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 […]
Tag: French Music
Categories
Insert Title Here
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. […]
Categories
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 […]
One of the first thoughts that came to my mind when deciding on Coco Chanel for my paper topic was how she no doubt changed women’s’ fashion forever with her impact on social change and push for women’s’ independence. Chanel’s styles such as trousers and suits for women, popularizing skin tan, the color black, branded […]
Georges Braque (1882-1963) and Pablo Piacasso (1881-1973) both act as two central figures in the Cubism art movement. During my initial research, I was unsure of how I was going to incorporate an artist such as Braque into the dynamic French musical movements of the early 20th century. It was upon discovering Nancy Perloff’s Art and […]
Categories
How do we define French Music?
The societal changes that drove music during the “Belle Epoque” were really the same changes that drove the reformation of everything else from technology to art. After establishing the Third Republic in France, an optimistic and proud mindset emerged, finally feeling some stability in France. Musicians and composers used that to their advantage, wanting to […]
When creating any kind of social group, the members must decide who or what is included and excluded. If everyone was included in a group, there would be no sense of cohesiveness or social connection, the act of defining a community is the same as defining what the community is not. Creating distinctions between groups […]