Historical Interplay in French Music and Culture, 1860-1960
- Submitting institution
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Birmingham City University
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 33Z_OP_B0030
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 978-0-367-88164-1
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
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- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
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- Criminology
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- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Eschewing a traditional chronological account, _Historical Interplay in French Music and Culture, 1860–1960_ aims to explore the nature of relationships between one main French period, broadly the ‘long’ modernist era 1860–1960, and its historical ‘others’, investigating intertextuality, interdisciplinarity, cultural meanings and identities (national and individual). This eleven-chapter book, edited and introduced by Mawer (‘Introduction: Revisiting French Musical History’), began as an international symposium (July 2014) to mark the launch of Royal Birmingham Conservatoire’s French Music Research Hub. The strongest contributions, including Katharine Ellis’s keynote lecture, were selected, developed and expanded, with new contributions also invited.
Mawer’s own chapter, ‘Jolivet’s Rameau: Theory, Practice and Temporal Interplay’, asks how Jolivet (Messiaen’s ‘other’) portrays the ‘lionized’ Rameau in an essay from around World War II and what this says about himself. This subject-object dialectic is contextualised through philosophical consideration of temporality (especially Bergson), Rameau’s and Jolivet’s theoretical writings. In a close reading, Mawer argues that Jolivet creates an insightful account, but one that inevitably re-inflects Rameau’s art to satisfy Jolivet’s authorial identity, including his views on the fleeting nature of time itself. The process involved detailed research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Bergson, Jolivet’s writings) and engagement with Jolivet’s daughter (Christine Jolivet-Erlih). The chapter received critical scrutiny at the Royal Musical Association Conference (Birmingham 2015), with its manuscript peer-reviewed by two expert readers (plus Routledge’s anonymised readers).
The interplay concept of Mawer’s chapter, amplified across her edited book (which also includes Graham Sadler on Saint-Saëns’s Rameau and Christopher Dingle on Messiaen’s canon), became the conceptual and contextual foundation for ‘Accenting the Classics’ (c. 1915-25): a large-scale AHRC-funded project with four researchers, hosted by the French Music Research Hub.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
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- English abstract
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