Historical Interplay in French Music and Culture

2017 | Music & Dance

This edited volume presents a selected history of French music and culture, but one with a dynamic difference. Eschewing a traditional chronological account, it explores the nature of relationships in French musical culture between one historical period and another, probing the emergent interplay, intertextualities and scope for subsequent reinterpretation across time and place. It engages with notions of cultural meaning, especially those pertaining to French identity, both national and individual. While founded on historical musicology, the approach benefits from association with philosophy, literature, film studies, music analysis, composition and performance. Attention is given to French composers' celebrations and re-makings of their predecessors. Composers' editions of and writings about earlier music are considered, as are aspects of the later cultural reception of romantic, baroque, renaissance and medieval repertoires. A related theme concerns issues for modern editors and performers of early French music.

Each of the book's five main parts sets out a specific cultural network or temporal interplay, which may result variously in synthesis, disjunction, or historical misreading. The interwar years and those surrounding World War II prove a particularly rich source of enquiry.

Deborah Mawer (Author)