JANE F. FULCHER. The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914-1940. New York: Oxford University Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 473. $74.00

Abstract

Although it seems to be the most apolitical of all arts, music has ever been an instrument of what Pierre Bourdieu calls “symbolic power.” The ideological function of music was especially emphasized in France during the Third Republic. In the wake of growing competition with Germany, music was nationalized and came to represent national culture and identity. This process reached its peak during World War I, when music was assigned the patriotic task of unifying the national community. The musical canon itself was at stake: French music was to be promoted and the German influence in France, especially that of Richard Wagner, to be combated. How did composers react to these ideological constraints? Far from retreating into an ivory tower, French composers responded by committing themselves as intellectuals. The material and symbolic benefits they could obtain by endorsing the public role the state assigned them were important: promotion of French composers in programs, public commands, financial support for institutions. As Jane F. Fulcher puts it, “the dominance now being exercised by the state was powerful precisely because, in the interests of ideological hegemony, it played upon deeply rooted professional concerns” (p. 34). But, as she demonstrates in this very thorough and comprehensive inquiry, the response was never direct. Using concepts such as ideology, cultural hegemony, and symbolic domination as well as Bourdieu's theory of cultural fields, she shows that the political constraints were refracted or mediated through the specific issues and stakes of the French musical field. This relational (anti-essentialist) approach allows her to analyze the ideological struggles between the right and the left for appropriating the most legitimate references of the canon such as Ludwig van Beethoven, described either as revolutionary or as religious, while excluding contemporary composers like Wagner, Arnold Schoenberg, or Darius Milhaud as representative of German romanticism as opposed to French classicism, modern as opposed to classical style, foreign (Jewish) as opposed to French.