Yvonne Desportes

It is all delicacy, all femininity, attested by a marked predilection for ternary measures and rhythms, evoking with a pleasant spontaneaity, a touching freshness of feeling.

Paul Bertrand wrote in his annual review that "Her Cantata was perhaps, out of all of them, the most homogeneous and the most skilful [sic] by a keen sense of progressions and contrast.

Without sacrificing to excess the intrinsic quality of the music, she subordinated it to the drama, and notably gave to the Romance a colour at once simple and moving, enveloped the drinking song in a picturesque fantasy.

[6] In her dissertation Musiciennes: Women Musicians in France during the Interwar Years, 1919-1939, Laura Ann Hamer discusses Desportes's win and her life struggles.

The Institut de France's "awarding of the Premier Grand Prix to Desportes in 1931 [sic], at a time when the French government actively sought to marginalise women within the domestic sphere and to exclude them from public life, suggests that women were sufficiently accepted by the Académie des Beaux-Arts to allow them to award their highest prize to a young mother, whose divorce and determination to succeed as a musician represented a significant flouting of normal social conventions in interwar France".

[6] Her compositional style, though influenced by the Baroque period, swayed more toward the "rich orchestral palette of the Russian Five […] and the harmonic language of Ravel and early Stravinsky.

[12] The use of a name represented by notes was also used in Desportes’s saxophone and harp duet, Une fleur sur l’étang (a flower on the pond).

"As the title suggests, this is a programmatic work, and each of the three movements reflects a different character: the first, a driving, fanfare-type movement, expresses a martial character; the second, a love duet, is musically realized by trumpet and trombone; and the third, a lively dance with intense use of changing meters, includes a host of variations in the subdivision of eight-eight and ten-eight meters.

Despite a fair amount of high tessitura playing, especially for the first trumpet, the work is, in general, comfortably written, and filled with the coloration of quartal and polyharmonies that are surefire staples of brass writing.

"[14] In a book written by Michel Gemingnani, Desportes's son, Gemignani collected tributes from colleagues and students of his mother: "You reaped numerous prizes at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris, but you learned to develop an inner sense of beautiful work, music that breathes with the heart, and devotion to others."

[16] "Pedagogy, outside of the transmission of knowledge, implies a high sensitivity and a psychological sense adapted to the students oh which one must guess slow progress, hesitations, and trial and error.

Yvonne Desportes possessed these faculties in the highest form, knowing to be strict, severe even when he fails, but also encourage the student when he loses his step."

[6] Hamer describes how Desportes "wrote a number of works for her eldest son, the percussionist Vincent Gemignani, including the Concerto pour percussion et orchestre (1963).

Played with a bow or with hammers, this 'sound sculpture' can produce a wide array of sounds (spreading from the absolute deepest to the very highest) in totally original colours and uncommonly sensual keys which are both profound and mysterious.