Charles Koechlin (1867-1950) trained at the Paris Conservatoire between 1890 and 1897. He studied with Jules Massenet, Gabriel Fauré and André Gedalge, later orchestrating (in part) Fauré’s incidental music Pelléas et Mélisande Op. 80. Music dictionaries indicate Koechlin was a late developer and, like Darius Milhaud, was an extremely prolific composer reaching 226 opus numbers, including over a hundred miniatures. He is best known today as a pedeagogue and the teacher of Cole Porter, Francis Poulenc and a generation of French composers. Koechlin became fascinated with early sound film. He experimented with film music, writing a number of works and ‘imaginary’ film scores inspired by watching silent and talking movies in Paris, mainly 1930s films starring the American-German actress and singer Lilian Harvey (1906-1968) and, later, Ginger Rogers and Jean Harlow, as recounted in the lecture here by British musicologist and French music scholar Robert Orledge.