I think it is impossible to ever fully understand a certain place at a time in the past. This class has exposed me more than ever before to this fact. No matter how much scholarship we read and how many actors we know about, we will be left with the biases of the writers of […]
In the course of my research on Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, an idea came into my head that I should have considered before but never really needed to. How do we critique or write about ballet? It seems like nothing in academia can really train you from this apart from gaining personal experience in the matter. I […]
Paris in the 1920s (much like New York) is often seen as an era of gaudiness, irony, and a general sense of the avant-garde in regards to arts, culture, and society. Important aspects of modernism were developed such as Dadaism in art, camp in fashion, and a myriad of changes in music, including the incorporation […]
In discussing the Negrophilia in Paris in the 1920s, we need to take a step back and first define what was going on. Negrophilia is a pretty vague concept and many of the audiences and critics in Paris in the 1920s had very different views from one another on the emerging influence of jazz on […]
Louis Vierne (1870-1937) was a French organist, teacher, and composer, most well known for his six organ symphonies and his position as organist of Notre Dame de Paris from 1900 until his death in 1937. Vierne is very well known among organists, but his influence on the wider reach of French music is difficult to […]
When creating any kind of social group, the members must decide who or what is included and excluded. If everyone was included in a group, there would be no sense of cohesiveness or social connection, the act of defining a community is the same as defining what the community is not. Creating distinctions between groups […]