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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Check out this performance by the St. Olaf Orchestra and Professor Anderegg! My first attempts at researching Ravel were slightly troubling. You think there would be an abundance of online resources examining such a well-known composer, and his piece, Tzigane, which has become a staple of the violin repertoire. There are many dissertations, concert reviews, […]
The concept of Negrophilia becomes quite convoluted when attempting to dissect it and separate it into its true parts. The question of if Parisian’s really did love African and African American artists at the time cannot truly be answered by a modern scholar, as I’m sure there were Parisians who really did appreciate the music […]
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 […]
Composers and writers were obsessed with establishing national identities through music in the early 20th century, in France and many Western countries. The disdain Cocteau’s writing1 shows for German music and the “mudiness” of Russian influence in Debussy’s music is at once familiar and bizarre. Certainly many people experience national pride; one need look no […]
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 […]
My initial thoughts on these questions are as eclectic as the plurality of opinions and musics I’ve attempted to digest over the first two weeks of class. Firstly, the horse. I can’t stop thinking about the way the horse moves. However, in all seriousness, I think the horse is a very fitting representation of […]