At the beginning of the semester, coming to this class felt like the informational equivalent of standing in front of a firehose. The readings were a largely indistinguishable soup of names and -isms. But after spending over three months untwisting the serpent (Daniel Albright pun intended) of Parisian musical life in the 1920s, I’m pleasantly […]
Author: Hannah Cabasco
Sitting at home, longing for the faraway resources of my beloved Halvorson music library, hoping that Gallica will load this issue of Le Figaro before my cat tries to jump on the keyboard again (it’s happened, and she knows how to close tabs), it occurred to me that research is equal parts psychological and academic undertaking. […]
Like these two bros, Poulenc’s and Satie’s music aligned, at least outwardly, with heteronormative expectations. By giving the music of Erik Satie and Francis Poulenc queer readings, Samuel Dorf and Christopher Moore use a largely unexplored lense to unearth greater insights to the works and perhaps the composer behind them. However, only Moore seals the […]
Reception towards the influx of black cultural products in 1920s France consisted of equal parts attraction and enjoyment but also revulsion and fear. Reading through French author’s impressions of La Revue Nègre, which they describe as “soft, splenetic, brutal, lustful, or sad,” “something animal,” and “frenetic and devilish,” it is clear that what 1920s Parisians […]
Aaron Copland was one of many creatives who flocked to Paris in the 1920s, where he encountered several forces that shaped his career as a composer. While spending the summer of 1921 at the Fontainebleau school for American composition students outside of Paris, Copland met by chance his future mentor and lifelong friend Nadia Boulanger.1 […]
My initial thoughts on these questions are as eclectic as the plurality of opinions and musics I’ve attempted to digest over the first two weeks of class. Firstly, the horse. I can’t stop thinking about the way the horse moves. However, in all seriousness, I think the horse is a very fitting representation of […]