One theme that really stood out to me during my time in MUSIC 345B: Music in Paris in the 1920s was the theme of fetishization, or similarly, tokenization and stereotyping. So many compositional techniques in French music stem from their obsession with other cultures and what they took from them in order to make French […]
Author: Laura Albrecht
Copland has always been one of my favorite composers, his piano sonata has been a favorite piece of mine for years. So before a lot of my research that I’ll discuss below, I had very high opinions of him and his composing, and in turn, his relationship with Nadia Boulanger. But my sources are conflicting; […]
I am personally convinced of the sapphonic nature of Poulenc’s Socrates, argued by Woods in her article. I am most swayed by her arguments regarding the Princess de Polignac’s sexuality and her specific requests to commission and contribute to the composition of Socrates with Poulenc, and the power of using a Greek text. The Princess’s […]
One Parisian who certainly thought he had a true love for jazz music was Darius Milhaud. He made a point to visit places like Harlem and New Orleans in America to observe jazz musicians for himself, where he decided that jazz was indeed its own art form (Gendron). Unfortunately, most French modernist composers, aside from […]
Désiré-Émilie Inglebrecht was a conductor, composer, and writer, debuting as a conductor in 1908 in Paris. He was a student of the Paris Conservatoire, and debuted at the Théâtre des Arts, later known as the Opera, and went on to have a long and exciting conducting career in Paris before his death after WWII in […]
French music in the 1900s was all about rejecting European norms and creating a new wave of nationalism within the country’s borders that had been previously violated by war, specifically the Germans. Composers like Fauré, Chabrier, Bizet, and Massenet decided to reject German stuff like Wagner and Mahler, and invent a new kind of essential […]