scholarly journals Saint-Saëns, Debussy, and Superseding German Musical Taste in the United States1

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 113-119
Author(s):  
James R. Briscoe ◽  
Chloé Huvet
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Claude Debussy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great War ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Solo Piano ◽  
Pelleas Et Melisande ◽  
French Music ◽  
The Great War

In an interview published in the October 21, 1908, issue of the Boston Transcript, Debussy had been asked to comment on American musical life. He remarked, “The distinction of a country like [the United States] is that it imbibes from all sources... it is less German bound than are the countries who hear little or no other music through chauvinism or antipathies.” This paper examines the roles of Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) and Claude Debussy (1862-1918) in driving such a modernist evolution. Saint- Saëns performed with and conducted the New York Symphony in 1906, including his symphonic poem Le rouet d’Omphale and playing solo piano in his Africa, Fantaisie pour piano et orchestre. He thereafter appeared in both Chicago and San Francisco, and critics could already hear the modernist aesthetic in formation. When conductor Frederick Stock, a stalwart champion of French music, led Prélude à “L’après- midi-d’un faune” in Chicago in December 1908, the symbolist dimensions of the new music were grasped by both critics and audiences, and Paul Rosenfeld wrote: “We should look to France for the latest gospel [of the new musical advancement] […] Claude Debussy has broken through the limitation of the old, and shall we say he has found new musical dimensions?” Contemporaneously, the premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande in New York dramatically impressed the new hearing on American audiences. To be sure, anti-German feelings after 1910, brought with the Great War, promoted such a shift from the aesthetics of the Gilded Age, but the new French music had itself led the way since just after 1900. By 1923, Carl Van Vechten, in Music after the Great War, wrote, “It is not from the German countries that the musical invention of the past two decades has come. It is from France.”

The Public Face of Chinatown: Actresses, Actors, Playwrights, and Audiences of Chinatown Theaters in San Francisco during the 1920s

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
NANCY YUNHWA RAO
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cantonese Opera ◽  
Interior Layers ◽  
Artistic Self

AbstractIn the twentieth century, elaborate and prosperous Chinatown theaters in New York and San Francisco (from the 1920s to the early 1930s) constituted a golden age of Cantonese opera in the United States, a vivid musical life that has been almost completely expunged from U.S. cultural memory. Seeking a historical narrative for this musical past—preserving those vivid sonorities and glamorous images that “threaten to disappear irretrievably”—entails an examination of the actresses, actors, musicians, and playwrights who enlivened the stages of these opera theaters, as well as the audiences who flocked to see them. In particular, this study sheds light on the significance of the performers named on the daily playbills and pictured in newspapers or on immigration bond papers. The images and sonorities extend beyond the bounds of the theaters to epitomize the Chinese community. The study not only offers a significant window into the interior layers of the music lives of Chinese America, but also reflects on the Chinatown community's sense of its musical and artistic self.

Patriotism or Nationalism? Fauré and the Great War

1999 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-625 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlo Caballero
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Great War ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
French Music ◽  
Political Choices ◽  
Charitable Activities ◽  
The Great War

Even though Gabriel Fauré's contemporaries championed his music as quintessentially French, Fauré distanced himself from policies of national exclusion in art, and his own construction of French musical style was cosmopolitan. This essay summarizes Fauré's political choices during the Great War, explains his motives, and indicates how some of his decisions affected French musical life. Fauré's outspoken preface to Georges Jean-Aubry's La Musique française d'aujourd'hui provides one key to the composer's position. Jean-Aubry, following Debussy, reckoned as authentically French only musical styles attached to pre-Revolutionary traditions. Fauré felt that such a narrow characterization of French music falsified the diversity of the historical record. His preface therefore takes issue with Jean-Aubry's book and insists that German composers had played an irrefutable role in the formation of modern French music. We may understand Fauré's-and other composers'-wartime decisions in terms of a distinction between patriotism and nationalism. Composers such as Fauré, Bruneau, and Ravel emerge as patriots. Debussy, who sought to purify French music of foreign contamination, emerges as a nationalist. Both nationalism and patriotism call on collective memory and experience, but nationalism exercises its power protectively and tends toward exclusion, while patriotism, favoring political over ethnic determination, tends toward inclusion. Fauré's patriotism emerges through the evidence of the preface; charitable activities; his refusal to sign a French declaration calling for a ban on contemporary German and Austrian music; and his attempt to unite the Société Nationale and the Société Musicale Indépendante. Fauré's wartime music, in contrast to his writings and activities, evades connections with historical events and raises methodological questions about perceived relations between political belief and artistic expression.

Revisiting the Myths: New Approaches to the Great War

2004 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 505-515 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL S. NEIBERG
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Great War ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Total War ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Time And Energy ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Great War

Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18: Understanding the Great War (New York: Hill & Wang), 280 pp., $24.00, ISBN 0-8090-4643-1.Jeremy Black, ed., War in the Modern World since 1815 (London: Routledge, 2003), 268 pp., £18.99, ISBN 0-415-25140-0.Gail Braybon, ed., Evidence, History, and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914–18 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003), 304 pp., £50.00, ISBN 1-57181-726-7.Roger Chickering and Stig Förster, eds., The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919–1939 (Washington, DC, and Cambridge: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2003), 364 pp., $60.00, ISBN 0-521-81236-4.Andrew Green, Writing the Great War: Sir James Edmonds and the Official Histories, 1915–48 (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 200 pp., £19.99, ISBN 0-7146-8430-9.John H. Morrow Jr, The Great War: An Imperial History (New York: Routledge, 2003), 352 pp., $27.50, ISBN 0-415-20439-9.Mario Morselli, Caporetto, 1917: Victory or Defeat? (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 176 pp., £65.00 (hb), ISBN 0-714-65073-0.Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War, Myths and Realities (London: Headline, 2001), 318 pp., £7.99, ISBN 0-747-27157-7.The powers of Europe fought the Great War for more than four years, but it took France fifteen years to write its official history, Germany nineteen years, and the United Kingdom an astonishing twenty-six years. These works, moreover, encompass only land operations and fill twenty-three extraordinarily detailed volumes for France, an equal number for Great Britain, and fourteen volumes for Germany. The time and energy needed to compile the thousands of necessary documents, organise that data, and construct the interpretations reflect both the enormity of the war itself and the difficulty of finding meaning in an event that so deeply shook the continent.

Suffragists Win the New York State Campaign, 1915–1917

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Goodier
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York State ◽  
The United States ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Great War ◽  
American Red Cross ◽  
York State ◽  
War Effort ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Great War

This chapter focuses on the second campaign for woman suffrage in New York State. Following the advent of the Great War, Alice Hill Chittenden, although continuing to serve as president of the state anti-suffrage association, focused her reform energy on war preparedness and the American Red Cross more than on suffrage. Historians have long posited that women won the right to vote as a reward for their war efforts. However, anti-suffragists, individually and as a group, committed their resources earlier and far more fully to the war effort than did suffragists. The Great War so distracted the anti-suffragists that they essentially dropped out of the battle, allowing the suffragists to win sooner than they otherwise would have. This subtle but important detail has been overshadowed by Tammany's famous reversal on the question in 1917. Once women won suffrage in New York State, the federal amendment would soon enfranchise all women in the United States.

The “Japanese Turn” in Fine Dining in the United States, 1980–2020

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
San Francisco Bay Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Further Training ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Wide Acceptance

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.

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