somewhere in the 1980's I saw, together with a friend, a documentary made in the 1970's by Dutch broadcaster VPRO about the Interbellum years 1920 - 1939.
It was called 'De Twintiger en Dertiger Jaren' (the Twenties and Thirties).
Apart from that it showed unique and interesting archive material, it was a landmark production also for its use of music.
Ever since we saw it there was one piece of music that we never could identify. That friend happens to be quite a classical music lover, so it definitely isn't something from the standard repertoire. We asked many other people, and in the past few years I also tried music here on the site, which comes with a load of suggestions but, no luck so far.
The piece is used several times during the programme, often with a voice-over cutting in at some point. This is the main theme from the used fragment:
search Musipedia for this
I copied it from the DVD and uploaded it to Soundcloud here.
We think the best chances are that it's an unknown piece of program music written between 1880 and 1920, maybe 1930. It is an highly romantic orchestral work and one of the themes is set in a habanera rhythm (or at least, that's my friend's guess - I don't particularly hear a habanera in there).
The feeling of one of the themes is that it is meant to depict a sunrise scene complete with suggested birdsong (though it is certainly not by Messiaen :p - and it's not very much like Ravel's Daphnis & Cloë either).
It would be great if anyone could help identifying this!
kind regards, Luthien
PS - I think the music notation of the them didn't work. It didn't in the preview at least. I don't know what I did wrong: I checked a couple of times, and it seems the code is OK. Here it is without the L tags:
g'2 a'2 a'2 b'2 b'2 c''2 e''2 d''2 d''4 c''8 d''8 c''4 a'8 c''8 a'2 b'2 r8 d''8 c''8 d''8 c''4 a'8 c''8 a'2 b'2
(incidentally, the commentator in the fragment talks about the Dutch election results of 1937)