Concert #2: Salon Edition

Yesterday marked both a national holiday and my second Parisian concert in the last month. While my first concert took place under somewhat rushed and harrowing circumstances, I had been preparing for yesterday's performance with Dominique Fournier (piano) and Anne-Chantal Carrière (soprano) since late fall. You can listen to our entire performance by clicking "play" below, or choose individual tracks by clicking "Les Sonorités du Salon." Click "download" on the player below to get the whole album in mp3 format. (If you're desperate to hear me play clarinet, skip to tracks 4-7.)

The concert took place in a private salon in the 9th arrondissement, just across the street from former residences of Chopin and Georges Sand. The salon, decorated in authentic Louis-Phillippe style, transported us to the era in which much of the music we performed was written. 

Playing chamber music is always a pleasure, but I especially enjoyed the "ethnographic" element this concert adds to my year of research. After all, I'm writing a dissertation about the period in French history that saw the last great flowering of salon culture, so I've spent a decent amount of time reading about concerts just like this one. To have participated in the planning and execution of a concert that could have easily taken place a century ago gives me a strange, almost cosmic sense of connection with the composers, performers, salon hosts, patrons, and audience members that I've been studying. It's fitting that this rich moment comes towards the end of a rewarding year.

I hope you enjoy listening to the recording. Let me know if you're interested in coming to a repeat performance of this concert, which will take place on May 30 in Longpont.

In Which I Pour My Heart Out About Researching A Dissertation

The most important thing I've learned over the last 8 months of research is something I learned at a Parisian restaurant.

My mom, Cathy and I had arrived several minutes early at La Cerisaie, where we were going to have dinner with Maggie, Eden, and JP, who were running a little late. It was freezing out, so we tried to go in. But the door was locked, there were no customers inside, and we were early enough that I figured they just hadn't opened yet. (Many restaurants don't open until 7:30 or 8.) We kept waiting for the other three to show up, getting colder and wondering when the restaurant would open. Finally, someone inside came to the door, opened it, I explained we had a reservation, and she let us in.

When Maggie, Eden, and JP finally arrived, I watched as they, too, struggled with the door. The hostess, who was busy doing something, called out "it's open! just keep pushing!" and a few seconds later they managed to force themselves through the door. I realized the door must have been open when we were trying to get in too, we just didn't push hard enough.

I was reminded of this incident yesterday, when I finally gained access to the archives of a certain Parisian music publisher after 7 months of trying. When I say "7 months of trying," I mean I sent dozens of emails, made gads of phone calls, resorted to pleading with mutual acquaintances to intercede on my behalf. Basically  I did everything short of showing up uninvited at the homes of the people with whom I was trying to get in touch. Oh, and after "getting in touch," I still had to get legal permission to look at something, anything, in their archives. Which took more time, caused more frustration, and made me feel like I was being left out in the cold. It was La Cerisaie all over again.

So I kept pushing. I knew it was possible to open that door, and eventually it did open - just not all the way. When I was finally given access, I wasn't allowed to see any of the things I had originally asked to see, like musical sketches, letters, contracts, and account details. Copyright and other legal questions made these things off-limits, but I did get to study something I hadn't even considered asking for: livres de cotage, the books in which they kept track of how many copies of each piece they print.

I'm purposefully showing you a terribly out-of-focus picture because 1) I wasn't supposed to take pictures and b) I definitely am not supposed to be "publishing" images of their livre de cotage and iii) don't steal my research, ok? It probably wouldn't be that useful, anyway - it's not incredibly useful to me, just a little interesting, worth a few sentences in my dissertation. In 8 months of research, I've gathered all sorts of crumbs like this one, which hopefully will come together to look more like a pie crust and less like a pile of crumbs by the time I'm finished writing up everything.

This archive was a particularly difficult nut to crack; several other archives, libraries, and attempts at making contacts proved challenging as well. But if I accomplished anything this year, it's because I learned to just keep pushing, not to take "no" for an answer, and to only eat at really good restaurants.

Money Matters

Usually birthday presents come from people you know. But Monday, I got a birthday present from some people I've never met (yet to whom I am most grateful): I got the second half of my fellowship. (I hope this doesn't seem crass to anyone, but if it does, I'd love to talk with you about it. After all, I'm writing a dissertation on music and money, part of which involves reducing the stigma surrounding money.)

The icing on this very, very large birthday cake came in this week's big news. Apparently the dollar is at a 9-month high against the Euro - $1.37 buys 1 euro. Considering that my fellowship is paid in dollars, and that for much of our stay here the dollar has hovered around $1.5 to the euro, this is pretty exciting. It means we're now paying around 13 cents less for each pain au chocolat we buy - and we buy quite a few pains au chocolat! Also it means our savings (again in dollars) won't be depleted quite so quickly, so we won't be entirely destitute when we get back to the States.

This chart shows a trend, reflected in forecasts, suggesting that the dollar may strengthen even more. I know this is bad for the American economy (a stronger dollar usually means weaker exports, and we need exports to increase to help us climb out of the recession) and worse for the European economy, but it's also great for Americans in Paris (guilty as charged). So keep it up, dollar! Get down, get down, get funky, euro! And to all you Americans who have been afraid to visit because of the terrible exchange rate, the next few months may be your window of opportunity!

Research Update

You may remember my first encounter with the Archives nationales (AN) almost exactly three months ago - I went, I saw, I came home empty-handed. This week, I ventured back with a better idea of what I needed from the AN, and had greater success.

Thanks to my previous experience, I knew the drill: deposit things at vestiaire, proceed directly to Salle des inventaires.. After confirming the côtes (call numbers) of the materials I wanted to consulter, I was finally able to register for a year pass (only 10 euros for students!), and was permitted to enter (insert dramatic music here) the Salle de consultation. Basically it's a reading room. Nifty architectural details. Photography is allowed.

Over a few days, I sifted through the contents of series F/21, boxes 4626 and 4657, which contain the records of the Ministère des Beaux-Arts, specifically the Ministère de l'Instruction Publique, which oversaw state subventions for theatres, concert series, and institutions of music education, among others. I looked at a lot of stuff like this:

Since they told me I didn't need permission to make photographic reproductions of everything I looked at, I assume it's ok to share with you . . . as long as you promise to bail me out of jail if I get in trouble for this. Also, give yourself a point for every composer's name you recognize out of that list. Who is J. Jongen??

Concert series and theatres receiving state funding were obligated to perform a certain amount of new French music every year, and this document shows how they proved to the state that they were satisfying the quota. These documents may be relevant to my dissertation in that they demonstrate one kind of demand for music composition - a demand that could either increase or decrease the financial incentive to compose for the concert-going public. I'm interested in how (or if) that demand was perceived by composers, and how (or if) they reacted to it. In a sense, I already know how composers felt about concert series: getting new works performed there was difficult, prohibitively expensive, and less rewarding (financially, professionally, psychologically) than they wished it would be.

Those are just some current thoughts. We'll have to see where these sources take me in the future. Dissertation research: always an adventure!

Total non sequitur: I had to post this cartoon because it's almost as topical today as it was in 1921. The text reads, "Everything's going down - except for one thing." "What's that?" "Unemployment!"

BnF

Warning: This post may be boring for those of you who don't get excited by rows upon rows of gleaming, esoteric books.

That's right: The BnF, or Bibliotheque nationale de France, located in Paris, is the national library of France. (Find it on our map.) I'll be spending a ton of time here, both at the pictured Site Francois Mitterand (aka Tolbiac), and at the Departement de la Musique, at 2 Rue Louvois, on the Right Bank. At both locations, I'll be sifting through boxes of unpublished correspondence, personal memoirs, financial records, musical sketches, party invitations, concert programs, and all kinds of other primary source documents from the Interwar years. 

As a foreign academic, I can only gain access to the Rez-de-Jardin (bottom level of the main branch, which is devoted to research) by presenting my passport and a letter of introduction at the Richelieu branch (also on the Right Bank). There, I'll sign up for a year membership (normally 35 euros, but 18 with a student ID). Once at the BnF site Francois Mitterand, I'll surrender most of my belongings at a vestiary and descend into the wondrous depths:

What it looks like inside (I may have taken this picture illegally)

A view of the below-ground-level garden (name-sake of the "Rez-de-jardin," or "garden level")

Here's the floor plan of the Rez-de-Jardin; each letter marks a different subject.

I've already done some research here, and it's a good thing, since initially it took me a few days to figure out how everything works. First I didn't bring my passport to the membership office; then I couldn't figure out how to request books; I also wasted time reading things I could have accessed just as easily in the States. This time around, I'll be better prepared!

Totally Lame

I just realized that I neglected to explain why I would need to go to Paris for a year. Mostly, it's because I love the city and want to become fluent in French. But technically, I'm going to do research for my dissertation.

In short, my dissertation will be about funding for art music composition in France between the two world wars. A slightly longer explanation is that composers have always been thought to exercise almost total control over how their music sounds, but I have a suspicion that where their money comes - whether from private patronage, an inheritance, or the government - influences how they compose, even if only unconsciously. 

The longest complete explanation I have at this point comes in the form of the proposal I wrote when I applied for a bunch of fellowships in the fall. I hope it's not totally lame that I'm reproducing it below. 

__________________________________________________________

Music and Money in Interwar France

Like scholars undertaking research projects, composers need funding to carry out their work. Yet music scholarship has avoided acknowledging the broadly influential role that money – in the forms of patronage, personal wealth, and income – has played and continues to play in art music composition. My dissertation addresses this issue through the lens of Les Six, a cohort of distinguished French composers active during the interwar period (1918-1939) whose careers constitute an ideal laboratory in which to investigate the intersections between politics, aesthetics, money, and music. Les Six accepted commissions in more disparate genres and from a wider range of sources, including private, institutional, and governmental sources, than had any previous group of composers. A Bourse Chateaubriand Fellowship would allow me to undertake dissertation research in France on the unpublished correspondence, memoirs, and musical sketches that demonstrate the impact these commissions and funding sources had on Les Six’s compositional process.

Interwar France was a transitional period in music patronage. In the midst of the euphoria and affluence that followed the end of the First World War, France witnessed the last great flowering of private patronage – a flowering inextricably linked to the advent of several new artistic movements. After the stock market crash and with new political and cultural tensions brewing, the leftist Popular Front government set an important precedent for the state’s direct involvement in the production of culture. The Second World War proved the end of private patronage in its pre-war form, leaving a vacuum that the state would later come to fill.

This historical and social context profoundly influenced the composers at the center of my study, Les Six: Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Louis Durey, and Germaine Tailleferre. Les Six represent a musicological laboratory for understanding the relationship between music and money because their similarities (age, training, socio-economic roots, social and artistic milieus) serve as controls for understanding the interplay between variables such as political and aesthetic proclivities, and sources of funding. For example, in the 1930s the Popular Front government sponsored Milhaud and Auric in the composition of incidental music for Romain Rolland’s play Quatorze Juillet (1936), meant to appeal to a mass audience. The Princesse Edmond de Polignac privately commissioned Poulenc’s Organ Concerto (1937), providing an example of the impact of a single patron’s stylistic taste and performance resources.

My preliminary research into correspondence and compositional sketches suggests a more collaborative role for patrons than has previously been acknowledged. Notable benefactors such as the Princesse Edmond de Polignac, Charles and Marie de Noailles, and the Comte and Comtesse de Beaumont were involved in determining a commission's genre, instrumentation and even formal structure. In addition, my research will provide evidence of the ways in which various sources of funding affected the style of a composer's music. The relationships between Les Six and their patrons allow us to interrogate the concept of the autonomous “composer” as author and innovator.

My project joins recent scholarship in demonstrating how social, cultural, and political factors influence music composition. Patronage remains understudied (outside of the visual arts); most efforts to date focus on biographical connections. Scholarship on Les Six is representative of these patterns, overwhelmingly avoiding money matters and focusing instead on the group’s iconoclastic, avant-garde activity (Harding, 1972; Hurard-Viltard, 1987) and their political and intellectual contexts (Robichaud, 2001; Fulcher, 2005). In her seminal cultural history of patronage in Third Republic France, Mécènes et Musiciens (2004), musicologist Myriam Chimènes presents wide-ranging evidence of the close ties between patrons and musicians (including Les Six), but does not connect those relationships to the resulting musical outcome. The tendency to ignore the funding context of Les Six’s music – a practice of almost all scholarship on twentieth-century music – originates in the long-standing stigmatization of money in the fields of musicology and music sociology. In the narrative inspired by Romantic composers (the first to “break free” from restrictive patrons), artists produce art, not a marketable commodity. In The State of Music (1939), a tongue-in-cheek exposé of the art music world, composer and critic Virgil Thomson is the first to acknowledge this musicological bias, and the first to link (albeit superficially) funding source and musical style. My work on money and music in interwar France will follow Thomson’s in stimulating criticism of the stigmatization of money in musicology. At stake are the legacies of the composers at the center of my study, and more broadly, our understanding of a fundamental aspect of music composition.

After having consulted the Erik Satie Papers, the Nadia Boulanger Collection, and correspondence by Georges Auric in Harvard archives, I recognize that successful completion of my project will require nine to twelve months of archival work in France, ideally starting in September of 2009. The Fulbright will make it possible for me to accomplish two research goals: first, I will immerse myself in the extensive correspondence between the patrons and composers at the center of my study. Second, I will study memoirs, sketches, autographs, and unique recordings for evidence of compositional revisions that reveal patrons’ input. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France is the major repository for the materials I seek. The Sorbonne’s Bibliothèque Michelet contains a number of unpublished memoirs by patrons and other participants in interwar musical life. Finally, private foundations and archives - many outside of Paris – contain materials relevant to each of the composers and many of the patrons I will study. In addition to the treasure trove of documentation that awaits me in the archives, I stand to benefit significantly from working with French scholars of the interwar period, such as Myriam Chimènes (of the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique) and Catherine Massip (of the CNRS and the Bibliothèque Nationale). I will also work closely with Professor Danièle Pistone of the Sorbonne, who has generously offered extensive institutional and intellectual support. Over the course of my time in France, I expect that the research I do and the relationships I form will constitute major steps on the path to a career devoted to teaching and researching music history.

Les Six afford us a unique opportunity to look beyond the final musical outcome and uncover the impact of funding on the process of composition. By examining their interwar careers, my project will provide a much-needed reevaluation of a rich historical moment and, perhaps more importantly, it will add a new dimension to our understanding of the complex relationship between money and music.