At the beginning of the semester, coming to this class felt like the informational equivalent of standing in front of a firehose. The readings were a largely indistinguishable soup of names and -isms. But after spending over three months untwisting the serpent (Daniel Albright pun intended) of Parisian musical life in the 1920s, I’m pleasantly surprised at my ability to recognize names, pieces, and broader trends at work. While we’ve treated each of the five class lenses in turn, I’ve noticed in crafting arguments for my papers that they aren’t distinct, but interrelated.
Issues of class, race, and gender all contributed to French insecurities about national identity, and their desire to create French-sounding music. Mary Louis Roberts shows that the French used gender as a vehicle to talk about more general changes after World War I.1 French national identity and traditional notions of masculinity were intimately connected; as we saw in Les Mamelles de Tiresias, a threat to one was a threat to both. This explains, in part, why a talented and capable female composer like Germaine Tailleferre failed to receive deserved recognition in her time. French composers like Darius Milhaud, Erik Satie, and Francis Poulenc used their power to borrow musical inspiration from groups of people with less privilege: either blacks, in the case of negrophilia, or poorer Parisians, in the art of the everyday. They didn’t appreciate these art forms as equal to their own, but saw them as tools to reinvigorate French art music. That isn’t to say we shouldn’t listen to and enjoy music from these composers. We should, understanding and thinking critically about their problematic elements.
The imminent end of this class has also caused me to reflect on the benefits of studying such a “niche” topic. Not that I didn’t find it inherently enjoyable and worthwhile, or that I want to give Professor Epstein an existential crisis about the important research he’s spent years conducting, but how has taking this class affected/benefited my day-to-day life? I’ve certainly gained confidence in my research abilities, especially to weave sources into argument, not just exposition. I’ve also become a bit of a French music advocate. We touched on it briefly at the beginning of the semester, but I want to understand more about how the works we’ve studied fit into the larger “Western canon.” Why hadn’t I heard of many of them, and why are they performed less often?
A final note: Last week, I played an etude for my clarinet lesson that was written by Paul Jeanjean, a French clarinetist, for an etude book originally published in 1928. Scott said I seemd to have an affinity for the music and asked if I’d “secretly been studying French phrasing and style.” I told him I haven’t, but spending hours listening to French art music certainly hasn’t hurt!
1Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (University of Chicago Press, 1994).