{"id":1445,"date":"2022-05-16T15:57:02","date_gmt":"2022-05-16T20:57:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/?p=1445"},"modified":"2022-05-16T15:57:02","modified_gmt":"2022-05-16T20:57:02","slug":"music-in-paris-in-the-1920s-semester-reflection-fetishization-and-stereotyping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/2022\/05\/16\/music-in-paris-in-the-1920s-semester-reflection-fetishization-and-stereotyping\/","title":{"rendered":"Music in Paris in the 1920s Semester Reflection: Fetishization and Stereotyping"},"content":{"rendered":"

One theme that really stood out to me during my time in <\/span>MUSIC 345B: Music in Paris in the 1920s<\/span><\/i> was the theme of fetishization, or similarly, tokenization and stereotyping. So many compositional techniques in French music stem from their obsession with other cultures and what they took from them in order to make French music sound different and unique. The French wanted to be different from Germanic styles that were overly romantic and emotive, like Wagner and Mahler\u2019s music, pieces that were long, heavy, dense, traditional, and loud (<\/span>Debussy<\/span><\/a>). Instead, they chose to emphasize music that meant \u201cnothing\u201d, like Satie\u2019s furniture music, or the entire concept of lifestyle modernism, which takes the mundane events of everyday life, and makes them the focus of the piece of music (<\/span>Taruskin<\/span><\/a>). The meaningless became meaningful because of its mundane-ness, to\u00a0 French artists. They strayed from most German harmonic and counterpoint rules, created their own tonalities, used neoclassicism (<\/span>Messing<\/span><\/a>), and used a lot of pentatonic scales and folk references (<\/span>Morgan<\/span><\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

The French were also really great at \u201cothering\u201d, or separating themselves from other cultures and forcing, for example, Africans and African-Americans, into a single monolith. Instead of recognizing differences and still trying to relate to them or learn new things from the source, they took small pieces of each culture\u2019s music, labeled it as something (usually incorrect and offensive, like Oriental, Negro, Indian, etc.), and then appropriated it by putting it into French music. They even did it to American music (<\/span>Fauser<\/span><\/a>)! They used snippets of jazz, blues, Chinese and Japanese traditional musical sounds, Brazilian dances and folk songs, and other foreign musics to differentiate their own compositions from the rest of Europe\u2019s music scene (<\/span>Auner<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Ravel<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Parakilas<\/span><\/a>, and more). Because these white men were considered the musical experts in Paris at the time, they were the main interpreters and then by extension, the teachers of the general public, about these cultures (<\/span>Watkins<\/span><\/a>). Because of their tokenization of the cultures and musical styles, both composers and the general Parisian public all in turn fetishized and adopted these stereotypes as the truth. This was almost entirely harmful to these minority groups, except in rare cases like Joesphine Baker (<\/span>Gendron<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Jordan<\/span><\/a>) because these incorrect stereotypes and assumptions made about them were adopted into the general knowledge of the public and became the normal, accepted view of them as a whole. It prevented the equitable diversification of music in Europe for many decades after.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Even in the West today, I would argue that the equitable diversifying of music is still happening, and our past mistakes as entitled white musicians haven\u2019t been fixed and won\u2019t be fixed for a while. This fetishization done by the French during this one specific decade is only a small snapshot of the other atrocities committed against minorities by white people during the last few hundred years, and we still have plenty of work to do to keep making amends.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sources from Class Cited or Referenced:<\/span><\/p>\n

Joseph Auner, <\/span>Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

Claude Debussy, Three Articles for Music Journals in Morgan, <\/span>Source Readings in Music History<\/span><\/i>, volume 7, <\/span>The Twentieth Century<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

Annegret Fauser, \u201cAaron Copland, Nadia Boulanger, and the Making of an \u2018American\u2019 Composer,\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Bernard Gendron, \u201cNegrophilia,\u201d in <\/span>Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

Scott Messing, <\/span>Neoclassicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept through the Schoenberg\/Stravinsky Polemic<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

Robert Morgan, <\/span>Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Matthew Jordan, <\/span>Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

James Parakilas, \u201cHow Spain Got a Soul,\u201d in <\/span>The Exotic in Western Music<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

Maurice Ravel, \u201cContemporary Music,\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Richard Taruskin, Lifestyle Modernism<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Glenn Watkins, <\/span>Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n



<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One theme that really stood out to me during my time in MUSIC 345B: Music in Paris in the 1920s was the theme of fetishization, or similarly, tokenization and stereotyping. So many compositional techniques in French music stem from their obsession with other cultures and what they took from them in order to make French […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4375,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4375"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1445"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1446,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445\/revisions\/1446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}