French Music Research Articles

Aesthetic and Interpretive Approaches in French Music for Saxophone. Robert Planel – Prelude et Saltarella

Although he knows the saxophone thanks to the leadership of the orchestra, P. Boulez won't write for sax players because the instrument evokes too much variety and jazz, and at the Conservatory he will not be close to the sax players of the "marginal" class (to use his words) of Professor M. Mule. However, the Paris Conservatoire is an undeniable cradle of composition in terms of works including the saxophone. The number of composers who liked this instrument, students in the classes of Nadia Boulanger, mainly, but also of Olivier Messiaen, Darius Milhaud, Paul Dukas and Andre Jolivet, is impressive, so it is clear how important their influence is and the number of works dedicated to saxophone.

Singing the English: Britain in the French Musical Lowbrow, 1870–1904. By Hannah L. Scott

<i>Singing the English: Britain in the French Musical Lowbrow, 1870–1904</i>. By Hannah L. Scott

Katharine Ellis, French Musical Life. Local Dynamics in the Century to World War ii

Katharine Ellis, French Musical Life. Local Dynamics in the Century to World War ii

Canonic Repertoires and the French Musical Press: Lully to Wagner by William Weber with Beverly Wilcox (review)

Canonic Repertoires and the French Musical Press: Lully to Wagner by William Weber with Beverly Wilcox (review)

French Musical Life: Local Dynamics in the Century to World War II, by Katharine Ellis

<i>French Musical Life: Local Dynamics in the Century to World War II</i>, by Katharine Ellis

Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars by Jillian C. Rogers

Reviewed by: Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars by Jillian C. Rogers Sharon L. Fairchild Rogers, Jillian C. Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars. Oxford UP, 2021. ISBN 978-0190658298. Pp. 364. Resonant Recoveries makes valuable contributions to the fields of musicology and music therapy by examining how French musicians during and after World War I used music to cope with the traumas they experienced. Rogers intentionally focuses on the emotional lives of composers and performers. She analyzes how music functioned in musicians' lives not only in coping with trauma, but also by supporting recovery and healing, by memorializing lost loved ones, and providing release via humor. In addition to music research, the book includes investigations in the fields of the history of psychology, medicine, and literature. It is a cultural history of French musical modernism that contrasts with previous representations of the period as les années folles dominated by jazz, dance music, musical theater, and surrealism. Through imagining what musicians must have been experiencing emotionally, Rogers provides an intimate understanding of famous musicians and artists of the period such as Ravel, Satie, Debussy, Stravinsky, Cocteau, and Boulanger. Rogers' overarching premise is that the trauma musicians experienced during the war led them to feel music as an embodied, therapeutic means of coping, and she analyzes how this manifested itself in four ways. Rogers first examines the subject of trauma and how it was viewed in the past. In an era that did not recognize post-traumatic stress disorder, society privileged a heroic self-sacrificing version of masculinity, while the expression of trauma and emotion was suppressed. Yet, while early musical pieces reflected these values, musician-soldiers found that performing or listening to music during the war provided a means to express their repressed trauma. Secondly, the author examines the late 19th century development of the field of music therapy during which psychologists discovered that trauma could be treated by vibratory sounds and music. Musical rhythm became recognized as being beneficial for physical and mental health. Through a study of musician-soldiers' letters, diaries, and other documents, Rogers shows that French musicians were aware of these theories; they frequently described their musical experiences during the war as a consolatory, vibrational therapeutic medium that impacted them physically. Another way that modernist composers found solace was through a particular style that Rogers examines in several music scores. This is the style dépouillé, found in works by Ravel, Satie, Poulenc, Stravinsky, and others. Rogers characterizes their compositions as having a repetitive, ostinato, rhythmic style, which helped mourning musicians process grief and satisfied their need for stability, regularity, and comfort. Artists also found that performing and composing music enabled them to memorialize and sense the presence of lost loved ones. Lastly, modernist composers and playwrights created spaces for healing laughter in musical-theatrical performances. Starting with Dada and Surrealism, Rogers examines collaborative projects of [End Page 219] artists such as Stravinsky and Cocteau whose humorous and absurd musical productions provided places in which to process wartime trauma. The innovative approach of this book is especially notable for its compassionate portrayal of the formerly overlooked emotional struggles of this generation of musicians. [End Page 220] Sharon L. Fairchild Texas Christian University, emerita Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

French Music in Britain, 1830–1914 by Paul Rodmell (review)

French Music in Britain, 1830–1914 by Paul Rodmell (review)

Themes of Christian Spirituality, New Plastic Forms and Perception of Visual Formulas in the XXth Century French Musical and Theatrical Works

For the first time, the author of this article considered a set of themes related to Christian spirituality in the works by P. Claudel, A. Honegger and O. Messiaen which were created for the XXth century French synthetic theater and offered a new reading into the holiness and Christian behavior. New plastic forms of stage movement and dance, which depicted modern ways of organizing stage space, have been defined as an integral part of French works for musical theatre. What has also been found is the results of perceiving visual formulas in some of the XIIIth and XVth cenury paintings. Special plastic forms, which are subject to the laws of dance, shaped about a concept of "dancing form" in the XXth century French musical and theatrical works. In synthetic musical and theatrical works, a game of form, proportions, light and color was designed. Some XXth century French playwrights and musicians perceiving visual formulas in the XIIIth and XVth century paintings led to expanding the range of interacting elements pertaining to various arts in several musical and theatrical works. Those by P. Claudel, A. Honegger and O. Messiaen play a significant role on the stage and reveal both a “considerate attitude towards the past” and “mediation with modern life”, as H. G. Gadamer said.

Singing the English: Britain in the French Musical Lowbrow, 1870–1904 by Hannah L. Scott

Reviewed by: Singing the English: Britain in the French Musical Lowbrow, 1870–1904 by Hannah L. Scott Claire Moran Singing the English: Britain in the French Musical Lowbrow, 1870–1904. By Hannah L. Scott. London and New York: Routledge. 2022. ix+ 254 pp. £96. ISBN 978-0-367-81543-1. Scholarship in nineteenth-century French Studies has, in recent years, increasingly highlighted the need to address the complexity of everyday lived experience and unravel the myths which have shaped our perceptions of the period. Hannah L. Scott's remarkable study of British popular music in late nineteenth-century France offers a fascinating glimpse into French cultural life in an extraordinary period of the country's history. The focus on British music in a study concerned with France may, as Scott points out wryly in her Introduction, 'strike the reader with some surprise' (p. 2) since, as the influential French musical theorist François-Joseph Fétis put it, 'the English [are] on the lowest rung of the ladder of musical talent' (p. 2). However, through her engaging, well-documented, and well-illustrated study, Scott makes a compelling case for the influence of British lowbrow music in shaping modern France. Singing the English revalorizes the centrality of popular British music for 'exploring, negotiating and mediating national identity and the importance of Britain in Third Republican society, politics and culture' (p. 12). The book comprises an Introduction, four chapters, and an Epilogue, and also includes a comprehensive appendix of café-concert songs about the English. The Introduction offers a much-needed contextual overview, all the while citing the pervasiveness of representations of les Anglais in French culture, most notably in literature, and Scott calls attention to the many minor and central figures such as the chronically melancholic Lord Ewald of Villiers d'Isle-Adam's L'Ève future, the courageous yet angelic Miss Clifton in Hector Malot's Souvenirs d'un blessé, and the sadistic English femme fatale Clara in Mirbeau's Le Jardin des supplices. The first chapter focuses on comic songs from French popular theatres in which French performers pretended to be English and where 'Englishing up' was the trend. The second explores the phenomenon of the Salvation Army band and its noisy presence on the streets of Paris, while the third discusses the French reception of Celtic folk music and includes analyses of translations and arrangements of songs by Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and Thomas Moore. The last chapter discusses the place of music in French travel writing and emphasizes how 'music and sound become fundamental axes in the French mental conception of British character and culture' (p. 185). Singing the English captures the essence of Britishness through nineteenth-century French eyes. It is both entertaining and illuminating, offering glimpses into a French mindset via a host of intriguing texts and archival documents. Paul Bourget's 1889 description of the aural impression of a Salvation Army band is a case in point: 'suddenly, a blast of trumpets bursts out, accompanied by strange singing. […] [A] man begins a sort of yelled prayer; his head is thrown back, his mouth is twisted, his eyes are turned backwards in his head. He calls out "the Lord, the Lord…". An expression of despair or ecstasy can be seen upon every face' (p. 85). Scott navigates texts and documents such as these with ease and [End Page 141] skill, highlighting the linguistic specificities and visual imaginaire that they draw upon. Overall, her analysis of the popular songs, performances, and traditions that represented Britishness in nineteenth-century France offers important insights into the relationship between France and Britain. It is, as she argues in her Epilogue, a relationship which continues to be influenced by popular music, and she cites the dozens of songs by artists from Mick Jagger to Bertrand Cantat which attempted to 'influence, mock, critique and occasionally praise the outcome of the June 2016 referendum' (p. 227). Singing the English is an excellent book which, in its careful and rigorous interdisciplinary scholarship, shows the importance of the nineteenth century in shaping modern life. Claire Moran Queen's University Belfast Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

A Brief Analysis of Romanticism in French Musical Mozart-l'Opéra Rock

The French musical Mozart-l'Opéra Rock is a romantic musical genre work with Mozart as the narrator. It premiered in 2009, with lyrics by Dove Attia and others, composed by Vincent Baguian et al. Romanticism is an ideological and cultural movement, like realism, both are the product of Western bourgeois society in the 18th and 19th centuries. Romanticism takes the pursuit of ideals as its creative focus, and creates fantastic artistic images with strong subjective lyricism. In terms of expression, fantastic fantasy, strong contrast, brilliant colors, high rhythm, exaggerated language, and bizarre plots are often used. The text analyzes the romanticism from three aspects: the creative group of the work, the lyrics and lines, and the stage performance.

Canonic Repertories and the French Musical Press: Lully to WagnerWilliam Weber Beverly Wilcox

Canonic Repertories and the French Musical Press: Lully to WagnerWilliam Weber Beverly Wilcox

Canonic Repertories and the French Musical Press: Lully to Wagner

Canonic Repertories and the French Musical Press: Lully to Wagner

Nadia Boulanger and Her World, edited by Jeanice Brooks

<i>Nadia Boulanger and Her World</i>, edited by Jeanice Brooks

Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham: Dances in Literature and Cinema by Hannah Durkin

Reviewed by: Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham: Dances in Literature and Cinema by Hannah Durkin Joanna Dee Das Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham: Dances in Literature and Cinema. By Hannah Durkin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. pp. xiii + 256. $99.00 cloth, $27.95 paper, $14.95 e-book. Hannah Durkin's Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham: Dances in Literature and Cinema pairs two of the twentieth century's most famous dancers to address [End Page 173] questions of Black women's authorship in a transatlantic context. Scholars have paid much more attention to Baker and Dunham's live stage performances than to their written or cinematic work, and this book aims to fill that gap. Though the two women had distinct career trajectories, Durkin compellingly argues for examining them together, given that "both women adopt self-reflexive narrative voices and explore dance to communicate radical narratives of Black female subjectivity" in a mid-century context (13). Durkin shows how both women intervened in racist structures to insist on the authority of their own voices. The first two chapters focus on literary works. Chapter 1, "The Dancer in Translation: Baker's Coauthored Narratives," takes Baker's memoirs seriously as sources of understanding Baker's negotiation of racism on multiple continents. Durkin asserts that despite the fact that these early memoirs were coauthored by white men, Baker's voice comes through and she still is able to challenge primitivist and exoticizing narrative tropes that framed her. Importantly, Durkin analyzes untranslated memoirs written in French, for the most part overlooked by scholars writing in English. Chapter 2, "The Dancer as Translator: Dunham's Ethnographic Memoirs," examines Katherine Dunham's Journey to Accompong (1946) and Island Possessed (1969) as literary works that have been overlooked because of how they blur genre categories. Dunham's memoirs offer a penetrating look at the subjective nature of anthropological research, as she constantly questions the ethnographer's "perceived position of authority" (57). They also, as Durkin writes, offer "an important literary account of Dunham's intellectual development and debt to Caribbean artistry" (69). Chapter 3, "Performing within Primitivism: Baker on the French Silent Screen" applies a well-rehearsed argument to new materials: that through dance, Black subjects carve out space for agency within oppressive structures. This argument has also been made with reference to Baker before by scholars such as Mae Henderson and Michael Borshuk, as "ambivalence" (93) and "ambiguity" (97) are terms frequently associated with Baker. While Durkin's argument is therefore not groundbreaking, her analysis of two silent French films, La Revue des revues (1927) and Sirène des tropiques (1929), adds important documentation of Baker's dancing to the existing literature. Refreshingly, Durkin specifies the African American vaudeville tradition from which Baker derived her material, describing specific dance steps (Pecking, the Itch, the Mess Around, etc.) as she analyzes the films. Contextualizing the reception of Sirène among Black cinema-goers in the United States was also helpful to read. Chapter 4, "Cinematic Stardom: Baker and the 1930s French Musical Film" continues in the same vein: Durkin reiterates the argument that Baker's films Zouzou (1934) and Princesse Tam-Tam (1935) "reinforce her image as an exotic [End Page 174] Other" but also "grant Baker some control over her dance scenes, enabling her to articulate a self-referential screen image that intervenes in and disrupts racial binaries" (106). Durkin emphasizes the difference between the French film industry, which framed Baker as a glamorous star, and Hollywood, which excluded Black women from ideas of glamor, beauty, or stardom. In particular, the French films featured Baker as a glamorous icon who could sing in the delicate chanson style; Durkin notes that when Baker replicated such a performance for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 on Broadway, white American theatre critics judged her harshly for straying outside of the bounds of acceptable Black performance. Unlike Baker, Dunham did have to take on Hollywood racial codes. Durkin's goal in chapter 5 echoes that of the previous four chapters: to "investigate the ambiguities resulting from Dunham's attempts to resist screen stereotypes" (136) and to conclude that "Dunham worked within such limitations to present an artistically and aesthetically...

Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song, by Rachel May Golden

Review| December 01 2021 Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song, by Rachel May Golden Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song, by Rachel MayGolden. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. xviii, 284 pp. Jennifer Saltzstein Jennifer Saltzstein JENNIFER SALTZSTEIN is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry (D. S. Brewer, 2013). Her article “Rape and Repentance in Two Medieval Motets” (this Journal, 2017) received the H. Colin Slim Award of the American Musicological Society. Her current book project explores relationships between song, landscape, and identity in medieval northern France. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2021) 74 (3): 673–677. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2021.74.3.673 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jennifer Saltzstein; Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song, by Rachel May Golden. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 December 2021; 74 (3): 673–677. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2021.74.3.673 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search In Mapping Medieval Identities, Rachel May Golden explores the topic of crusade in the songs of twelfth-century Occitania, illustrating how song became a vehicle for the formation of crusader identity. This identity, she underscores, was forged collaboratively by knights and monks: crusade rhetoric appears first in the Latin monastic versus genre and subsequently in vernacular songs written by troubadour-crusaders. Golden illustrates the ways in which many crusade songs worked to articulate a geography of the crusade journey in which songs, through their lyrics and melodies, mapped a spatialized exploration of the experience of crusade and its dynamics of place and movement. Golden’s contention that crusade songs “acted as means for negotiating imagined and real geographies” (p. 233) relies fundamentally on relationships between lyrics and melody. Her close readings of such relationships explore how some songwriters combined music and words to articulate the geography and temporality of crusade. Golden argues... You do not currently have access to this content.

French Musical: history and specificity of the genre

French Musical is &amp;ldquo;younger&amp;rdquo; than the Broadway, popular; however, there is yet no serious scientific approach towards its examination. The subject of this research is nationalization of the French Musical in historical and genre contexts. The goal is to disclose role of French Musical as a relatively young genre on the theoretical level. The article employs the interdisciplinary approach, which involves the scientific theories and concepts from other fields; historical-culturological approach, which reveals the factors contributing to assimilation of French culture with the traditions of other cultures; systemic approach aimed at examination of professional performance in French Musical as a result of development of the genre in late XX &amp;ndash; early XXI centuries. The scientific novelty consists in introduction of the previously missing biographical materials and new information on the establishment and development of the genre of French Musical and its national specificity. The theoretical significance lies in characterization of the concepts of &amp;ldquo;French Musical&amp;rdquo;, &amp;ldquo;popular culture&amp;rdquo;, &amp;ldquo;interpretation of classical music&amp;rdquo;, &amp;ldquo;musical performance&amp;rdquo; in the context of art history knowledge, as well as methodology of science. The practical significance lies in broader understanding of the role of establishment and proliferation of French Musical, comparison of the use of chanson and jazz in the Musicals of France and the United States. The main result consists the statement that French Musical contains the key to understanding the French people, their thought pattern, and tastes. This genre allows them to express and defend their values and uniqueness.

Critical Responses to Nineteenth-Century French Music

Critical Responses to Nineteenth-Century French Music

‘Distant Reading’ in French Music Criticism

This article offers a series of experiments exploring the potential for ‘distant reading’ in French music criticism. ‘Distant reading’, a term first coined by literary theorist Franco Moretti, refers to quantitative approaches that allow for new insights into a large corpus of texts by aggregating data. While the main corpus employed here is the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris (1831–1877), I also use secondary corpora of reviews of Félicien David's Herculanum in 1859, Berlioz's reviews of Gluck and Beethoven in the Journal des débats and reviews that mention Gabriel Fauré in the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America database. My experiments employ a text analysis tool named Voyant, built by Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair, thereby also offering a basic introduction to the range of visualizations employed in distant reading. My experiments focus on areas in which quantitative methods are particularly well suited to generating new knowledge: corpus-wide visualizations and queries, moving beyond traditional text searching, investigations of music critics’ authorial styles and detecting sentiment in reviews, and finally, to geographies of music criticism.

From Royalty to Riots: Nation and Class in the Reception of French Musical Theater in London

From Royalty to Riots:Nation and Class in the Reception of French Musical Theater in London Erica Levenson (bio) Of the many foreigners to thrive on the early eighteenth-century London stage, George Frideric Handel has most consistently garnered the attention of scholars.1 Yet alongside Handel's now canonic opere serie, more ephemeral, light-hearted entertainments flourished in the margins of high culture. When French acting troupes from Paris arrived in London in 1718, they quickly became showstoppers. Their repertoire had been shaped predominantly in Paris's fairground theaters, but also in the city's official theatrical institutions—the Comédie-Italienne and the Comédie-Française. Their performances blended music with dance and acrobatics with spoken comedy and often revolved around the stock characters from commedia dell'arte. Over the next two decades, French acting troupes, consisting of up to seventy members, performed nearly two hundred distinct musical comedies in London.2 While French dancers and commedia dell'arte actors had been employed on London stages for afterpieces in decades prior, the troupes that performed between 1718 and 1738 became more than addons to the main theatrical attraction and could command the stage for an entire evening.3 Offering an average of four different programs of theatrical entertainments per week, theirs was a fast-changing, ephemeral repertoire that was performed entirely in French. The troupes did not regularly perform [End Page 141] at the London equivalent of the Paris fair theaters, but rather at the official theaters used for serious dramas and operas, including Lincoln's Inn Fields and the King's Theatre. As a result, the royal family and London's aristocratic elite were often in attendance at their performances. Given Britain's ongoing tense political relationship with France throughout the eighteenth century, one might assume that Londoners' predominant attitude towards the French performers was one of antagonism, especially since Britain and France had recently emerged from a twenty-five-year period of war.4 However, the troupes' reception in London was not so clear-cut. It is true that they were condemned, belittled, and often parodied by many members of the "middling sort," a wide-ranging group that included "yeomen, financially independent trades, and knowledge-based professions."5 However, the French performers found great appeal among London's elite and even gained patronage from the British royalty. Their twenty years of successful trips to London were in large part due to this royal support. This article examines the reactions to the French troupes within the context of the rapid social changes of early eighteenth-century England. Chief among these transformations was a growing concern with social hierarchy, which developed during the 1720s and 30s in response to an increasingly unified ruling elite and the growth of the middling orders.6 These changes eventually led to a heightened awareness of "social class" as a principle for describing the hierarchical nature of British society.7 Although England had long been divided along lines of rank and aristocratic privilege, many eighteenth-century commentators began to see "class" as something that could be gained or lost; it thus could be performed, emulated, or even bought, resulting in new anxieties surrounding status.8 In response to these changing social norms, French musical comedies were interpreted as both high- and low-style entertainment once they were imported to England, depending largely on who was watching. For elites, attendance at the French plays could signal prestige and demonstrate their nuanced grasp of foreign culture. But among the middling orders the craze for French theater was indicative of widespread trends for consuming foreign luxuries that they believed would destabilize native English culture. Thanks to this divergent reception across social strata, the French performances became divorced from their earlier position at the lower end of the hierarchy of Parisian theatrical institutions.9 Through this process of reinterpretation, the French performances helped to enact a mutable sense of class identity in ways that both negated and reinforced ideas of what France could represent in the transnational imagination. [End Page 142] The Royal Treatment The widespread success of the French performers in the years 1718–38 depended, at least in part, on the support of the...

The Evolution of French Musical Orientalism in the Works of Francisco Salvador-Daniel

The Evolution of French Musical Orientalism in the Works of Francisco Salvador-Daniel