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 […]
Aaron Copland was one of many creatives who flocked to Paris in the 1920s, where he encountered several forces that shaped his career as a composer. While spending the summer of 1921 at the Fontainebleau school for American composition students outside of Paris, Copland met by chance his future mentor and lifelong friend Nadia Boulanger.1 […]