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 […]
Tag: Francis Poulenc
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Understanding 1920s Paris
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 […]
Both Dorf and Moore’s writing raise issues of gender and sexuality that had been excluded from meaningful examination in musicology through much of the 20th century. Queer scholar Elizabeth Wood is a rare example among musicologists of that time, introducing the idea of Sapphonics in her first edition of Queering the Pitch in 1994. Wood […]
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 […]
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Music in the closet
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 […]