Composer, Author. He was born in Paris and had an early interest in music. Instead of pursuing his true vocation, he followed the wishes of his family to study engineering. Koechlin’s heart, however, was not in his studies and he did poorly, failing many of his classes. He eventually won the struggle with his family to study music and was accepted by the Paris Conservatoire in 1890. Among his teacher were Jules Massenet and his fellow-pupils included George Enescu, Reynaldo Hahn and Florent Schmitt. In 1896, Koechlin began studying with Gabriel Fauré, who had a major influence on the development of Koechlin’s Impressionist style of music. Upon his graduation, Koechlin became more widely known for his work as an orchestrator, theorist and teacher than for his own music. His many books on music include a multi-volume treatise on orchestration, one of the most extensive of its kind. Among his students were Germaine Tailleferre and Francis Poulenc, as well as film and television composer Lalo Schifrin. Koechlin's skill and reputation as a superb orchestrator counted Saint-Saëns, Fauré, and Debussy among composers who entrusted to him with the orchestration of several of their own works. He orchestrated a suite from Faure’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Debussy's ballet, Khamma s Koechlin's own music is distinctive but not as dramatic as his contemporaries such as Debussy or Ravel. His melodies are more subtle and long, broadly colored with continuous development instead of a melody one can go away whistling. Among his most popular works are the tone poems written to depict portions of Kipling’s Jungle Book, which he wrote over a longer period of years. He had a deep affection for the cinema and celebrated seven film stars (Douglas Fairbanks, Lilian Harvey, Greta Garbo, Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, Emil Jannings, and Charlie Chaplin in his Seven Stars Symphony (1933). His cinema works included Five Dances for Ginger [Rogers] (1937) and Epitaphe de Jean Harlow (1937). He visited the USA four times to lecture and teach in 1918-19, 1928, 1929 and 1937. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1928 – 29 and his symphonic poem La Joie païenne won the Hollywood Bowl Prize for Composition in 1929. Koechlin was a political radical all of his life. Although he was never a member of the Communist Party, he subscribed to their beliefs and promoted the idea of “Music for the People.” In 1940, the French government offered him the award of Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, but he refused it. Following an illness in 1888, he became an avid swimmer, mountaineer and tennis player. He was an enthusiastic nature-mystic and held pantheistic views rather than subscribing to Christianity.