In Search of a Consolatory Past

Abstract

Abstract This chapter investigates how interwar French musicians understood music making as an embodied memorial practice. Using archival sources such as soliders’ and musicians’ diaries and correspondence, concert programs, and journals like the Gazette des Classes du Conservatoire, this chapter demonstrates that Maurice Ravel, Marguerite Long, Nadia Boulanger, and Darius Milhaud were among the many French musicians who understood musical practices such as composing, listening, and performing as crucial sites for maintaining connections with lost loved ones. By situating these sources within the context of popular fin-de-siècle theories of corporeal memory posited by Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust, as well as spiritist and French Catholic memorial practices, this chapter shows how making music facilitated mourning by permitting musicians to recall corporeally the feeling of being in the presence of those they mourned.