{"id":91,"date":"2020-02-22T13:41:51","date_gmt":"2020-02-22T19:41:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/?p=91"},"modified":"2020-02-22T13:41:51","modified_gmt":"2020-02-22T19:41:51","slug":"is-1920-so-different-from-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/2020\/02\/22\/is-1920-so-different-from-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Is 1920 so different from 2020?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Much of the discourse about French music between 1870 and 1920 feels somewhat distant from my experiences as an American in 2020. But under the surface, many of the anxieties that French composers and music critics were expressing at the time are strikingly similar to the political conversations happening currently, and many of the ideas about French and broader European identity are still with us. For example, I recently played the Saint-Saens Oboe Sonata<\/a>, and am currently playing the Poulenc Oboe Sonata<\/a>; both pieces written by French composers who were influential during this time period.\u00a0 While playing each piece, I\u2019ve had conversations about how aspects of them feel very \u201cFrench\u201d. Things like measured, yet expressive lines, and a restrained sense of polytonality were in some way associated with French identity without me necessarily being able to express why. In reading Ravel<\/a> and Milhaud\u2019s writings<\/a> on the essential components of French music, I found that many of the things that I identified as \u201csounding French\u201d were exactly what they said distinguished French music from German and Russian music. Of course there is nothing inherently French about any of those musical characteristics, I think of them as being that way because national musical identity was formed around those ideas, and transmitted down through generations. But the fact that I have the same associations as composers a century ago shows that their construction of a national musical identity was successful in some measure. Even with very limited conscious contact with France and French culture, I knew what characteristics I was supposed to associate with Frenchness. In this way, I\u2019ve found a lot that I relate to in many of the documents we\u2019ve read so far in class. <\/span><\/p>\n

One of the aspects of this musical period that I find least relatable is the relationship to war. Much of French identity at the time was based in anxieties about the loss of the Franco-Prussian War, which is an event I am very far removed from. That event feels almost entirely foreign to me, and is one that I can\u2019t draw many direct influences on my life from, so it can be difficult to think of it as more than contextual. But perhaps more poignantly, I find myself largely unable to imagine the impact of World War I on the composers of the 1910s. While I know that a generation of young men were killed in terrible conditions, and that the impact of the war and those losses changed world history drastically, I can\u2019t possibly imagine what that change would have felt like. I can\u2019t imagine a world in which the world wars had not happened, and I find it difficult to truly comprehend the depth of emotion that would arise out of having so many friends die in circumstances that had never been seen before. While I can feel the emotion in pieces about World War I like Ravel\u2019s <\/span>Le Tombeau de Couperin<\/span><\/i><\/a>, and I can try to picture what he must have felt writing it, I doubt I will ever be able to grasp the full depth of the horror and anguish that were felt in that time. I count myself very lucky that such circumstances are not relatable to me.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Much of the discourse about French music between 1870 and 1920 feels somewhat distant from my experiences as an American in 2020. But under the surface, many of the anxieties that French composers and music critics were expressing at the time are strikingly similar to the political conversations happening currently, and many of the ideas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3470,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91","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\/91","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\/3470"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions\/92"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}