The concert as political propaganda in France and the control of "performative context"

Musical Quarterly

Volumn 82, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 41-67

  Fulcher, Jane F ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33751010085     PISSN: 00274631     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/mq/82.1.41     Document Type: Article

References (81)

1. On the concept of performative context and the keying of performance, see Richard Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House, 1978), 9-16;
2. Richard Bauman, Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1-10;
3. Richard Bauman, "Performance," in Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments, ed. Richard Bauman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 45-46;
4. and Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 10, 43.
5. A different use of these concepts, focused more specifically on ritual, may be seen in Martha Feldman, "Magic Mirrors and the Seria Stage: Thoughts toward a Ritual View," Journal of the American Musicological Society 48, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 423-83.
6. On performativity in the context of J. L. Austin's theory of "speech acts" and his differentiation of "constative" utterances from the "performative" (or that which "states" as opposed to that which "achieves"), see Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 7.
7. On the incursion of the Right into the realm of French culture, see Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural identity, 1900-1945 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992);
8. on the Republic's response, see Richard D. Mandell, Paris 1900: The Great World's Fair (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967).
9. The relation between the Ligue de la Patrie Française and the Ligue de l'Action Française is treated in detail in Jean-Pierre Rioux, Nationalisme et conservativisme: La Ligue de la Patrie Française (Paris: Beauchesne, 1977).
10. On Barrès's conception of the culturally unified nation as the cognate of a great work of art, or born of the same "national spirit," see David Carroll, French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 35, 73. Carroll also discusses in detail (16, 40) the tight imbrication of politics and art in Barrès's thought - the role of art in the " mythologizing" of the nation, and thus the "aestheticizing of politics."
11. As founded in 1894, the Schola Cantorum was originally a society for the promotion of religious music, and especially of Gregorian chant. It was the idea of Charles Bordes, who soon enlisted the collaboration of Alexandre Guilmant and Vincent d'Indy. It gradually became a full-fledged school of music, defined in part by what were perceived to be the weaknesses of the state Conservatoire. By the height of the Dreyfus affair, it was defining itself against both the Conservatoire and the Third Republic itself, and by 1903 d'Indy became its sole director. For a complete (if biased) history of the school, see Vincent d'Indy, La Schola Cantorum en 1925 (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1927).
12. One of the most innovative aspects of the Schola's curriculum was its inclusion of the symphony, ignored as an inherently lower genre at the Paris Conservatoire. In his teaching of the symphony, d'Indy emphasized, above all, the Viennese classics, perceiving Beethoven's symphonies, in particular, as the most elevated examples of "musique pure"; hence his model was derived from Beethoven, although in the distinctive manner in which d'Indy construed the composer and the historical implications of his art. For d'Indy, as for his teacher, Franck, the symphony's status derived from his resolute belief that it was the most expressive genre of all - able to communicate both feelings and ideas. As Brian Hart has shown, the latter were of a moral and political nature, which made the symphony a hortatory genre through which ultimately to "improve" society. See Brian Hart, "The Symphony in Theory and Practice in France 1900-1914" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1994).
13. See Jean Mamold, "Le Conservatoire et la Schola," Mercure de France (1902), 105-6.
14. Lionel de la Laurencie, "Le mouvement musicographe," Mercure de France (June 1907), 659.
15. Jan Pasler, "Building a Public for Orchestral Music: Les Concerts Colonne," paper read at the conference "Concert et public: Mutation de la vie musicale en Europe de 1780 à 1914," Göttingen, Germany, Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte, 27-29 June, 1996.
16. On Lamoureux's performances of Wagner, see Martine Kahane and Nicole Wilde, eds., Wagner et la France (Paris: Herscher, 1983), 50.
17. On both Colonne and Lamoureux, see Charles Malherbe, Trente ans de concerts, 1873-1903 (Paris: Kugelmann, 1903).
18. On Republican patriotism, see Maurice Agulhon, La République 1880-1932, vol. I (Paris: Hachette, 1990), 13-14.
19. As Annegret Fauser has suggested to me, the way was probably prepared or prompted by the French Wagnerian circle, which had sought to diffuse Wagner's doctrines and music through "lecture-concerts" in private salons. Significantly, the Schola's earliest concerts drew their audiences from among this group, which included not only d'Indy and Debussy but both symbolist and anarchist sympathizers. While some have proposed to me that the large, government-sponsored male workers' choruses, the "Orphéons," provided another precedent, it is important to remember that the primary goal of their organizers was the effect on the 'performers,' as opposed to the more broadly based audience. On them, see Jane F. Fulcher, "The Orphéon Societies: 'Music for the Workers' in Second-Empire France," International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 10, no. 1 (1979).
20. See Michael Holquist and Katerina Clark, Mikhail Bakhtin: A Biography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 207.
21. On the disillusionment of the former Dreyfusards and the decline of the "Republican mystique," see Antoine Compagnon, La Troisième République des lettres: De Flaubert à Proust (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983), 121.
22. For the nationalist and Catholic presses' diffusion of d'Indy's discourse see, for example, Lionel de la Laurencie, "Un musicien de chez nous," L'Occident (1904): 1-10
23. and Lionel de la Laurencie, "L'oeuvre de Vincent d'Indy," Durendal: Revue catholique d'art et de littérature (Apr. 1902): 205.
24. Also see the Revue critique des idées et des livres (July-Sept. 1908) on d'Indy's Cours de composition musicale. It is important to remember, however, that unlike the Ligue de la Patrie Française, the Action Française did not approve of d'Indy's strong interest in German music (if as part of a "universal" tradition), and particularly his stress on Wagner.
25. Camille Mauclair, "La Schola Cantorum et l'education morale des musiciens," La Revue (Aug. 1901): 256.
26. Jean Marnold, "Le conservatoire et la schola," Mercure de France (1902): 105-6.
27. On Mauclair's awakening to the dangers of the schola, see his article "La réaction nationaliste en art et l'importance de l'homme de lettres," Revue mondiale 15 (Jan. 1905): 151-74.
28. Emile Vuillermoz, "Le Dictionnaire," Mercure musical (1 Mar. 1906): 549.
29. See Emile Vuillermoz, "La schola et le conservatoire," Mercure de France (1909): 235.
30. According to Vuillermoz, the teaching at the Schola is burdened with "une foule de considérations morales, politiques, religieuses, et sociales au plus fâcheux effet." And specifically he charges that the Schola is collectively and officially not only nationalist but also anti-Semitic, as well as ideologically anti-Dreyfusard. With puerile ostentation it has committed the unpardonable error of subordinating aesthetic questions to preoccupations that ought to remain outside of music (240-41). In the period between Vuillermoz's two articles, Louis Laloy, the defender and close friend of Debussy, had expressed similar views in La grande revue. In 1907 he published an article on the factionalism in the French musical world, which prominently included the Schola. See his "Les parties musicaux en France," La grande revue (25 Dec. 1907): 792. He excoriates not only d'Indy's propensity for moral allegory, but also the spirit of the Schola in general, which he compares to that of a religious sect. For all assumes a sacred air; everything there is made mystical, and only works in conformity with its ritual canon are considered to merit praise.
31. See Christophe Charle, "La science et les savants: le debout de l'age d'or?" in L'affaire Dreyfus et le tournant du siècle (1894-1910), ed. Laurent Gervereau and Christophe Prochasson (Paris: Musée d'Histoire Contemporaine - BDIC, 1994), 66-71.
32. Compagnon, La Troisième République des lettres, 119, 142.
33. The Third Republic itself had long been interested in education as a means of producing good French citizens, or patriots in the proper Republican mold. Now, after the affair, "science" and "verité," or knowledge and truth, with their Dreyfusard connotations, were intended to enlighten and protect the nation: henceforth the Republic emphasized a socialist approach to education, as seen in the Universités Populaires and other avenues for extending education and culture to workers. See Madeleine Réberioux, La République Radicale? 1898-1914 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975), 37.
34. And with the challenge of the Schola, the Republic would also attempt to incorporate music into its educational scheme through different venues and on several levels. Education was thus one of the themes that would emerge in the musical discourse surrounding the programs of French music presented at the 1900 Universal Exposition. Some scholars, such as Katherine Ellis, in Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) have argued that a "canon" already existed in France by the mid-nineteenth century. But it is important to remember that it was the creation of a small group of scholars and critics and was not institutionalized in the Conservatoire, although it was performed for a small, elite audience in the Conservatoire's hall by the independent Société des concerts du Conservatoire.
35. For a complete list of the members of the commission see the review of Alfred Bruneau's La Musique française by "X," "Ancien membre de la commission," in the Revue d'histoire et de critique musicale (Mar. 1901): 110-11.
36. On Bruneau's collaboration with Zola, and on the way in which he was drawn into the affair, see Alfred Bruneau, "Souvenirs," Revue internationale de musique française 7 (Feb. 1989): 8-82,
37. and Alfred Bruneau, À l'ombre d'un grand coeur (Paris: Charpentier, 1932).
38. On the concept of "master fictions," see Sean Wilentz, ed., Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics Since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 3.
39. See Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 2.
40. R. D. Anderson, France 1870-1914 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 89.
41. Jean Touchard, La gauche en France depuis 1900 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968), 28,
42. Alfred Bruneau, La musique française: Rapport sur la musique en France du XIII au XXe siècle: La musique à Paris en 1900 au théâtre, au concert, à l'Exposition (Paris: Charpentier, 1901), 73.
43. Here he lavishes praise on Charpentier's "Couronnement de la Muse," a "fête," previously composed and incorporated in Louise. For Bruneau, the work united the poetry of art, of work, and of rejoicing crowds, making it no less than a "reveil heureux de l'esprit national." This national spirit, of course, was diametrically opposed to that which was currently being stridently propounded by the anti-Dreyfusard Right. Such ideas were to be developed and spread further by a more respected and exacting scholar, who would eventually become a major figure in the academic musical establishment, Maurice Emmanuel. Emmanuel's article "La vie réele en musique" appeared in the Revue de Paris (15 June 1900): 841-83, a politically conservative although not narrow-minded journal. His focus is on Charpentier's attempt to avoid "mysteries" (in the medieval sense), legends (of Germanic association), lies, and conventions in order to define a "democratic music."
44. Like Bruneau, Emmanuel attempts to trace Charpentier's values back in history, but his focus here is on the decisive point of reference for the Dreyfusards (and the Exposition) - the French Revolution. Hence, in the context of Charpentier's "fête," he draws attention to the recent publication of the librarian of the conservatoire, Constant Pierre's Musique des fêtes et cérémonies de la Resolution Française (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1899).
45. According to Emmanuel, like the works of the Revolution, the message of Louise is a moralizing one, concerning the destructive potential of mere sensual pleasure. On Charpentier's complex motivations in the work, as well as the way in which it was misread because of such framing, see Jane F. Fulcher, "Charpentier's Operatic 'Roman Musical' as Read in the Wake of the Dreyfus Affair," Nineteenth-Century Music 16, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 161-80.
46. In both 1848 and 1870 symbols such as the tricolor often appeared on the operatic or concert stage to trigger patriotic associations with the works being performed, in perhaps the most primitive way. The more ritualistic conception was clearly the innovation of the new nationalist Right; on Victor Turner's conception of the "transformative" conception of ritual, see Bobby C. Alexander, Victor Turner Revisited: Ritual as Social Change (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholar's Press, 1991), 16-17.
47. See Michel Brênet, "La Musicologie," in Rapport sur la musique française contemporaine, ed. Paul-Marie Masson (Paris: Arman et Stein, 1913), 18-19.
48. On the Collège de France, see Christophe Charle, "Le Collège de France," in Les lieux de mémoire, II. La nation, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 389-90, 398. Combarieu had been one of the organizers of the Congrès d'Histoire Musicale of 1900, held in Paris in conjunction with the Universal Exposition.
49. Jules Combarieu, "L'organisation des études d'histoire musicale en France dans le second moitié du XIX siècle," Revue musicale (1906): 502.
50. Combarieu, "L'organisation."
51. See Jules Combarieu, "Comment la musique s'est-elle formée?" Revue musicale (1910): 488-96. It too is staunchly anti-scholiste, sounding in places like Bruneau's Rapport, for it similarly traces the origins of French music back to the chanson populaire.
52. Christophe Prochasson, "Sur l'environement intellectuel de Georges Sorel: l'École des hautes études sociales (1899-1911)," Cahiers Georges Sorel 3 (1985): 17.
53. Prochasson, "Sur l'environement intellectuel," 17.
54. In the spring of 1902 Rolland had delivered a series of lectures at the institution stressing the Revolutionary period and its music. See David James Fisher, Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 93.
55. and Romain Rolland, "Musique," in L'École des hautes études sociales 1900-1910 (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1911), 69-70. As Rolland points out, there were regular courses that ran from year to year as well as isolated lectures on various subjects.
56. Theodore Reinach and Louis Laloy delivered lectures on Greek music, and Laloy on Gregorian chant; A. Gastoué and Pierre Aubry spoke on music in the Middle Ages; Henry Expert and Michel Brênet lectured on the Renaissance; Henri Quittard, Lionel de la Laurencie, Henry Prunières, Paul-Marie Masson, André Pirro, and Romain Rolland covered the seventeenth century; Pirro, Rolland, Charles Malherbes, Julien Tiersot, Paul-Marie Masson, and F. Hellouin spoke on the eighteenth century; lecturing on the nineteenth century were Tiersot, Malherbes, d'Indy (on Franck), Paul Landormy, Jean Chantavoine, Henri Lichtenberger, Lionel Dauriac (on Wagner), Rolland, and Calvocoressi (on Russian music). In addition, Tiersot lectured on the chansons populaire, Maurice Emmanuel spoke on "Musique tonale classique: fugue, sonate, symphonie," and Frédéric Hellouin lectured on "Les nationalités musicales" and "La critique musicale." The latter lectures were subsequently published as Essai de critique de la critique musicale (Paris: A. Joanin, 1906). Other series of lectures included those not only on non-Western music but on "Esthétique et technique musicale," in which d'Indy participated.
57. For a complete listing of the concerts presented, see Rolland, "Musique," in L'École des hautes etudes sociales, 77-78.
58. Rolland, "Musique," 75-76.
59. See Jane F. Fulcher, "D'Indy's 'Drame anti-Juif and Its Meaning in Paris, 1920," Cambridge Opera Journal (Nov. 1990): 295-319.
60. On d'Indy's Symphony no. 2, see Hart, "The Symphony in Theory and Practice in France, 1900-1914," 82-103, 433-34
61. as well as René de Castera, "La symphonie en si bémol de M. Vincent d'Indy," L'Occident (Mar. 1904): 174-75.
62. See Fulcher, "Charpentier's Operatic 'Roman Musical'."
63. See Jean Marguerite, Les Fêtes du peuple: L'oeuvre, les moyens, le but (Paris: Les Fêtes du Peuple, 1921).
64. On Albert Doyen, see Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la Patrie: les intellectuels et la première guerre mondiale (1910-1919) (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 1996), 51-52, 149, 234, 278. Prochasson places Doyen with the "milieu de Créteil" before the war, together with socialists, "vitalistes," and revolutionary syndicalists.
65. For Rolland's ideal of the fête, see his Théâtre de la Révolution (Paris: Albin Michel, 1972). Doyen's ideas concerning popular theater were not only prepared by those of Rolland, they were also characterized by an original appropriation of other ideas that had previously been associated with d'Indy and the Schola Cantorum. For while the fêtes he proposed would be new, they could be based on traditional legends as well as on medieval mysteries, recalling d'Indy's opera, La légende de Saint Christophe. The visual focus was to be on simple, decorative lines, but, as in Charpentier's Louise, the costumes employed were to be of the present day. And like portions of Louise, as well, the action was to be articulated in a Wagnerian manner, "tout intérieur et symphonique."
66. The relation between hermeneutics and framing was suggested by Lawrence Kramer's discussion of hermeneutic windows in Music as Cultural Practice, 5-6.
67. For a complete listing of the programs performed at the Fêtes du Peuple, see Marguerite, Les Fêtes du peuple, 4. Other programs included readings from Maupassant and Vallès, a Beethoven trio, a fragment of Doyen's Le triomphe de la liberté, and the "Hymne à la paix," based on the Largo from Handel's Xerxes.
68. On the continuum of "efficacy" and "entertainment," see Richard Schechner, Essays on Performance Theory, 1970-1976 (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1977), 75.
69. "Cultural performance" is employed here as defined by Gérard Béhague (who cites Milton Singer) in Bauman, Folklore, Cultural Performance, and Popular Entertainments, 174: "portions of activity thought by members of a social group to be encapsulations of their culture which they could exhibit to visitors and to themselves."
70. On the "invention of tradition" in France during World War I, in the sense made famous by the collection edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),
71. see Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dinys, 1989).
72. Béhague develops the idea of ethos in cultural performance in Folklore, Cultural Performance, and Popular Entertainment, 177.
73. James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).
74. On the "processual" aspects of performance, see Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986), 78.
75. On "hermeneutic windows" see Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 5.
76. Kramer also emphasizes the "dynamic" element in meaning production, as opposed to "cognitive structures," in the manner of James Johnson. Roger Chartier has been extremely influential in his stress on the role of material supports and conditions of access in the history of reading. See, for example his Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).
77. For a discussion of popular music as a cultural phenomenon that cannot be separated from its context, see Philip Tagg, "Musicology and the Semiotics of Popular Music," Semiotica 66 (1987): 279-98.
78. The "essentialist" argument is perhaps most prominently embodied in the writings of Theodor Adorno, which posit an "absolute" connection between style and ideology. On the process of transcription from one framework of meaning to another schema of interpretation, see Goffman, Frame Analysis, 44-45.
79. The term "appropriation" in cultural history has been used and developed most extensively by Roger Chartier and Jacques Revel. See, for example, Roger Chartier, The Cultural uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans., Lydia Cochrane (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988).
80. On political culture and its components, see Serge Berstein, "La culture politique," in Pour une histoire culturelle, ed. Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-François Sirinelli (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1997), 371-86,
81. and Jean-François Sirinelli and Eric Vignes, "Introduction: Des cultures politiques," in Histoire des droites in France, ed. Jean-François Sirinelli, vol. 2, Cultures (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 1-11.