Transcribed by Richardis von Stade Date: September 16, 1178 I am feeling weak. I have been sick much of my life, but this one feels different. After 82 years I have grown tired. I pray to God daily that I will be released from this life soon to be near Christ, for I have served […]
Date: 1178 My monastery has been placed under interdict for following the word of God. The prelates of Mainz demands the once excommunicated nobleman we recently buried in our churchyard be exhumed.1 This man has died in a state of grace, reconciled with the church, and I will not obey, even if it means I […]
Date: 1153 The Scivias A little over 10 years ago I received a calling to share my visions. The Scivias is my documentation of such visions and declaration that these visions are true from God. It took 10 years to write with the help of Volmar, my former teacher and now secretary, and my favorite […]
Date: 1147 As Abbess of Disibodenberg I have had opportunities to run things as I see fit. As I’ve developed my own monastic ideals it seems imperative that I, along with 18 other nuns, go to Rupertsburg near Bingen to find my own abbey.1 I wish to leave the male convent at Disibodenberg and to break […]
Date: 1141 I have mentioned these visions before, but it’s time I share them with the world. I must now as I have been instructed by God, “O fragile human, ashes of ashes, and filth of filth! Say and write what you see and hear. But since you are timid in speaking, and simple in […]
Date: 1136 Jutta has passed and I am now abbess of Disibodenberg. I will continue to pray for her and admire her since she was clearly graced by God, but I hope that Disibodenberg can move away from her ascetic ideals. My sisters understand my moderation. I hope to form and grow a community with […]
Date: 1118 I don’t need much, nor have I received much education here besides the callings that bring me closer to God. We are strictly enclosed here which allows for more time for prayer and devotion to God. Because of that I don’t have much to say about Jutta except that she is clearly graced […]
Transcribed by a nun at Disibodenberg Date: 1106 My parents entrusted me with a noble woman for my education, Jutta is her name if I recall correctly. My parents tell me this is all for God. I’m not sure I quite understand this all yet, but I know it’s important to my parents and that […]
New Primary Sources Discovered from Hildegard Date: December 13, 2022 A new set of primary sources from Hildegard of Bingen has just been discovered by historians. These sources come from Hildegard’s personal journal, compiled by Richardis von Stade at the time of her death. Students at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota have digitized the […]
I have a love/hate relationship with primary sources. On the one hand, I love getting a glimpse into the lives of the people I research and gaining a better understanding of what their perspectives were. On the other hand, I want to tear my hair out trying to find them. On the one hand, I […]
When Black music and dance traditions became popular in Paris in the 1920s, the ensuing negrophilia caused an artistic divide as prominent as the geographical divide created by the Seine. This division is comprised of two primary perspectives. Some agreed with Jean Cocteau, believing that jazz and the dance traditions that had come with it […]
African American musical idioms ran rampant in Paris following the import of such ideas by American soldiers in the Great War. What started as music in niche social clubs for veterans who remained abroad soon grew in popularity, so much so that 1920s popular Parisian music is almost synonymic with jazz. The Parisian jazz scene […]
Who would’ve thought that a class on music in Paris would require looking at so many French texts? /sarcasm/ For how much I enjoy singing it, boy do I not understand a lick of French (curse me for taking Latin in Highschool before deciding to learn another useless language [Norwegian] in college). When researching my […]
When I reflect on the materials of a course, I sometimes like to consider the things that we didn’t explicitly discuss in class. The things that we left unsaid, if you will. It goes without saying that one of the major themes of our course has been just how not German French music was during […]
There’s a certain level of humor I have to have when writing this post, since it’s being written well after I have conducted the last bit of research for this class. I think for the sake of getting past the silly gags, I’ll just pretend that I’m currently doing this research. Ahem… When conducting my […]
The entirety of this post comes from the perspective of a queer man. Reader discretion is advised. Before we dive into the arguements made by Dorf and Moore, it should be heavily noted that Queerness and Gender are both heavily fluid concepts. You can be as heteronormative or hella-gay as you want to be in […]
There are so many moving parts in this prompt, let’s start with love. As a working definition of this term and to elaborate on my (eventually explained) opinion, in order to truly love someone or something, you must also give them their deserved respect and celebrate all parts of them. Their flaws, their successes, their […]
Since I’m publishing all of these posts in a rather quick succession, it is nice to have some shape or form to my narrative here – and considering that this prompt is asking which of all the sources has best helped be understand my thoughts toward French music, it is only slightly amusing that I […]
Why hello Music 345b! Come here often? The joke is, I haven’t! I’ve been lacking in the blog-post department this semester, so I wouldn’t really be able to know if anyone comes here often – though I hope you have been posting more often than I have. That’d really be embarrassing… Anyways, music! Paris! The […]
There is a lot of connectivity to the three topics that were covered in the papers written for this class. Not only are there clear throughlines regarding the lenses we’ve studied, such as race, class gender or sexuality, there are clear figures who act as throughlines for some musical corners of Paris at this time. […]
The theme that cropped up most prominently in my assignments this semester is nationalism. From the way that French politics directed composers’ musical choices, I have concluded that nationalism often caused the other class themes of racism, gender, and sexuality. The politics of power balances between nations applies, in the most basic way, to all […]
When I signed up for this class, I was incredibly excited. Excited enough to break my “no more 8ams” rule that I had planned on enforcing after the fall semester. This subject ties so many of my interests together, while also filling a gap in my knowledge of 20th century French music. (I had researched […]
Phew… what a semester. It has surely been a whirlwind. There is so much that I have learned in this class, but one theme tended to permeate particularly two of my favorite writing assignments: gender. I thoroughly enjoyed writing my paper about Marcelle Meyer, a brilliant French pianist. The more and more I couldn’t find, […]
Through the readings, listenings, and especially our class conversations, my understanding of the relatively niche topic that is Paris in the 1920’s and the themes present at the time grew from having almost no knowledge to a quite holistic comprehension. Through our assignments – most notably our papers – the themes of gender and sexuality, […]
As a student who was initially skeptical about the subject of this course being confined within 10 years of music history in a single city, it’s quite an understatement to say that I was proven wrong in these worries. There has been so much to unpack from Music in Paris in the 1920s. from the neoclassicism of […]
Finally (Kinda) Understanding French Music As I take time to reflect on this past semester, I feel that overall, I learned a lot. For me as a woman, the most prominent theme I resonated with was through the lens of gender. By writing about Jane Bathori, I truly had the opportunity to understand more about […]
Nationalism has been an important lens for French music throughout this semester. Before this class, I only thought of nationalism as extreme patriotism that leads to dictatorships and invasions of other countries. But now I have learned that nationalism played a large role in the shaping of French music and identity in the 1920s, and […]
As I’ve reviewed my papers and my notes, the themes that emerged most strongly were nationalism, expression of emotion, old vs. new, and sexuality. When I thought about it more carefully, though, I realized all of the latter themes lead back to nationalism. After everything we’ve learned in class, I define musical nationalism as doing […]
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 […]
Throughout my research and writing in this class, Nationalism seemed to be the strongest course theme. Most of my papers and blog posts discussed nationalism prominently, and although they alluded to other course themes, they all addressed ideas of what French music should be. It seems many people, institutions, and works shaped national artistic ideals, […]
A central theme throughout my writings for this course has been nationalism, and the sense of national identity composers, critics, performers, and organizations were trying to build. The strongest central link being a rejection of German music. However each person had their own version of Frenchness, like the SNM and SMI which couldn’t come together […]
When searching for primary source information about Symphony of Wind Instruments and other pieces that debuted on the same night, I got pretty stuck and couldn’t find much past the date and place it was performed. I was trying every trick I knew in catalyst, looking at the microfilm in the library, and searching for […]
We all know the feeling, you’ve found a reference to a newspaper article from 1920s Paris, you’ve tracked it down in Gallica, and finally you’re ready to learn about the Parisian musical landscape. As the scan slowly loads in you let out a sigh of despair, “ah beans, you can’t actually read French. As preposterous […]
I’m writing about Poulenc’s Organ Concerto, which was commissioned by the Princesse de Polignac. The piece was premiered privately at her salon in late 1938, and then publicly at the Salle Gaveau in mid-1939. I was initially very worried about finding sources for this paper. After spending a little too long figuring out how to […]
In my research of the last two papers, I have found it more difficult than not to find big ole’ articles or even single chapters about either the person or place I was researching. I felt like Shia LaBeouf in the movie Holes: digging and digging…searching and searching… …Feeling hopeless until I find a golden […]
I am researching for a paper on Pulcinella by Igor Stravinsky. This piece has always been one of my favorites, which I discovered from a book of trumpet excerpts. I always thought it was neoclassical, but as we discussed in class it really wasn’t thought of in that way. In fact, some critics thought that it […]
Something that is exciting when it comes to any research based class, is the notion of a collective knowledge forming. At this point, the connectivity between our subjects has been interesting to see. I am able to draw conclusions between sources that we’ve looked at, and have gotten to the point that every time I […]
Overall, I find research itself intriguing, as my curiosity can be strung along down rabbit holes of uncovering mysteries. What I specifically enjoy about research is the magical feeling when I find the exact source or information that I am looking for, especially if I find a secret trove of archived primary sources. I particularly […]
I imagine most of my classmates and I will find it hard to write about anything other than the challenges of researching such a specific topic for our final paper. The challenges I’ve been facing come in many different forms, including, but not limited to: not being able to find many sources that are pertinent to […]
Scholars Samuel N. Dorf and Christopher Moore both present valid arguments that the music commissioned or composed by 1920s French artists, Polignac and Poulenc, served as an expression of their queer identities and a means of communicating with their respective queer communities. The most convincing pieces of evidence for such arguments are primary sources that […]
Germaine Tailleferre is an interesting subject of study, which has contributed to the fact that she has been well-studied by many musicologists and scholars. The sources about Tailleferre are numerous, from entire books, to dissertations; many have attempted to draw conclusions from her compositions, her social (ie. romantic) life, and her membership in Les Six. As […]
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; […]
As far as the legitimacy of these two readings goes, they are pretty informative and convincing. Moore’s Dorf’s detailing of the hidden lesbianism in Polignac’s lifestyle mirroring the hidden themes in Satie’s work is very telling of the environment these songs were composed and released in. The description of camp aesthetics as means of being […]
Overall, Dorf does a good job of establishing Polignac’s influence on the work as a whole but doesn’t adequately convince me how the piece was impacted by their sexuality. Dorf does show that Barney’s treatment of Greece is obvious lesbian, but Polignac’s not so much. Dorf also notes that Satie’s social network included many queer […]
As a performer in the arts, I had heard of Poulenc before but nothing quite as intimate as Moore describes with Poulenc’s relationship with his own music. One composition that Moore talked about was the piece Aubade. From an oblivious perspective, this is just a woman named Diane who is rebellious and abandons the virgin […]
In my reading of the articles by Christopher Moore1 and Samuel Dorf2, I read one argument that was well thought out and tied together sources with ease, and I read one argument that was confusing, and didn’t seem to wholly follow one train of thought. Let’s begin with the former, Christopher Moore’s article on Francis […]
Dorf’s and Moore’s papers examine vastly different pictures of queerness in music. Moore’s argument is very convincing. It makes perfect sense that Poulenc and his contemporaries could hide their sexualities behind a smokescreen of flamboyance. Moore points out that straight people at the time didn’t notice the ambiguity and dog whistles embedded in Poulenc’s music. […]
The papers by Samuel Dorf and Christopher Moore examine the influence of sexuality on the music of Eric Satie and Francis Poulenc, respectively. The former article focuses on the sexuality of Winaretta Singer-Polignac more so than that of Satie. Dorf uncovers some details about her love life, but emphasizes Polignac’s efforts to hide her sexuality– […]
At this point of my college career, I’ve noticed that scholarship is full of bold claims and ideas. From intentions to relationships to fetishization, scholars love the “hot goss.” Was Chopin’s music obviously feminine? Was Paul Simon politically insensitive in the creation of his album Graceland? Arguments have been addressed, and the claims have been […]
In his writing, Samuel Dorf argues that Satie’s Socrate is a vivid expression of sapphonics, a term Wood used to describe the erotic quality of the feminine voice to listeners in an expression of a feminine sexuality or lesbianism. Dorf substantiates his claims by highlighting the close relationship between Satie and the Princesse de Polignac during the inception […]
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 […]
The argument that Moore made about Poulenc is much more convincing than Dorf’s argument on the Princesse de Polignac. While gender and sexulity both played an important role in patronage and composition, Moore’s stance on how it impacted Poulenc’s life was much more thorough. Poulenc’s sexuality was an “open secret” of sorts. He confided in […]
The question of whether Parisians truly loved, respected, and celebrated African American artists requires delving into the specific definitions of these three verbs as well as “Parisians” and “African American artists.” First, it is difficult and probably inaccurate to define, nevertheless assign a fully-mutual sentiment to, every member of a large group of people. For […]
Parisians were unable to love African American artists because what they actually loved was their own views reflected in African American artists. As an example, Josephine Baker, Parisians didn’t love her as an African American artist. According to Grendon the Revue was redesigned to fit expectations, making it match French views of Africa. The entire […]
Negrophilia is a captivation with a caricature of Blackness, which blurs the boundaries of black identity and fetishizes “primal roots” for entertainment value. This was especially common in Paris in the 1920s. It is an odd phenomenon to modern sensibilities, as there was a somewhat positive attitude toward blackness but was nonetheless demeaning and racist. […]
I think that Parisians were excited about African American artists because of how different they were from previous music, but I don’t think that they had respect for it because of how intentionally or unintentionally racist they were about it. One example of a racist way to approach African Art is illustrated by Picasso. The […]
The 1920s Parisian audiences experienced a fascination and infatuation with African and African American artists. Their racism prevented them from feeling true love for the art and artists they encountered. French audiences separated themselves from Black artists, caricatured African culture, and dehumanized Black artists. First of all, Parisian critics continually “othered” African American jazz. Levinson’s […]
We all know the couple, the one we constantly watch with curious eyes as their relationship continues, even if it shouldn’t: the couple who is always on and off again. Whether in movies or in real life, toxic relationships are an unfortunate reality of human love. Often characterized by imaginary expectations, manipulation, conquest, inconsistency, fleeting […]
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 […]
Parisians felt a sense of wonder or “love” for marginalized music, but because their feelings were misguided and racist in motivation, further steps needed to be taken in order for the music to be properly respected. The “tokenization” of other culture’s music – where its purpose is to be included in short musical quotes in […]
Negrophilia, according to avant-garde artists in Paris 1920s, was loosely defined as some vague type of love/fetishization of black culture and art. I would argue that this so-called “love” that was felt was not anything close to the definition that some of our 21st-century souls would define it. I mean, let’s be completely honest, this […]
It is difficult for me, a White person who grew up in a liberal area of the United States in the early 2000’s, to see the Negrophilia craze of 1920s Paris as an act of love for the Black population. While I do think Parisians at this time had a love for Black art, especially […]
Composers and artists living in Paris in the 20s had a complicated relationship with black art. Based on the readings that we’ve encountered so far, it’s safe to say that the mostly white population did not love this art, but rather used this art for their gain and loved the success they saw. Bernard Gendron’s […]
A trend in musical composition that we’ve been seeing around this time in Paris is inspiration being taken from artistic mediums that are not music related. Picasso being an influential figure in art, obviously, had an effect in musical life in Paris. His work in Parade is the main focus of my research, and in […]
Many of our class sources that have discussed national and cultural identities in music have served as extremely applicable to my understanding of Ida Rubinstein’s contributions to “French” music during her career. The most recent and idea-striking reading I have encountered so far is James Parakilas’ “How Spain Got a Soul,” in which he asserts […]
Rosenstiel’s Nadia Boulanger, a life in music, gives a thorough account of Boulanger’s entire life. She paints a picture of a musician who, despite early success in competitions, would have her composition and performance career ruined by unfortunate circumstances and mistakes. One example of this is a Russian tour where Nadia was to assist Raoul Pugno, […]
One source that has been especially useful to me is the magazine article “The Evolution of Modern Music in Paris and in Vienna” that Milhaud himself wrote. Naturally, because this is a primary source of the figure I chose, there is a directness available to me that would not otherwise be there. I know that […]
Louis Durey (1888-1979) was the eldest member of Les Six, and the quickest to abandon the collaborative activities of the group. I began my research using a variety of publicly available dictionaries and encyclopedias (including Wikipedia, Oxford Music, and Grove Music Online) which all lead me to the same source – Louis Durey: l’aîné des […]
From the moment he landed in Paris, Georges Auric was a social butterfly, flitting around from group to group and making connections with exactly the right people. This was not the image I had in mind. I had this idea of Auric as the old moth stuck outside the window, watching all the butterflies dance […]
In my quest to learn more about the life of Marcelle Meyer who was a highly renowned French pianist, I immediately was slapped with some sticky setbacks (and yes, that was purposeful alliteration). It, frankly, came with no shock to see that there are essentially no girthy articles or scholarships written exclusively about Miss […]
Before this class, I had never heard of Jane Bathori, which I am surprised by considering how talented and influential she became. In the scholarly article The Performer As Catalyst: The Role Of The Singer Jane Bathori (1877–1970) In The Careers Of Debussy, Ravel, “Les Six,” And Their Contemporaries In Paris, 1904–1926 by Linda Cuneo-Laurent it […]
Arthur Honegger was important to French music as a member of Les Six, but according to Harry Halbreich’s biography of the composer, he was the black sheep of the group. Halbreich’s biography leads the reader through a timeline of Honegger’s life, and the section for 1920 details the beginnings of the famous group of French […]
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 […]
For this project, I’m focusing on Louis Vierne, who was the organist of Notre Dame in Paris from 1900-1937. Louis Vierne in 1915. (Source: WikiMedia Commons.) The first source I examined is French Masters of the Organ by Michael Murray. 1 The chapter on Vierne discusses his life from birth until 1900, when he was […]
We all know and love Francis Poulenc. And as I’ve begun research on the well known Parisian, I’ve run more into the problem of finding too much information than not finding enough. This is because Poulenc was an active and well known composer from 1916 all the way to his death in 1963. He did plenty […]
The French magazine, La Femme de France published a fascinating article about the emergence of “Étoile Noir,” Josephine Baker. The article, written by French film director J.K. Raymond-Millet, came out with the 1925 issue of the magazine, and summarized the public opinion of Baker at the time, shortly after her debut in Paris in 1925. […]
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 […]
In the late 19th century, Paris was know as the cultural capital of Paris with the Société nationale de musique being established the population of Paris reaching two million. A sense of reawakening with national self esteem was much needed after a humiliating loss after the Franco-Prussian War. However, for many years before and after […]
Good question… The nationalistic obsession with French music is one that was logical for the time. In the late 18 and early 1900’s, after a devastating defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, the French people needed something “uniquely French” to cling to. However, what I find to be an unrelatable fact of the era to modern […]
Following France’s embarrassing defeat during the Franco-Prussian and the subsequent formation of the German Empire, many French musicians sought to manufacture a unique French national identity by defining France’s national style. Championed at the time by composers such as Fauré, Saint-Saëns, and Franck, they opened the way for the innovations of Debussy and, later, Satie. […]
In comparing French debates over their country’s musical identity between 1870-1920, I see similarities between Cocteau’s style of writing – in which he uses seemingly disjunct metaphors and fragments of explanations – and certain styles of pop music today in which artists often convey their beliefs in brief musical phrases and perhaps metaphorical lyrics. In […]
The hot question lingers: What is French music in the early 20th century, and who specifically decides this? In exploring the literature written about this “artistic epoch”3 (yay, new vocabulary word for me (!), and yes I cited a source for one single word), it seemed as though the more music was made available and […]
After doing all the readings assigned for this class, I understand how French nationalism arose after the Franco-Prussian War. At first I thought, “They lost a war. So what?” And then I realized that the French had suffered a huge blow to their self-esteem. They were reeling. They had to find something they were good […]
Between 1870 and 1920, French music was in the midst of an identity crisis. The horror and embarrassment of the Franco-Prussian war and the First World War created a desire for a distinct French identity, which asserted itself in the music of the time. French music became the antithesis of German Romanticism, which was glossed […]
I really empathize with the idea that music can be influenced by different artistic mediums. Ravel and other composers all found influence in poetry, art, film and many other artistic expressions that don’t involve music, thus influencing their musical expression that much more. I also greatly empathize with the ideas that the French, national consciousness […]
I’ve been surprised with how many similarities are evident between the 1920s Paris we’ve been studying and the 2020s America today. Especially because of how little I understood European history in high school when I studied it, all the many kings and queens and empires, I found it hard to keep track of in my […]
France in the early 1920s struggled to reconcile its own national identity with growing globalization and the absorption of other cultures on its own soil. The influences of globalization and nationalism made their imprint on the music of the time. French composers took inspiration from the music of other cultures, to create a “new” French […]
There are really too many things I’ve learned over the semester to discuss in one blog-post. I think I’ve developed as a writer by refining my thesis and argumentation style. I’ve also become a better reader simply by necessity: I’ve learned to parse long, dense readings for a thesis statement and other key points. However, […]
Dorf tries, unsuccesfully in my opinion, to argue that Socrate by Erik Satie has themes of gayness. I do not find his argument to be convincing in the slightest. The pieces was written for the Princess de Polignac, who was openly gay in a time when that was very much frowned upon. However, I don’t […]
Many of the things we’ve addressed this semester are particularly familiar to me, and others were completely strange and things I’d never considered before. While not having known specifically how it affected the French people, I knew that WWI had a serious impact on the French people as a whole, but I had no idea it […]
Drama! Intrigue! Passion! Sorrow! Music in Paris in the 1920’s had all of it, not to mention wide-sweeping sexism, racism, exoticism, and classism. So what is there to make of the chaotic, competitive, and altogether alluring mess that makes up this unique period of music making? In my opinion, it begins with surrealism. The significance […]
Throughout this course I’ve continued to gain new insights into the idea of modernism in Paris in the 1920s. The readings for our very first day of class discussed Taruskin’s assessment of the idea of lifestyle modernism in Paris, a movement away from romanticism towards something more deliberately shallow.1 The new generation of composers and […]
Well, we’ve made it to the end of Music 345: Paris in the 1920s and I can confidently say I know more about the subject than I did going in. From the very first day I attended, the conversation began with an idea of nationalism: us vs. them, or in this case, France versus Germany. […]
One topic that seemed to come through in all of the topic’s I researched was the issue of defining and securing French’s sound at the time. The topics I researched all differed greatly in their approach to it. Some worked to help define it, being the work of a member of Les Six and for […]
Race and gender have emerged most powerfully in my writing this semester. I now think of Paris as a kind of “promised land” for people of color in the 1920s. As we see with Ada “Bricktop” Smith, African Americans (even African American women) were able to live autonomously and have control over their own finances. […]
Throughout the course of this class the theme of identity has emerged as a common denominator. It is rather broad, but it encompasses all the different topics and lenses we have discovered from race to gender and sexuality, and to me most prominently, national identity. For a whole century France had close ties with Germany […]
This class has proven to me time and again that no music, at the very least no music composed in Paris in the 20s, is devoid of extramusical meaning. The necessity of patronage in allowing music to happen at all, especially classical music, assures us that the composers who see success do so only because […]
When I signed up for this class, I was excited. Music and history are the two academic subjects that interest me the most, and the classes I like most are the classes that look at the intersection of those two disciplines. It is impossible to understand music without understanding its historical context. Tensions between France […]
The idea that has been most impactful, interesting and consistently relevant throughout this semester has been the degree to which French musicians of this time really were in the business of invention; always trying to find new ways to set themselves apart from the Germans and to reinvigorate their own music. From the very beginning […]
Nation was a fluid thought in 1920s France. Perhaps even in the whole world. The great war was a recent memory, and at the same time as desire for a unified national identity was at its peak, large numbers of people were displaced, for reasons of politics, from the result of the war, from circumstances […]