Throughout this course, one of the themes that kept arising was nationalism. The lasting national trauma from World War I was often clear in the sources we read, and clearly fed into many of the deep anxieties regarding French identities that were often in the background. One of the places this was clearest was in […]
Author: Mary Crawford
As it turns out, it is very difficult to do research without access to a physical library. I’m currently researching Igor Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments and its relationship to discourses of gender in 1920’s France. The piece has many characteristics that are typically associated with masculinity in music, and tied in with the high […]
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Sapphonics
In order to understand the arguments made by Samuel Dorf about Erik Satie’s Socrate, it’s important to talk about Elizabeth Wood’s conception of Sapphonics. Wood’s central conceipt in her essay Sapphonics that it makes sense to have a lens for understanding music through sexuality, and that there exists a transgressive form of communication in music […]
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What Was Negrophilia Really About?
Negrophilia is one of the more complicated, and difficult topics we’ve talked about so far in class. One of the difficulties is that many, if not most Parisians really did believe that they were experiencing genuine representations of African American and African music and culture, and that their consumption of these materials was based in […]
In my research on Nadia Boulanger I have been turning to Kimberly Francis time and time again for information on Boulanger and her relationship with the Stravinsky family. Francis is one of the most prominent scholars in this area of research, along with Caroline Potter. The most useful source for me so far has been […]
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Is 1920 so different from 2020?
Much of the discourse about French music between 1870 and 1920 feels somewhat distant from my experiences as an American in 2020. But under the surface, many of the anxieties that French composers and music critics were expressing at the time are strikingly similar to the political conversations happening currently, and many of the ideas […]