Music Criticism in France, 1918–1939: Authority, Advocacy, Legacy ed. Barbara L. Kelly and Christopher Moore

Abstract

Reviewed by: Music Criticism in France, 1918–1939: Authority, Advocacy, Legacy ed. Barbara L. Kelly and Christopher Moore Alexander Carpenter Music Criticism in France, 1918–1939: Authority, Advocacy, Legacy. Edited by Barbara L. Kelly and Christopher Moore. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2018. [xii, 346 p. ISBN 9781783272518 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9781787442573 (e-book), $24.99.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Music Criticism in France, 1918–1939: Authority, Advocacy, Legacy is an edited collection comprised of an introduction and twelve essays by a range of contributors, including musicologists, music theorists, ethnomusicologists, and literary scholars. As editors Barbara L. Kelly and Christopher Moore note, the book is the outgrowth of a bilingual international workshop held at the University of Ottawa in 2011, which brought together scholars from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France to discuss common themes in the study of French interwar music criticism. At the outset, there are three important general observations to make about this book: it is the first detailed study of its kind; it does not focus exclusively on the big names in French art music but also on their critics and on the discourse of criticism, to provide a broader study of interwar French culture; and it offers a multifaceted approach that combines the examination and analysis of archival documents and critical writing. As such it contributes to a growing field of music criticism as a branch of contemporary musicology in its own right. The editors' introduction provides a neat and clearly written summary of the main concerns of the essays that follow. It identifies the key problems of music criticism in France's interwar period, which are addressed in a variety of ways by the contributors to this volume. There is a clear focus on the French musical canon and on the unremitting conflict between past and present in French musical culture, which is exacerbated by the deaths of the doyens of French music—Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, and Camille Saint-Saëns—and pressurized by the emergence of new contemporary music, all within the context of the often highly politicized French music press. Indeed, the political role played by music criticism is perhaps the main theme of this volume, with politics encompassing everything from nationalism and the construction of French cultural identity to the internecine struggles of French composers and critics during the aesthetically unstable years between the world wars. The introduction concludes with the assertion that Music Criticism in France provides insights not only into the interwar period in question but also into our modern era, arguing that competing forces—conservative and [End Page 609] progressive—create "multiple narratives" that shape musical culture, and that the effects of this shaping carries over into the future, reminding us that "our perspective is not the only one and that our musical values, our canon and even our current analytical methods have been shaped by debates in the past" (p. 16). The first essay in the collection, "Music Criticism and Aesthetics during the Interwar Period: Fewer Crimes and More Punishments" by Michel Duchesneau, provides a fine example of the admirable clarity of writing that characterizes this entire volume and offers a solid overview of the "crisis of criticism" (p. 28) in interwar France, defined by the conflict between impressionistic and scientific criticism. Christopher Moore's "Nostalgia and Violence in the Music Criticism of L'action française" is a timely contribution that directly addresses the theme of criticism and politics by examining the practice of musical and cultural criticism in right-wing, nationalistic newspapers and the role played by criticism in the service of political ideology. In "Charles Koechlin: The Figure of the Expert," Philippe Cathé engages with one of French music criticism's most prominent figures, who surfaces frequently throughout Music Criticism in France. Cathé's essay presents Koechlin as a composer-critic of greater "breadth and range" (p. 65) than Debussy or Fauré and as a critic whose writing demonstrates not only a high literary quality but also significant technical chops. Jann Pasler describes the emergent radio technology in the interwar period in "Bleu-horizon Politics and Music for Radio Listeners: L'initiation à la musique (1935)." She notes the increasing importance of radio in...