainly added to his eventual fascination with the folklore, music, and culture of Brittany and other nations. Later in life, Bourgault would support the Breton Regionalist Union, a Celtic organization indebted to the propagation of Breton culture, ideals, and the notions of independence. Bourgault was one of the first western European composers to be influenced by what is now known as world music. His devotion led many other elite composers including his student, Debussy, to study it more intensely. One of his more obsessive interests lay in pentatonic Eastern scales. Anachronistic for the time, he composed a two part work in 1882 called Rapsodie cambodgienne, or "Kampuchean Rhapsody," with genuine gamelan instruments and Cambodian musical themes. The eventual performance of this piece in 1889 was spurred on by Bourgault and Debussy's attending of the World's Fair in Paris during the latter half of 1889. This turned out to be the first Western gamelan piece ever written, although Debussy's efforts are more well known. Between 1883 and 1892 Louis met with Peter Tchaikovsky a number of times to discuss the burgeoning Rus