Search results for ""Author Katharine Ellis""

Explicitly or not, the historical musicology of post-Revolutionary France has focused on Paris as a proxy for the rest of the country. This distorting lens is the legacy of political and cultural struggle during the long nineteenth century, indicating a French Revolution unresolved both then and now. In light of the capital's power as the seat of a centralizing French state (which provincials found 'colonizing') and as a cosmopolitan musical crossroads of nineteenth-century Europe, the struggles inherent in creating sustainable musical cultures outside Paris, and in composing local and regionalist music, are ripe for analysis. Replacement of 'France' with Paris has encouraged normative history-writing articulated by the capital's opera and concert life. Regional practices have been ignored, disparaged or treated piecemeal. This book is a study of French musical centralization and its discontents during the period leading up to and beyond the "provincial awakening" of the Belle Époque. The book explains how different kinds of artistic decentralization and regionalism were hard won (or not) across a politically turbulent century from the 1830s to World War II. In doing so it redraws the historical map of musical power relations in mainland France. Based on work in over 70 archives, chapters on conservatoires, concert life, stage music, folk music and composition reveal how tensions of State and locality played out differently depending on the structures and funding mechanisms in place, the musical priorities of different communities, and the presence or absence of galvanizing musicians. Progressively, the book shifts from musical contexts to musical content, exploring the pressure point of folk music and its translation into "local color" for officials who perpetually feared national division. Control over composition on the one hand, and the emotional intensity of folk-based musical experience on the other, emerges as a matter of consistent official praxis. In terms of "French music" and its compositional styles, what results is a surprising new historiography of French neoclassicism, bound into and growing out of a study of diversity and its limits in daily musical life.

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A new wave of scholarship inspired by the ways the writers and musicians of the long nineteenth century themselves approached the relationship between music and words. Words and Notes encourages a new wave of scholarship inspired by the ways writers and musicians of the long nineteenth century themselves approached the relationship between music and words. Contributors to the volume engage in two dialogues: with nineteenth-century conceptions of word-music relations, and with each other. Criss-crossing disciplinary boundaries, the authors of the book's eleven essays address new questions relating to listening, imagining and performing music, the act of critique, and music's links with philosophy and aesthetics. The many points of intersection are elucidated in an editorial introduction and via a reflective afterword. Fiction and poetry, musicography, philosophy, music theory, science and music analysis all feature, as do traditions within English, French and German studies. Wide-ranging material foregrounds musical memory, soundscape and evocation; performer dilemmas over the words in Satie's piano music; the musicality of fictional and non-fictional prose; text-setting and the rights of poet vs. composer; the rich novelistic and critical testimony of audience inattention at the opera;German philosophy's potential contribution to musical listening; and Hoffmann's send-ups of the serious music-lover. Throughout, music - its composition, performance and consumption - emerges as a profoundly physical and social force, even when it is presented as the opposite. PHYLLIS WELIVER is Associate Professor of English, Saint Louis University. KATHARINE ELLIS is Stanley Hugh Badock Professor of Music at the University of Bristol. Contributors: Helen Abbott, Noelle Chao, Delia da Sousa Correa, Peter Dayan, Katharine Ellis, David Evans, Annegret Fauser, Jon-Tomas Godin, Cormac Newark, Matthew Riley, Emma Sutton, Shafquat Towheed, Susan Youens, Phyllis Weliver

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