‘An intricate web of essays that offers captivating insights into a key aspect of French musical culture between 1860 and 1960. By exploring the historical interplay at work in French musical modernism, the authors present innovative and engaging reflections on the politics of performance, composition, and critical engagement. The threads woven between the essays also reveal the transhistorical presence of cultural reference points and their transformation in specific moments, whether through the recomposition of local folk-music traditions in opera or the ensounded nostalgia for the ancien régime.’ Professor Annegret Fauser, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA‘The essays in Deborah Mawer’s collection cover a century of French music, from 1860 to 1960, and offer perspectives that are both new and invigorating. By taking into consideration the roles played by literature, painting, cinema, and the interactions among the various arts, the essays offer a reconsideration of the ways in which a number of composers – among them Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Poulenc, Satie, Jolivet, and Messiaen – were able to create links between their music and that of previous centuries. By employing a multiplicity of approaches and methodologies, the essays renew with conspicuous energy both the question of national identity, which has too often been treated with too narrow a focus, and the question of the nature of musicians’ relationships with their traditional French heritage.’ Professor Denis Herlin, Director of Research, IReMus, CNRS, Paris, France
