French Music Research Articles

:French Music, Culture, and National Identity, 1870–1939.(Eastman Studies in Music, number 54.)

:French Music, Culture, and National Identity, 1870–1939.<i>(Eastman Studies in Music, number 54.)</i>

French Music since Berlioz. Ed. by Richard Langham Smith and Caroline Potter.

French Music since Berlioz. Ed. by Richard Langham Smith and Caroline Potter.

French Music Since Berlioz (review)

Reviewed by: French Music Since Berlioz Bruce Whiteman French Music Since Berlioz. Edited by Richard Langham Smith and Caroline Potter. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. [xxiii, 363 p. ISBN-10: 0-7546-0282-6; ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-0282-8. $99.95.] Illustrations, index, music examples, bibliographic references, suggested readings. The English musicologists Richard Langham Smith and Caroline Potter, both specialists in French music, have put together a broad survey of classical music in France since 1870 in a group of twelve essays by eleven scholars, all of them English. Described by the editors as a "mosaic," the collection mostly excludes jazz and popular music (Deborah Mawer's chapter on French music in the 1930s is an exception) and also attempts to move beyond or away from the usual emphasis on French music's close relationship with literature and the visual arts to concentrate more on "the social and political context of music" (p. xix). In the historical period after Berlioz this approach makes good sense, since his death in 1869 corresponded almost exactly with the Franco-Prussian War, with Wagner's unfortunate anti-French article "Une capitulation," and with the fall of the Second Empire and the establishment of the Third Republic. Whether there is any special need to sacrifice the conventional alliance of French music with the sister arts is perhaps debatable, but in any event the contributors to this volume take that shift with varying degrees of seriousness. One surely cannot discuss Debussy or Chausson without invoking literature and art. Messiaen, who mostly wrote his own texts, is another story, and how that story relates to society and politics is not made immediately obvious. Nor is the story of Pierre Boulez's appointment by the government of President Pompidou to run the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique (IRCAM) in 1978, a move that removed Boulez from the sphere of an international conducting career and made him into a kind of high-level researcher and functionary. So the social and political context comes and goes in French Music Since Berlioz. Some chapters are more chronicles than anything else—useful annotated lists, in a way, but not especially informed by any broader socio-political understanding of the works, despite Richard Langham Smith's just remark in chapter 5 that "a list of operas alone, with a few comments on their relative [End Page 300] merit, is neither the story nor the history" (p. 117). Thomas Cooper's piece on opera from 1870 to 1900, for example (chap. 2), takes us chronologically through the repertoire staged at the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique, from L'Africaine to Reynaldo Hahn's now forgotten L'île du rêve, with only Wagnerism and exoticism evoked as context. Cooper occasionally wades into deeper social waters, as for example when he suggests that Alfred Bruneau's operas declined in popularity as his support for Dreyfus became widely known. One wants to ask whether Vincent D'Indy's operas, by contrast, grew in popularity because of his virulent anti-Semiticism, something one instinctively doubts (Jane Fulcher has explored D'Indy's anti-Dreyfusard position and its influence on his music in her book, French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfuss Affair to the First World War [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999]). A chronicle is not the place, however, for exploring in depth the ambiguities inherent in the effect of a composer's social and political views on the success or failure of his music. Timothy Jones (on nineteenth-century orchestral and chamber music) and Nigel Simeone (on church and organ music) also tend toward the annotated list of works. Jones does provide some critical and analytical details, in addition to narrating the founding of various concert venues—Colonne's and Lamoureux's concert series, which would later be associated with the Conservatoire and the Schola Cantorum respectively, as well as the Société nationale de musique—which helped to make French instrumental music possible. Jones is indeed more willing than most to be critical of the works he collocates as inherently significant in his essay. Both Franck's Symphony in D minor and Saint-Saëns's Third Symphony...

The Color of Music: Social Boundaries and Stereotypes in Southwest Louisiana French Music

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Until the 1960s, southwest Louisianans did not categorize their music as Cajun, Creole, or zydeco. Instead, they referred to it as musique francaise, or French without systematically assigning it to a specific ethnic group or music subgenre. The French versus American musical distinction was the significant factor. In fact, this belief was so well-rooted that one Cajun woman who grew up in the 1960s was convinced that the AM/FM options on her radio referred to the distinction between American Music and French Music. In recent years, however, artists and intellectuals in southwest Louisiana have increasingly pointed out the historic collaboration and intermixing of Cajuns and Creoles within French while simultaneously emphasizing their differences as distinct ethnic groups. The distinctions between these categories shape and are shaped by social stereotypes, while discussions of musical hybridization, or creolization, tend to mask persistent tensions along social boundaries. The Louisiana context thus mirrors the way in which the problematic category of world music, despite its pluralist ideology, also tends to obscure social and racial divisions in the music world. Cajuns and Creoles share francophone origins and are most commonly referred to respectively as white and black French-speaking people from Louisiana. Many Cajuns claim Acadian ancestry, although their origins are also traceable to other European immigrant groups that settled in Louisiana. In addition to the claim of a blood kinship with the Acadians from the Canadian Maritime Provinces, this sense of belonging is expressed through a common historic memory rooted in the expulsion of the Acadians by the British in 1755 (Grand Derangement) and in a recurrent survival theme, common to all dispersed Acadians, that defines their contemporary sense of identity. This notion of an Acadian diaspora has more recently been reinforced and institutionalized by the World Acadian Congress organized since 1994, which reunites people of Acadian ancestry every five years. For their part, black Creoles strongly differentiate themselves from Cajuns, who until the mid-1990s were the primary focus of tourism promotion in French Louisiana. In present-day southwest Louisiana, individuals who call themselves Creoles are descendants of both free people of color and freed slaves. Their identity is combined with a strong sense of being African American: black identity and French heritage are thought of not only as compatible but as inseparable. Throughout the twentieth century, Cajuns and Creoles have unarguably shared common music traditions. Historically, two musicians embody this shared heritage: Creole accordion player Amedee Ardoin (1896-1941) and Cajun fiddler Dennis McGee (1893-1989), both sharecroppers who recorded together in 1929. They were tremendously successful for twenty years, playing in local dancehalls and house dances, and Ardoin is now considered the father of French music by most local musicians, no matter which subcategory of music they identify with. Until the 1860s the fiddle was the lead instrument; often twin fiddles played, one leading with the melody and the other seconding with harmony or chords. The diatonic accordion took over later and was played along with a fiddle and a rhythm section composed of a guitar and percussion--a triangle, or 'tit fer, and/ or a washboard, or frottoir. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A product of multiple influences, the French repertoire never excluded other styles, and French musicians typically followed trends in American music. Canray Fontenot, a Creole fiddler who played from the 1940s until his death in 1995, knew, for instance, a wide variety of rags. In the 1930s and 1940s western swing, with its string bands and steel guitar (allowing for amplification), exerted a strong influence on French music. Many popular songs were sung in English, while others were translated into French. …

“The Triumph of the Flesh”: Women, Physical Culture, and the Nude in the French Music Hall, 1904-1914

“The Triumph of the Flesh”: Women, Physical Culture, and the Nude in the French Music Hall, 1904-1914

Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (review)

FRENCH MUSIC Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France. By Katharine Ellis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. [xii, 298 p. ISBN 0-19-517682-0. $60.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Anyone setting out to explore France and the French, whether from a historical perspective or in the present, will sooner or later come up against what we might term the three P's of Philosophy, Politics, and Paris. Each of these, either alone or in potent, inherently unstable combination, exerts its influence on a fourth P, which is Patriotism. It is thus not at all surprising to find all four P's playing their pan in Katharine Ellis's fascinating exploration of early music in nineteenth-century France. This is a book that succeeds on many levels. Readers requiring a straightforward, digestible narrative to introduce them to the main events of this story-sometimes divertissement, more often melodrama-and to the idealists, ideologues, and people in between who form its dramatis personae, will be grateful for the first three chapters, which respectively cover 1800-46, 1846-78, and 1878-1900. If 1846 seems to have been chosen fairly arbitrarily (though it does have the benefit of dividing the three chapters into manageable chunks of around forty pages each, which probably suited the publisher), 1878 is more artfully selected, for at least two reasons. First of all, it makes musical sense: readers with any knowledge of France's cultural life will immediately recognize 1878 as the year of an Exposition universelle, and Ellis skillfully uses this as a jumping off point for her third chapter, which opens with an account of Alexandre Guilmant's six organ recitals at that event. With these recitals, Guilmant began what was to be a twenty-year exploration of the organ repertory of Handel, Bach, Buxtehude, Frescobaldi, Clerambault, and modern (p. 81), something obviously germane to the book's subject matter. second, using 1878 neatly avoids overemphasizing the caesura of 1871 that historians, especially political historians, usually impose when discussing nineteenth-century France. Ellis is keen to avoid giving undue prominence to 1871 in her narrative, surely a wise decision given that 1871 and its aftermath have long been presented in music historiography as the time when the Societe nationale de musique and others were promoting new composers of undeniably French pedigree, rather than bringing forward the music of earlier times. By avoiding the 1871 problem, Ellis reinforces the notion that, at least for the topic under discussion in her book, other dates may have equal or greater significance. The second set of chapters develops themes expounded in the first three, but now freed from the constraints imposed by those chapters' chronological arrangement. This half of the book proceeds by means of four case studies, respectively La musique francaise at the Crossroads (pp. 119-46); Sources of Frenchness (pp. 147-77); Defining Palestrina (pp. 179-207), which deftly negotiates the minefield of church politics and skillfully exposes the different attitudes of Ultramontanes and Gallicans in regard to early music; and Baroque Choral Music: the Popular and the Profound (pp. 209-40). A persistent theme of these studies, and of this book as a whole, is that things are never as simple as they appear on the surface. Such a statement will come as no surprise to students of French musical culture, but even they may be somewhat taken aback by the sheer number of levels of complexity that have to be negotiated in order to get to the bottom of things. For the narrative proves time and again that whether a particular composition was perceived as a masterpiece or not depended very little on its musical qualities. Pieces of music became battlegrounds for critics, politicians, and churchmen, all of whom were engaged in a struggle to impose their own point of view on wider issues. Small wonder that some composers were sacrificed in the process. …

On the reception of Modern French Music in the prewar Showa Era

On the reception of Modern French Music in the prewar Showa Era

The ‘Cabale du Dauphin’, Campra, and Italian Comedy: The Courtly Politics of French Musical Patronage around 1700

Beginning in the late 1680s, opposition to the conservative cultural politics of Louis XIV coalesced in an influential court clique around Louis XIV's son, Louis (1661–1711). In contrast to the king's anti-theatrical moralizing and heritage of supporting classicism, the Dauphin and his Cabale embraced aspects of the arts that Louis XIV had rejected: the Comedie-Italienne, Italian music, and the operas of Andre Campra. The Dauphin not only supported the Opera and encouraged Louis XIV to reinstitute the Comedie-Italienne, but his cabale also staged entertainments at court in which commedia dell'arte and Italian music featured. The group's support for Campra during the early phase of his operatic career is reflected by three fetes commissioned from him in 1697–8 by nobles seeking to cultivate members of the cabale as political patrons. The Dauphin's importance as a protector of the theatre was publicly acknowledged in the prologue to Campra's Le Carnaval de Venise (1699) and in other works of the period. The activities of the cabale and its extended political clientele thus played a significant role in the French fad for Italian music and comedy of the late 1690s, and demonstrate the influence of courtly politics in the musical life of the era.

Gallic Musings: English Writing on French Music

Gallic Musings: English Writing on French Music

Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Regime, 1647-1785 (review)

Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647-1785. By Downing A. Thomas. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. [vii, 411 p. ISBN 0-521-80188-5. $70.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

French Music

French Music

Awakening Spaces: French Caribbean Popular Songs, Music, and Culture

Awakening Spaces: French Caribbean Popular Songs, Music, and Culture

Review: Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics

Review: Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics

Singing Our Way to Victory: French Cultural Politics and Music During the Great War. By Regina M. Sweeney. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. 355 pp

<i>Singing Our Way to Victory: French Cultural Politics and Music During the Great War</i>. By Regina M. Sweeney. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. 355 pp

Review: French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War, by Jane F. Fulcher

Review: French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War, by Jane F. Fulcher

Debussy's Rameau: French Music and Its Others

Debussy's Rameau: French Music and Its Others Get access Anya Suschitzky Anya Suschitzky Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Musical Quarterly, Volume 86, Issue 3, FALL , Pages 398–448, https://doi.org/10.1093/musqtl/gdg016 Published: 01 January 2002

Debussy's Rameau: French Music and Its Others

Debussy's Rameau: French Music and Its Others

Faure and French Musical Aesthetics (review)

Faure and French Musical Aesthetics (review)

Awakening Spaces: French Caribbean Popular Songs, Music, and Culture

Awakening Spaces: French Caribbean Popular Songs, Music, and Culture

Through the Spectrum: The New Intimacy in French Music (II)

The first part of this article, a consideration of a number of younger ‘post-spectralist’ French composers as llustrated by some of their recorded works (the recordings are detailed in an annexe to this part) appeared in Tempo 212. That part concluded with a discussion of Pascal Dusapin and his expressive programme ‘to draw a wracked lyricism from his material through sensuously tangible strategies of constraint. As we shall soon see, younger composers have been quick to take this up to their advantage …’)