Nationalism as Paradigm

Nationalism has been an important lens for French music throughout this semester. Before this class, I only thought of nationalism as extreme patriotism that leads to dictatorships and invasions of other countries. But now I have learned that nationalism played a large role in the shaping of French music and identity in the 1920s, and by extension learned that nationalism is a widespread phenomenon that impacts daily life.

First, I learned what Nationalism is: Anderson claims that “[the nation] is an imagined political community,”¹ because we cannot possibly be connected to every person within the community yet we construct a picture of what our community looks like in our heads. We create boundaries to make our community distinguishable in our imagination, separating us from the “other.”  Gellner writes that there may be such thing as nationalism without ego, but that more often than not it becomes “infected” with “partiality” towards our own community.²

As we learned how nationalism impacted French music, some of the manifestations were very clear-cut. Exoticism is the most obvious extension of nationalism, by creating a false conception of a foreign culture for the sake of entertainment. Parakilas‘ argument that Spain was exoticized once it lost its political power was fascinating to me,³ because it demonstrated how French music is directly related to issues of nationalism and power. Negrophilia is another extension of nationalism, as it separates blackness from whiteness by conflating it with generalizations of primitiveness in distant Africa. These both are easy to write off as intolerant ways of old that wouldn’t happen today.

However, neoclassicism as nationalism was a complete surprise to me. I had always understood neoclassicism as a simple affinity for the lightness of Bach, Mozart, and Haydn. In class we learned that the use of pre-Romantic composers was in fact, a reaction against German Romanticism itself. This stemmed from the Franco-Prussian War and WWI, during which Germany was France’s enemy. The lightness of French music was an assertion of nationalist identity in the face of German military and musical dominance. Maurice Ravel believed that “French consciousness is one of reserve,”⁴ and Darius Milhaud defined French music by its sense of form, as well as its “clearness, simplicity and conciseness.”⁵ Both agree that one’s nationality is central to their musical identity, and Ravel considers Arthur Honegger’s [Swiss-]German heritage more influential in his music than his French education.⁶ Honegger was the subject of my first paper, in which I argued (from of Milhaud’s perspective ) what differentiated Honegger from the rest of Les Six (namely his nationality and quasi-impressionism), yet how he was still a valuable part of the group because of his commitment to form, clarity of vocal writing, and the counterpoint of Bach. I learned so much about Honegger from this paper, which is fascinating to me as a trumpet performance major– his Intrada for trumpet is on most graduate and orchestral auditions.

(I was at this performance! This video has to be opened on Youtube.) My favorite part of this class was researching composers and pieces I will be performing for the rest of my life.

Another surprise was learning that the piece I knew best from 1920’s Paris, Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, is not actually neoclassical.

For my third paper I extensively used Scott Messing’s Neoclassicism in Music to explain Stravinsky’s nationalism in this ballet. Messing clarifies that Pulcinella is more an avant-garde cubist portrait of 18th-century music than an evocation of the past.⁷ However, the implementation of an 18th-century French tradition that features singers at the ballet, and the instrumentation that omitted “romantic clarinets,” still served French nationalism. Even before the term “neoclassicism” was in use, critics recognized the clarity of Pulcinella as an antidote to the excesses of German Romanticism.⁸ It has been fascinating to dig into these nuances of nationalism and neoclassicism.

Nationalism and neoclassicism were also themes in my second paper about the Société Des Concerts Du Conservatoire, an orchestra that had a reputation for performing the old classics (particularly Beethoven and Haydn). I used neoclassicism as an argument for a Haydn revival. Despite their Austro-German heritages, Bach, Haydn, and Mozart were considered “universal composers” upon whom French musicians drew to create a new identity.⁹ d’Indy, the writer of my fictional letter, was an ardent nationalist who put on concerts through the Schola which “showcased the French Tradition . . . as the embodiment of authentic French culture based on religious principles and respect for authority.”¹⁰

Nationalism is an important paradigm for this class. As I wrote in my first blog post, nationalism is hard for me to relate with because of my experiences living in places all around the country and feeling like there isn’t much that truly unites them. This class helped me understand the root of nationalism, and how it branches into my life of music.

1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 6.