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 by extension learned that nationalism is a widespread phenomenon that impacts daily life.<\/p>\n
First, I learned what Nationalism\u00a0is:\u00a0<\/em>Anderson claims that “[the nation] is an imagined political community,”1<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0because we cannot possibly be connected to every person within the community yet we construct a picture of what our community looks like in our heads. We create boundaries to make our community distinguishable in our imagination, separating us from the “other.” \u00a0Gellner writes that there may be such thing as nationalism without ego, but that more often than not it becomes “infected” with “partiality” towards our own community.2<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n As we learned how nationalism impacted French music, some of the manifestations were very clear-cut. Exoticism is the most obvious extension of nationalism, by creating a false conception of a foreign culture for the sake of entertainment. Parakilas<\/span>‘ argument that Spain was exoticized once it lost its political power was fascinating to me,3<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0because it demonstrated how French music is directly related to issues of nationalism and power. Negrophilia is another extension of nationalism, as\u00a0it separates blackness from whiteness by conflating it with generalizations of primitiveness in distant Africa. These both are easy to write off as intolerant ways of old that wouldn’t happen today.<\/span><\/p>\n However, neoclassicism as nationalism was a complete surprise to me. I had always understood neoclassicism as a simple affinity for the lightness of Bach, Mozart, and Haydn. In class we learned that the use of pre-Romantic composers was in fact, a reaction against German Romanticism itself. This stemmed from the Franco-Prussian War and WWI, during which Germany was France’s enemy. The lightness of French music was an assertion of nationalist identity in the face of German military and musical dominance. Maurice Ravel believed that\u00a0\u201cFrench consciousness is one of reserve,\u201d4<\/sup><\/a> and Darius Milhaud defined French music by its sense of form, as well as its \u201cclearness, simplicity and conciseness.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a> Both agree that one\u2019s nationality is central to their musical identity, and Ravel considers Arthur Honegger’s [Swiss-]German heritage more influential in his music than his French education.6<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0Honegger was the subject of my first paper, in which I argued (from of Milhaud’s\u00a0perspective ) what differentiated Honegger from the rest of\u00a0Les Six<\/em> (namely his nationality and quasi-impressionism),\u00a0yet how he was still a valuable part of the group because of his commitment to form, clarity of vocal writing, and the counterpoint of Bach. I learned so much about Honegger from this paper, which is fascinating to me as a trumpet performance major– his\u00a0Intrada\u00a0<\/em>for trumpet is on most graduate and orchestral auditions. <\/span><\/p>\n