This class has proven to me time and again that no music, at the very least no music composed in Paris in the 20s, is devoid of extramusical meaning. The necessity of patronage in allowing music to happen at all, especially classical music, assures us that the composers who see success do so only because of the alignment of an array of social and political agendas. One of the most prevalent themes, nationalism, was born of a deep need to reject the violence of Germany, to prove that France was something different (itself an interesting issue; I wonder if it would have been a different strain of nationalism, had France’s ego not been so badly hurt in the war). This distancing from Germany manifested quite plainly in all of my research through the class. Milhaud’s work drew continually from American sources, including dance music from Brazil as much as jazz music from the United States–popular music far removed from the drawn out romanticism of Germany. The music of Les Six in Les mariés de la tour Eiffel similarly draws from popular sources, and almost all of the music we have observed has been blatant in its un-romanticism. The acclaim the repertoire earned at the time and as history unfolded beyond the 20s shows a France that is deeply proud of its non-reliance on the “greats” of Germany.
That being said, issues of race and exoticism are ever at play with this sort of heedless borrowing. Especially in Les mariés, Parisian composers parodied even the music that was responsible for their separation from German tradition, adding to it a cynical surrealism that deflated the meaning of all manner of clichés and stock characters. It could be argued that Milhaud’s borrowing throughout his career is just as inauthentic, as he imposed his own polytonality on the structures and elements taken from other cultures with great frequency. The colonial attitude of French composers unites their nationalism with an exoticism which frequently hinges on race. Whether borrowing from cultural sources is destructive is its own complex subject, but the very act of basing their newfound Frenchness on the music of black Americans and other foreign sources complicates the idea of nationality in music universally. All music is created in reaction to surrounding music, whether those influences are respected or parodied, a fact that has come up in class repeatedly through the semester.
Understanding the parody of Satie and the camp of Poulenc gave still more lenses through which to view the apparent absurdity of Les mariés de la tour Eiffel, in particular. Even when Parisian composers gave their music little pretense or dignity, they used the body of existing music and other art media to make a claim of their own. Satie’s was merely that pretense has no place in music, an attempt to deflate class difference in art even as he buoyed high art with his satire. Critics saw in these works the power to rejuvenate France and remove other foreign national influences from the repertoire. Poulenc employed camp in his work as a traditional expression of sexual identity that was repressed by society, a practice that was helped immensely by support from like-minded patrons. Both of these composers were considered modernists in their time, and musical trends, facilitated by critics and patrons alike, saw work of their sort gaining popularity as surrealism rose to the fore. Each lens offers insight to the meaning of music in the 20s, and while I don’t think any lens will have as much power as nationalism (and I don’t fault this–losing millions of people in nationalistic war justifies its strength as a concept), it is apparent that the identities and beliefs of all involved in the act of music-making manifest themselves in their art, the stories it tells, and the stories that others tell about it.