{"id":833,"date":"2020-05-11T10:12:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-11T15:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/?p=833"},"modified":"2020-05-11T10:12:05","modified_gmt":"2020-05-11T15:12:05","slug":"understanding-1920s-paris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/2020\/05\/11\/understanding-1920s-paris\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding 1920s Paris"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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 our class texts. I’ve often found myself wondering what about Paris in the 1920s has drawn so much scholarship from musicologists. There is something about this particular city in this particular decade that seems to beg to be understood. I think some of the overarching themes from the semester can help explain this phenomenon. In thinking about themes that thread through the semester, I’ve come up with two related but opposing ideas that seem concurrent in Paris in the 1920s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Erik Satie, one of the most important French composers of the early 20th century.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The first is that music making was completely intertwined between groups of people. Boundaries between nations, art forms, and sexualities were being broken pretty much like never before. This is most evident in the desire to create something new and modern that many of the composers felt during this time. They saw borrowing and mixing from previously unused sources as injecting vitality into French music. This was most clear when looking at jazz and music from other countries. Ravel created his Chansons Madecasses<\/a><\/em>, meant to invoke a primitivist African setting. Other composers did the same, such as the ballet La Creation du Monde<\/a><\/em> by Darius Milhaud. In these examples, the composers weren’t trying to write in a jazz style, only use enough elements of jazz that the meaning could be recognizable to their audience. Composers were also more free to explore sexuality and gender in music, like Poulenc did in his ballet Les Biches<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
A scene from Poulenc’s Les Biches<\/em>. Ballet saw a revitalization as an art form in Paris<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, there were remarkable divides in society at large that existed in music as well. The most obvious was the stark class divide. Almost all of the composers, patrons, and other actors that we studied this semester belonged to more upscale society. The music they were writing definitely was not for everyone nor was it what was popular in Paris at the time. Their interpretations of Jazz and other popular styles often evoked more of a mockery or disdain, such as in Adieu New-York<\/a><\/em> by Georges Auric. The weight that musicologists put on music that was novel is almost always much greater than what was actually popular in Paris at the time. Many concertgoers loved Brahms, Beethoven and Mozart, and they were programmed much more than new music. There were also spheres of music making that remained almost completely separated from the mainstream. Church and organ music had its golden age in Paris (and France) during the same time period, yet was not picked up on by mainstream composers of the day like Jazz was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n