Charles-Louis-Eugène Koechlin (1867–1950) was a prolific French composer who was a founding member of the Société musicale indépendante along with Maurice Ravel, Gabriel Fauré, and Florent Schmitt. He is remembered today largely for two works: *Les Heures persanes* and *The Seven Stars Symphony,* a seven-movement symphony where each movement is themed around a different film star from the silent film era.

Koechlin attended the Paris Conservatoire beginning in 1890, studying with Jules Massenet and Gabriel Fauré, whose biography he would later write; Koechlin also orchestrated Fauré’s incidental music for *Pelléas et Mélisande*, which Fauré drew from in order to create the suite following the play’s run in London. His own work spanned an incredibly wide range of styles from early impressionism owing a debt to Hector Berlioz and Fauré, to Baroque counterpoint, to post-Schönbergian atonalism. Unfortunately, much of his later large-scale work was ignored during his lifetime due to the push toward neoclassicism and serialism while Koechlin’s orchestral work was mostly written as tone poems and symphonic songs for large forces. An additional reason several of his works remain rare to see in performance is that he had a tendency to write for unusual instruments. For example, his *Symphony No. 2* calls for *four separate Ondes Martenot* parts in one movement. Even when the piece is performed, that movement is often omitted.

Aside from his compositional output, Koechlin was also a noted teacher, counting among his pupils Germaine Tailleferre, Francis Poulenc, and Cole Porter, and has several textbooks to his name: one on harmony (in three volumes), one on music theory, one on orchestration (in four volumes), and one on counterpoint. These books influenced other composers such as Paul Dukas and Darius Milhaud, the latter of which claims that he learned more from Koechlin than he did from any other teacher despite not having a teacher-student relationship with Koechlin.