Charles Koechlin

The New Groves gives his complete name as Koechlin, Charles (Louis Eugène), where the use of brackets indicate optionality for the 'Louis Eugène' bits; whereas Wikipedia lists him as Charles-Louis-Eugène Koechlin commonly known as Charles Koechlin, which puts a slightly different slant on things. I can find no other source using hyphenated first names (IMSP doesn't do so, for example), and in any case all his scores and autographs appear to mention just “Ch. Koechlin” (though sometimes the o and e are written as the grapheme œ, just to liven things up a bit!) In a sense, therefore, it doesn't matter: he gets catalogued as plain 'Charles Koechlin' regardless.

He was of course French, being born in Paris in 1867 and living until as late as 1950 -despite a youthful bout of tuberculosis. He was a pupil of Fauré whilst studying at the Paris Conservatory in the 1890s. He mostly earned his living during the 1900s as a music critic and theorist, but Debussy thought well enough of him as a composer to ask him to orchestrate his Khamma in 1913. Nevertheless, his own music compositions fell mostly into instant obscurity. Koechlin's music has been described as 'ranging from a state of demonic energy to a diaphonous luminosity which arises from chords using superimposed 4ths or 5ths'. His output was huge (New Groves lists opus numbers in the 200s), with a couple of symphonies, tonnes of orchestral songs, symphonic tone poems and chamber music by the bucket-load. He often wrote for unusual instruments, notably the saxophone and the early electronic instrument the Ondes Martenot, for example.