At the beginning of the semester, the extent of my knowledge of 1920s French music could be found in “that one time we talked about Erik Satie in Introduction to Musicology”, my affinity for playing early 20th century unaccompanied flute music, and the program note I wrote about Francis Poulenc’s Laudamus Te for St. Olaf’s […]
Each research project carries its own set of difficulties. If you are researching with a lot of sources at your disposal, it is often difficult to decide which are the most important and which you should leave out when making your claim. Research on an obscure topic where limited to almost no scholarship exists can […]
The first time I considered relationships between sexuality and music composition, I wasn’t entirely convinced. Sure, there were some more contemporary relationships between music and sexuality that were more obvious to me. Musical theater featuring queer characters, or more contemporary artists who established themselves as prominent figures of the LGBTQ+ community seemed to hold more […]
This past interim, I had the opportunity to spend the month of January in Washington D.C. with Professor Epstein while taking a course called “Democracy and the Arts in Washington DC”. Towards the beginning of the trip, we visited the National Museum for Women in the Arts. Touring around the museum we came across a […]
There are a lot of sources out there about Francis Poulenc. This wasn’t a particularly profound discovery; after first hearing his Sonata for Flute and Piano a few years ago, I was fueled with the desire to discover more about his music and his subsequent popularity in the French musical scene of the 1920s.
Surprisingly, the French debates over national musical identity are not that unfamiliar. In a world that often feels politically and culturally insecure today, it seems that America is seeking to redefine itself and its culture just as composers and musicians sought to establish a musical identity that was uniquely French. Efforts made to define national […]