French Music Criticism and Musicology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: New Journals, New Networks

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-32
Author(s):  
Michel Duchesneau
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
French Music ◽  
Through Diffusion

This article examines the efforts of French musicologists to create a specialized journal at the turn of the twentieth century that would clearly associate music criticism and musicology. Using as case study a set of music journals, from La Revue d’histoire et de critique musicales to the Mercure musical and the Revue S.I.M. that followed, I establish the connections that brought together the nascent musicological milieu, the musical press and the artistic affinities among the principal actors in their attempt to create a new network of music critics guided by musicological exigencies. Jules Combarieu, Romain Rolland, Louis Laloy, Jean Marnold, Émile Vuillermoz and Jules Écorcheville are some of the musicologists engaged in this project between 1900 and 1914. But historical contingencies make this project a relative utopia, and requirements of the young musicology hardly meet that of a music criticism divided between disciplinary tradition and the necessity to support contemporary music. After the war, with the founding of a new Revue musicale, René Prunières, prudently, would not hire musicologists to develop a music criticism. Instead, he took up the characteristically Republican project of promoting musical culture, and thus responding to the interests of both the cultivated bourgeoisie and the musical, literary and artistic milieus through diffusion of music knowledge.

Rewriting Modernism

2019 ◽  
pp. 248-298
Author(s):  
Alexandra Kieffer
Keyword(s):  
New Music ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Pelleas Et Melisande ◽  
French Music ◽  
Music Aesthetics ◽  
Historical Relationship ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Music And Emotion

By 1910, Debussy occupied a very different position in Parisian musical culture from where he had been at the premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902—now the acknowledged patriarch of modern French music rather than its intrepid trailblazer. Debussy’s writings in the decade after the Pelléas premiere, emphasizing the importance of listening and reevaluating the relationship between music and emotion, betray a significant debt to the critical discourse of debussysme. At the same time, debussysme, even for such Debussy stalwarts as Jean Marnold and Louis Laloy, was itself losing its relevance after 1910, overshadowed by other modernist currents that were then taking hold of critics’ attention. As a new music aesthetics defined by logical universals redefined the significance of Debussy’s music, the work of Henri Bergson and Albert Bazaillas inspired a new intellectual-historical relationship between the practice of music criticism and a modern psychology of the unconscious.

Auber's Horses: L'Annee terrible and Apocalyptic Narratives

2007 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 213-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Delphine Mordey
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
French Music ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Timely Death

On 13 May 1871 Auber died. His passing was blamed on the horrors of the Franco-Prussian War, Siege and Commune, and provided a powerful symbol of the end of an era. Indeed, the idea that the debacle of 1870-71 caused a rupture in French music, one embodied in Auber's death, continues to influence music histories; political events are thought to mark a clear turning point away from the operettas of the Second Empire to the more serious works associated with the Third Republic. This notion of a turning point has much to recommend it, but the accepted history may ultimately be better viewed as an example of an apocalyptic narrative; after the event, the infamous frivolity of Napoleon III's era was seen to have led, inexorably, to defeat in the War, and to steep cultural change. I argue that this narrative was retrospectively constructed by contemporary music critics dissatisfied with existing French musical culture. The siege, the Commune, and the "timely" death of Auber were used as a means of bolstering demands for change: if the nation were to recover, she would have to change her ways, musical and otherwise. This constructed narrative obscures the picture suggested by primary sources; that not only had changes begun before the war, but that light-hearted forms continued to flourish afterward. It is clearly a narrative in need of historical revision.

A Machine for Feeling: Ping's Posthuman Affect

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-102
Author(s):  
Alys Moody
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
Affective Quality ◽  
Contemporary Perspective ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Natural Emotion ◽  
Archival Quality ◽  
Historical Moment

Beckett's famous claim that his writing seeks to ‘work on the nerves of the audience, not the intellect’ points to the centrality of affect in his work. But while his writing's affective quality is widely acknowledged by readers of his work, its refusal of intellect has made it difficult to take fully into account in scholarly work on Beckett. Taking Beckett's 1967 short prose text Ping as a case study, this essay is an attempt to take the affective qualities of Beckett's writing seriously and to consider the implications of his affectively dense writing for his texts’ relationship to history. I argue that Ping's affect emerges from the rhythms of its prose, producing a highly ‘speakable’ text in which affect precedes interpretation. In Ping, however, this affective rhythmic patterning is portrayed as mechanical, the product of the machinic ‘ping’ that punctuates the text and the text's own mechanical rhythms, demanding the active involvement of the reader. The essay concludes by arguing that Ping's mechanised affect is a specifically historical feeling. Arising from a specifically twentieth-century anxiety about technology's tendency to evacuate ‘natural’ emotion in favour of inhuman affect, it participates in a tradition of affectively resonant but curiously blank or indifferent performances of cyborg embodiment. Read in this historical light, Ping's implication of the reader in the production of its mechanised affect grants it, from our contemporary perspective, an archival quality. At the same time, it asks us to broaden the way in which we understand the Beckettian text's relationship to history, pointing to the existence of a more complex and recursive relationship between literature, its historical moment, and our contemporary moment of reading. Such a post-archival historicism sees texts as generated by but not bound to their historical moments of composition, and understands the moment of reception as an integral, if shifting, part of the text's history.

Poe and His Global Advocates

2018 ◽  
pp. 596-617
Author(s):  
Emron Esplin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South America ◽  
Rio De La Plata ◽  
Río De La Plata ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
La Plata ◽  
Original Works ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Global Reputation

This essay explores Edgar Allan Poe’s extraordinary relationships with various literary traditions across the globe, posits that Poe is the most influential US writer on the global literary scene, and argues that Poe’s current global reputation relies at least as much on the radiance of the work of Poe’s literary advocates—many of whom are literary stars in their own right—as it does on the brilliance of Poe’s original works. The article briefly examines Poe’s most famous French advocates (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry); glosses the work of his advocates throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas; and offers a concise case study of Poe’s influence on and advocacy from three twentieth-century writers from the Río de la Plata region of South America (Quiroga, Borges, and Cortázar). The essay concludes by reading the relationships between Poe and his advocates through the ancient definition of astral or stellar influence.

EVIDENCE OF THE PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF SOLFEGGIO PATTERNS IN THE MANUSCRIPT FOR THE 1707 NEAPOLITAN PERFORMANCE OF LA FEDE TRADITA E VENDICATA BY GASPARINI AND VIGNOLA

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-184
Author(s):  
ERIC BOARO
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Strong Evidence ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Schema Theory ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
Recent Contribution ◽  
Corpus Studies ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

The last two decades have seen the opening of several new paths in eighteenth-century musicology, and Robert O. Gjerdingen has opened one of these: schema theory. Schemata are ‘stock musical phrases employed in conventional sequences’ that function as harmonic, melodic and rhythmic frameworks for musical passages. Evidence of such schematic thinking has emerged through related studies on partimento and solfeggio. Solfeggio practice of the time manifests a schematic way of thinking about music, being mostly based on simple hexachordal patterns which, as studies progressed, could be embellished in different ways. Vasili Byros has addressed the ‘archaeology’ of hearing through reception history, and offered strong evidence that eighteenth-century ears did hear schemata. Interweaving corpus studies on music of the long eighteenth century (1720–1840), contemporary music criticism and reception history, as well as didactic documents from that era, Byros sheds new light on the ways in which schemata were perceived at the time. A recent contribution by Gilad Rabinovitch uses a live improvisation in the style of Mozart by Robert Levin to demonstrate the importance of conventional schemata for historical improvisation.

Життєтворчість Іллі Саца у вітчизняному культурному просторі початку ХХ століття

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (36) ◽  
Author(s):  
O. Badalov
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Creative Activity ◽  
Analysis Method ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Humanitarian Space ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Creative Life

The subject of the study is comprehensive understanding of the life and creativity by I. Sats – a significant figure in the national musical life of the early twentieth century.The purpose of the article is exploring the circumstances of I. Sats’ activity in the socio-cultural context of the era.The methodology of the article includes: historical and chronological method – for studying the events of the artist’s biography; source method – for research of archival materials, correspondence, reconstruction of composer’s creative life; hermeneutical analysis method – for interpretation of literary inheritance (libretto, music criticism) by I. Sats in the context of the early twentieth century; logic-generalization method – to summarize the results of the study.As a result of the research, a complex view on the multivectoral creative activity by I. Sats was formed, his significant role in the formation of new genres of musical and theatrical creativity, development of the humanitarian space of Chernihiv, Irkutsk, and Moscow was proved. The application of the results of the research in scientific, music-pedagogical and educational activities will significantly expand the established ideas about the development of the national musical culture.Key words: music for theater, Moscow Art Theater, satirical opera, I. Sats, Chernihiv region, Irkutsk music classes.

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