Nationalism is about taking pride in your culture. Its about a sense of belonging and being a part of something bigger, right? There\u2019s a part of me that definitely wants to feel this sense of belonging and pride, but somehow, I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever truly felt the nationalistic urge. \u00a0I can\u2019t imagine defending America with the same vigor that Cocteau or Debussy defend their idea of French-ness.<\/p>\n
Let me take a moment to describe my current feelings on nationalism. In my view, our country is very divided right now. Political polarization drives our sense of national disunity. On the right, we have a shallow sense of gun-toting patriotism which defends America to a fault. At the same time, it seems that the left holds a special resentment for anything vaguely American. The word has almost become pejorative. I know these are rather reductive generalizations, but the problem remains that many of us have lost faith in our culture. We are not sure whether to cling to the remnants of the past or to throw the baby out with the bathwater. To me, neither of these seem like good options. All this is to say that an experience of true American nationalism is very foreign to me. Even St. Olaf is careful to encourage us to be \u201cglobal citizens\u201d.<\/p>\n
Now I\u2019m going to play devil\u2019s advocate. Despite everything we know about how nationalism furthers othering, let us consider for a moment that there may be some benefits to nationalism. I think it has become clear that without the nationalistic undercurrents running through Paris, French music would be very different. To Ravel, national identity is an inseparable part of artistic creation. He places the \u201croots of [an] artist\u2019s sensitiveness and personal reaction\u201d in two categories: the national conscious and the individual conscious [1]. Ravel later explains that \u201cthe national consciousness of musicians distinctively German is expansive, while our French consciousness is one of reserve\u201d [1]. While this \u201cnationalism does not deprive an artist of his \u2026 individual expression\u201d [1], it\u2019s clear that his French identity plays a large role in how he thinks about music.<\/p>\n
In many ways this embrace of French identity also means the rejection of other nationalities, especially identities associated with Germany. While Ravel already alluded to this, Debussy continues this trend with his comments on Wagner. In a letter from 1913, Debussy decries that French composers have wrongly interpreted a Wagnerian ideal which \u201ccould never be in tune with the French spirit\u201d [2]. Debussy exclaims that \u201cWagner was not a good teacher of French\u201d [2]. \u00a0In a similar fashion to Ravel, Debussy has actively rejected German characteristics in favor of a true French-ness. My point here is that nationalism strongly influenced how French composers thought about and created music. While we certainly have reason to be skeptical of it, we must keep in mind that it spurred new creative decisions for composers. French composers like Debussy and Ravel reacted against the dominating German musical culture in order to create something uniquely their own. Without nationalism its likely that their music would be very different from what we hear today.<\/p>\n
[1] Maurice Ravel, essay, 1928, in Revue de Musicologie, ed. Bohdan Pilarski ( Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Fran\u00e7aise de Musicologie,964), 208-221<\/p>\n
[2] Claude Debussy, letters to music journals, 1902-1913, in Source Readings in Music History<\/i>, ed. Oliver Strunk (New York: W.W. Norton and Company Inc., 1950), 161-167.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nationalism is about taking pride in your culture. Its about a sense of belonging and being a part of something bigger, right? There\u2019s a part of me that definitely wants to feel this sense of belonging and pride, but somehow, I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever truly felt the nationalistic urge. \u00a0I can\u2019t imagine defending America […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3599,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-203","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\/203","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\/3599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions\/204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}