Between 1914 and 1918, the French modernist composer Maurice Ravel was deeply affected by his experiences as a soldier in World War I, the deaths of many friends in combat, and the passing of loved ones on the home front. The aim of this dissertation is to determine how the music that Ravel wrote and performed after 1914 engaged with contemporary French cultures of mourning. Archival research in Paris and the United States has allowed me to examine funeral accounts and obituaries in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periodicals, as well as the correspondence, diaries, scrapbooks, and collected materials of Ravel and his grieving friends, in order to ascertain how grief and its display were socially constructed and understood in interwar France within Ravel's social circle. Obituaries and funeral accounts published in Parisian periodicals between 1875 and 1925 reveal that as a result of wartime nationalism and divisions between soldiers and civilians, modes of mourning shifted during the war from personal, descriptive, and direct representations of grief, to emotionally guarded and collectively oriented ones. In response to this stoicism, Ravel and many of his peers sought new ways of managing grief, including keeping the memory of lost loved ones vividly present through celebrating death anniversaries publicly and privately, collecting photographs, obituaries, and other objects that once belonged to loved ones, sharing their grief with other mourners, and performing or composing music that allowed them to recall corporeally the presence of those they mourned. Analysis of the wartime works of Ravel's contemporaries reveals that many of them wrote music that not only offered a space for audiences and performers to mourn, but also justified the sacrifices and grief engendered by the war by framing them optimistically as sources of France's strength and eventual victory. By drawing on archival research, psychoanalytic theory, memory and trauma studies, and cultural history, I show how Ravel engaged with and in some instances subtly resisted nationally-oriented French cultures of mourning through providing his listeners with musical portraits of the psychic difficulty of grief and trauma in Le Tombeau de Couperin (1918), Frontispice (1919), and La Valse (1920). I demonstrate as well how Ravel's specific brand of rhythmically regular and kinesthetically demanding postwar modernism, evident in works like Le Tombeau de Couperin, the Sonata for Violin and Violoncello (1922), the Sonata for Violin and Piano (1927), and the Piano Concerto in G Major (1932), allowed Ravel to convey his own grief, while also providing a musical means for his friends Hélène Jourdan-Morhange and Marguerite Long to physically work through, perform, and share their grief with one another.

Music gives specific meanings to our lives, but also to how we experience death; it forms a central part of death rituals, consoles survivors, and celebrates the deceased. Music & Death investigates different musical engagements with death. Its eleven essays examine a broad range of genres, styles and periods of Western music from the Middle Ages until the present day. This volume brings a variety of methodological approaches to bear on a broad, but non-exhaustive, range of music. These include musical rituals and intercessions on behalf of the departed. Chapters also focus on musicians' reactions to death, their ways of engaging with grief, anger and acceptance, and the public's reaction to the death of musicians. The genres covered include requiem settings, operas and ballets, arts songs, songs by Leonard Cohen and the B-52s, and instrumental music. There are also broader reflections regarding the psychological links between creative musical practice and the overcoming of grief, music's central role in shaping a specific lifestyle (of psychobillies) and the supposed universalism of Western art music (as exemplified by Brahms). The volume adds many new facets to the area of death studies, highlighting different aspects of "musical thanatology". It will appeal to those interested in the intersections between western music and theology, as well as scholars of anthropology and cultural studies. CONTRIBUTORS: Matt BaileyShea, Alexandra Buckle, Peter Edwards, Richard Elliott, Nicole Grimes, Mieko Kanno, Kimberly Kattari, Wolfgang Marx, Fred E. Maus, Jillian C. Rogers, UtaSailer and Miriam Wendling.

"French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars illustrates that coping with trauma was a central concern for French musicians active after World War I. The losses and violent warfare of World War I shaped how interwar French musicians-from those fighting in the trenches and working in military hospitals to more well-known musicians-engaged with music. Situated at the intersections of musicology, history, sound and performance studies, and psychology and trauma studies, Resonant Recoveries argues that modernists' compositions and musical activities were sonorous locations for managing and performing trauma. Through analysis of archival materials, French medical, philosophical, and literary texts, and the music produced between the wars, this book illuminates how music emerged during World War I as an embodied technology of consolation. Resonant Recoveries demonstrates that music making came to be understood by French interwar musicians as a consolatory practice that enhanced their abilities to remember lost loved ones, gave them opportunities to perform their grief publicly and privately, allowed them to create healing bonds of friendship, and soothed them with sonic vibrations and the rhythmically regular bodily movements required in order to perform many French neoclassical compositions. In revealing the importance music making held for interwar French musicians, this book refigures French modernist music as a therapeutic medium for creators, performers, and audiences, while also underlining the importance of addressing trauma, mourning, and people's emotional lives in music scholarship"--

During the Great War, composers and performers created music that expressed common sentiments like patriotism, grief, and anxiety. Yet music also revealed the complexities of the partnership between France, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. At times, music reaffirmed a commitment to the shared wartime mission. At other times, it reflected conflicting views about the war from one nation to another or within a single nation.Over Here, Over There examines how composition, performance, publication, recording, censorship, and policy shaped the Atlantic allies' musical response to the war. The first section of the collection offers studies of individuals. The second concentrates on communities, whether local, transnational, or on the spectrum in-between. Essay topics range from the sinking of the Lusitania through transformations of the entertainment industry to the influenza pandemic.Contributors: Christina Bashford, William Brooks, Deniz Ertan, Barbara L. Kelly, Kendra Preston Leonard, Gayle Magee, Jeffrey Magee, Michelle Meinhart, Brian C. Thompson, and Patrick Warfield

Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979) was arguably one of the most iconic figures in twentieth-century music, and certainly among the most prominent musicians of her time. For many composers— especially Americans from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass—studying with Boulanger in Paris or Fontainebleau was a formative moment in a creative career. Composer, performer, conductor, impresario, and charismatic and inspirational teacher, Boulanger engaged in a vast array of activities in a variety of media, from private composition lessons and lecture-recitals to radio broadcasts, recordings, and public performances. But how to define and account for Boulanger’s impact on the music world is still unclear. Nadia Boulanger and Her World takes us from a time in the late nineteenth century, when many careers in music were almost entirely closed to women, to the moment in the late twentieth century when those careers were becoming a reality. Contributors consider Boulanger’s work in the worlds of composition, musical analysis, and pedagogy and explore the geographies of transatlantic and international exchange and disruption within which her career unfolded. Ultimately, this volume takes its title as a topic for exploration—asking what worlds Boulanger belonged to, and in what sense we can consider any of them to be “hers.”

Since its publication nearly eight decades ago, the consensus among scholars about Fábula de Equis y Zeda, by the Spanish poet Gerardo Diego (1896-1987) remains unchanged: Fábula is an enigmatic avant-garde curiosity. It seems to rob the reader of the reason necessary to interpret it, even as it lures him or her ineluctably to the task; nevertheless, the present study makes the case that this work is, in fact, not inaccessible, and that what the anhelante arquitecto, intended with his masterpiece was a creation myth that explains the evolution of music in his day. This monograph unlocks the fullness of the poem ́s meaning sourced in music’s mythical consciousness and expressed in a poetic idiom that replicates aesthetic concepts and cubist strategies of form embraced by the neoclassical composers Bartok, Falla, Ravel, and Stravinsky.

Coping with trauma and the losses of World War I was a central concern for French musicians in the interwar period. Almost all of them were deeply affected by the war as they fought in the trenches, worked in military hospitals, or mourned a friend or relative who had been wounded, killed, or taken prisoner. In Resonant Recoveries, author Jillian C. Rogers argues that French modernist composers processed this experience of unprecedented violence by turning their musical activities into locations for managing and performing trauma. Through analyses of archival materials, French medical, philosophical, and literary texts, and the music produced between the wars, Rogers frames World War I as a pivotal moment in the history of music therapy. When musicians and their audiences used music to remember lost loved ones, perform grief, create healing bonds of friendship, and find consolation in soothing sonic vibrations and rhythmic bodily movements, they reconfigured music into an embodied means of consolation--a healer of wounded minds and bodies. This in-depth account of the profound impact that postwar trauma had on French musical life makes a powerful case for the importance of addressing trauma, mourning, and people's emotional lives in music scholarship. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.