In Search of a Consolatory Past

This chapter investigates how interwar French musicians understood music making as an embodied memorial practice. Using archival sources such as soliders’ and musicians’ diaries and correspondence, concert programs, and journals like the Gazette des Classes du Conservatoire, this chapter demonstrates that Maurice Ravel, Marguerite Long, Nadia Boulanger, and Darius Milhaud were among the many French musicians who understood musical practices such as composing, listening, and performing as crucial sites for maintaining connections with lost loved ones. By situating these sources within the context of popular fin-de-siècle theories of corporeal memory posited by Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust, as well as spiritist and French Catholic memorial practices, this chapter shows how making music facilitated mourning by permitting musicians to recall corporeally the feeling of being in the presence of those they mourned.

Introduction

This introductory chapter outlines the aims of Resonant Recoveries as well as the book’s theoretical and methodological apparatuses. In introducing one of the central arguments of this book—that music came to operate as a corporeal technology of consolation in interwar France—the introduction provides an overview of how late nineteenth- through mid-twentieth-century French artistic, psychological, sociological, and philosophical discourse framed the body as a privileged site for the production and development of knowledge about oneself and the world. In so doing, this introduction provides the socio-historical background for the historical and musical analysis that follows in subsequent chapters while also advocating a specific mode of interdisciplinary research that investigates how music has historically been conceived as a therapeutic, corporeal medium.

Rire as Release and Rapport

This chapter demonstrates that Jean Cocteau’s interwar musical-theatrical endeavors with “Les Six” were significant sites for coping with postwar trauma. Letters, diaries, memoirs, and performance reviews illustrate that pieces like Le Bœuf sur le toit et Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel offered traumatized playwrights, musicians, and audience members opportunities for bodily pleasure and laughter. Examination of archival sources—from period texts on laughter to accounts of humor’s importance for front-line soldiers as well as Dada and Surrealist artists—reveals that absurdist interwar musical theater was intertwined with contemporary ideas concerning the importance of laughter as a tool for emotional release, social bonding, and political expression. Analysis of the music, scenario, choreography, and stage design of Le Bœuf and Les Mariés illuminates that Cocteau and his collaborators incited laughter by drawing on common tropes that resonated with broad audiences, and through staging inside jokes based on real-life instances of music making.

Embodying Sonic Resonance as/after Trauma

This chapter shows that interwar French musicians understood music making as a therapeutic, vibrational, bodily practice. Soldiers’ accounts of music making in correspondence and diaries reveal that enlisted musicians were frequently concerned with how music’s organized vibrations offered antidotes to the unpredictable and harmful vibrations of warfare. In memoirs and method books, professional French musicians like Marguerite Long, Émile Vuillermoz, and Marcelle Gerar described singing and piano playing as mentally and physically beneficial sensorial practices. Investigation of scientific, medical, psychology, and musical discourse from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveals a genealogy of the perception of music as a healing vibrational medium that was prevalent during and after World War I. In situating these accounts of music making’s benefits within broader international understanding of music’s sonic qualities, this chapter illuminates the role that vibration played in the development of music therapy in France during World War I.

Soothing Movements

This chapter argues that after 1914 French modernist composers and performers embraced a neoclassical, repetitive, perpetual-motion-oriented musical style—often termed style dépouillé—to help themselves and others cope with trauma somatically. Examination of psychological, scientific, and medical discourse on the mental, emotional, and physical benefits of rhythmic bodily movement in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French texts provides a broader context for understanding the interwar popularity of music pedagogue Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s eurhythmics, a popular interwar musical practice based on the understanding of musical movement as emotionally transformative. Analysis of compositions in the style dépouillé, situated within the context of trauma studies, Dalcroze’s influence, and musicians’ commentaries on how these pieces made them feel, reveals that the challenging musique dépouillée repertoire engaged musicians’ bodies in rhythmically regular corporeal movements and provided them opportunities to process and perform the emotional difficulty of trauma.

Conclusion

This short final chapter closes Resonant Recoveries by proposing touch as a useful concept for understanding and summing up the relationships that existed between trauma and music for those living during and after World War I. By underlining the importance of music making in creating opportunities for touching others emotionally in the wake of the war’s traumas, this conclusion asserts that music making offered ways for musicians to care for one another in powerful ways, even within an interwar French context that failed to acknowledge trauma and its effects.

Music Making as Emotional Care

This chapter addresses how grief, trauma, and their unspeakability were intertwined with music’s emergence as an important medium through which French musicians negotiated wartime social expectations and traumatic experiences. French medical and psychology texts, obituaries and funeral accounts in Parisian newspapers, and musicians’ correspondence and diaries demonstrate that trauma and personal grief were, for many musicians, rendered inexpressible within a nationalistic culture that privileged heroic masculinity above all else in wartime. Through analysis of conventions of musical and verbal expression during wartime, as well as consideration of French musicians’ wartime musical activities through their letters and war diaries, this chapter shows how listening to and performing music became means of emotional self-care as well as community care in contexts where self-expression was otherwise silenced.