Why hello Music 345b! Come here often?
The joke is, I haven’t! I’ve been lacking in the blog-post department this semester, so I wouldn’t really be able to know if anyone comes here often – though I hope you have been posting more often than I have. That’d really be embarrassing… Anyways, music! Paris! The 1920s! I unfortunately (yet somehow, fortunately) will be approaching this series of posts with the perspective of someone who has already taken the bulwark of this course – let’s hope that makes for some unique opinions!
Onto the actual prompt – I find that I do personally understand the French identity crisis fairly well. At least from a historical perspective, it makes a ton of sense that a society that has been completely bodied (in reference to both social endeavors and literal war) by a Germanic society has such a vehement distaste for anything to do with those darn Saxons! That logic extends into the musical identity of the time too; we get such a mixed bag over the course of those fifty years! Bouncing from something so simplistic as Milhaud’s Le Train Bleu to something intentionally designed to be inconsequential like Poulenc’s Les Biches. We go from a mold breaking Rite of Spring by Stravinsky to a satisfying and sober String Quartet from Ravel! Music in this time is a wild Frankish potpourri, as are the minds of those trying to establish what it means to be French through their own art and society!
These opinions are even expressed beyond the boundaries of a grand staff, though – scholars and artists go on to publish their own thoughts on the Germanic musical “opposition”. Typically, this manifests in a insult-fueled memoir where a few pages calling Wagner a “blackboard musician” and saying German music is “drunken” (Jean Cocteau, anyone?). This anti-German sentiment is entirely understandable though, even though the delivery might be a tad petty.
If I absolutely had to pick an aspect that is the least relatable with the French nationalist movement within this fifty year stint, I’d lean into the sheer absurdity of some of the newly-announced aspects of French-ness. Sure, Germanic compositions tend to be rather lush and intense, but is there really a need to make sure French music is the precise opposite of German music? It just feels a little melodramatic to make sure you are the exact foil of your rival – there’s no need to be soul bound to “sober melodies” and chromaticism if German music is lush and predictable, just dial everything back a tad! Then again, what do I know about having an identity crisis on the national scale? When I was freaking out about who I was, I just sat in my room and listened to Purple Rain on repeat.
Works Cited;
Jean Cocteau, The Cock and the Harlequin, 2nd ed., trans. Rollo Myers (London: Verso, 1926), 14-21.