In a book that challenges modernist ideas about the value and role of music in Western society, Composing the Citizen demonstrates how music can help forge a nation. Deftly exploring the history of Third Republic France, Jann Pasler shows how French people from all classes and political persuasions looked to music to revitalize the country after the turbulent crises of 1871. Embraced not as a luxury but for its "public utility," music became an object of public policy as integral to modern life as power and water, a way to teach critical judgment and inspire national pride. It helped people to forget the past, voice conflicting aspirations, and imagine a shared future. Based on a dazzling survey of archival material, Pasler's rich interdisciplinary work looks beyond elites and the histories their agendas have dominated to open new windows onto the musical tastes and practices of amateurs as well as professionals. A fascinating history of the period emerges, one rooted in political realities and the productive tensions between the political and the aesthetic. Highly evocative and deeply humanistic, Composing the Citizen ignites broad debates about music's role in democracy and its meaning in our lives.

"Jann Pasler's remarkable Composing the Citizen reaches well beyond what any book concerned with music in society has ever attempted. Concentrating on France of the Third Republic, from the 1870s through the early 1900s, she demonstrates convincingly how music--whether new, old, popular, or élite, whether performed at institutions of state (such as the Opéra), the Folies Bergère, concert halls, or the zoo--helped to redefine what it meant to be French under evolving political circumstances. Equally adept in the languages of history, sociology, political science, reception history, and music analysis, Pasler establishes music's cultural significance and implicitly illuminates the role it can still play in countries like the United States."--Philip Gossett, The University of Chicago and University of Rome, La Sapienza "Composing the Citizen offers nothing less than a new paradigm for the study of musical cultures. Rather than forcing French music into the moulds developed for the Austro-German canon, Pasler simply studies the social uses of music in fin-de-siècle France. Her painstaking archival research allows her to present an astonishingly detailed account of musical practices, tastes, and activities; new names and genres come to the fore to engage in a variety of dynamic artistic scenes most of us never knew--or only thought we did by virtue of having read Proust. A masterwork of a scholar at the very peak of her career."--Susan McClary, MacArthur Fellow 1995 and author of Georges Bizet: Carmen and Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madgrigal "Utilité publique: a common-sense republican notion of sweeping consequence. In this greatly anticipated volume Jann Pasler uses it as touchstone, showing how and why musical life so mattered in Third-Republic France: layer after layer of it, in a journey that takes us past the Opéra and Conservatoire to the pops concerts, department stores, the zoo, the world's fairs, the overseas colonies. Companionable as a well-worn Baedeker, seductive as Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years, this exquisitely styled and paced achievement is also a compelling read."--D. Kern Holoman, author of Berlioz and The Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 1828-1967

Covering more than one hundred years of history, this multidisciplinary collection of essays illuminates the important links between citizenship, national belonging, and popular music in Brazil.

Recent global security threats, economic instability, and political uncertainty have placed great scrutiny on the requirements for U.S. citizenship. The stipulation of literacy has long been one of these criteria. In Producing Good Citizens, Amy J. Wan examines the historic roots of this phenomenon, looking specifically to the period just before World War I, up until the Great Depression. During this time, the United States witnessed a similar anxiety over the influx of immigrants, economic uncertainty, and global political tensions. Early on, educators bore the brunt of literacy training, while also being charged with producing the right kind of citizens by imparting civic responsibility and a moral code for the workplace and society. Literacy quickly became the credential to gain legal, economic, and cultural status. In her study, Wan defines three distinct pedagogical spaces for literacy training during the 1910s and 1920s: Americanization and citizenship programs sponsored by the federal government, union-sponsored programs, and first year university writing programs. Wan also demonstrates how each literacy program had its own motivation: the federal government desired productive citizens, unions needed educated members to fight for labor reform, and university educators looked to aid social mobility. Citing numerous literacy theorists, Wan analyzes the correlation of reading and writing skills to larger currents within American society. She shows how early literacy training coincided with the demand for laborers during the rise of mass manufacturing, while also providing an avenue to economic opportunity for immigrants. This fostered a rhetorical link between citizenship, productivity, and patriotism. Wan supplements her analysis with an examination of citizen training books, labor newspapers, factory manuals, policy documents, public deliberations on citizenship and literacy, and other materials from the period to reveal the goal and rationale behind each program. Wan relates the enduring bond of literacy and citizenship to current times, by demonstrating the use of literacy to mitigate economic inequality, and its lasting value to a productivity-based society. Today, as in the past, educators continue to serve as an integral part of the literacy training and citizen-making process.

Drawing on a passion for music, a remarkably diverse interdisciplinary toolbox, and a gift for accessible language that speaks equally to scholars and the general public, Jann Pasler invites us to read as she writes "through" music, unveiling the forces that affect our sonic encounters. In an extraordinary collection of historical and critical essays, some appearing for the first time in English, Pasler deconstructs the social, moral, and political preoccupations lurking behind aesthetic taste. Arguing that learning from musical experience is vital to our understanding of past, present, and future, Pasler's work trenchantly reasserts the role of music as a crucial contributor to important public debates about who we can be as individuals, communities, and nations. The author's wide-ranging and perceptive approaches to musical biography and history challenge us to rethink our assumptions about important cultural and philosophical issues including national identity and postmodern musical hybridity, material culture, the economics of power, and the relationship between classical and popular music. Her work uncovers the self-fashioning of modernists such as Vincent d'Indy, Augusta Holm?s, Jean Cocteau, and John Cage, and addresses categories such as race, gender, and class in the early 20th century in ways that resonate with experiences today. She also explores how music uses time and constructs narrative. Pasler's innovative and influential methodological approaches, such as her notion of "question-spaces," open up the complex cultural and political networks in which music participates. This provides us with the reasons and tools to engage with music in fresh and exciting ways. In these thoughtful essays, music--whether beautiful or cacophonous, reassuring or seemingly incomprehensible--comes alive as a bearer of ideas and practices that offers deep insights into how we negotiate the world. Jann Pasler's Writing through Music brilliantly demonstrates how music can be a critical lens to focus the contemporary critical, cultural, historical, and social issues of our time.

This book appraises the contribution of Paul Dukas (1865–1935) to a wide variety of French musical practices. As a composer, critic, artistic collaborator and teacher, Dukas was central to the fin de siècle and early twentieth-century Paris musical scene (and more broadly to the French scene). Significantly, his compositional style mediated tradition through the modern language of his present, while his critical writings pioneered a new mode of musical discourse in the French press. Of further interest are Dukas’s professional relationships with iconic figures such as Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy, and his role in fostering the next generation of French composers. In addition to mentoring famous names such as Olivier Messiaen and Tony Aubin, he staunchly supported his female students, notably Elsa Barraine, Claude Arrieu and Yvonne Desportes. This unique essay collection offers a panoramic perspective on a comparatively neglected French musician. Paul Dukas: Legacies of a French Musician traces two aspects of his work: Part I treats Dukas as a composer, thinker and artistic collaborator; Part II constructs his intellectual legacy as seen in his creative and pedagogic endeavours. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in fin de siècle and early twentieth-century French music, women in French music, music criticism and composition education in the Paris Conservatoire.

This volume explores how art and artifacts can tell women’s stories of war—a critical way into these stories, often hidden due to the second-tier status of reporting women’s accomplishments. This unique lens reveals personal, cultural, and historically noteworthy experiences often not found in records, manuscripts, and texts. Nine stories from history are examined, from the mythical Amazons of Ancient Greece to a female prisoner of war during World War II. Each of the social, political, and battlefield experiences of Penthesilea, Artemisia, Boudica, the feminine cavaliers, the Dahomey Amazons, suffragists, World War I medical corps, and a World War II prisoner of war are intertwined with a particular work of art or an artifact. These include pottery, iconographic images, public sculpture, stone engraving, clothing, decorative arts, paintings, and pulp art. While each story stands alone, brought together in this volume they represent a cross-sectional reflection on the record of women and war. The chapters cover not only a diverse range of women from around the globe - the African continent, the Hispanic territory of Europe, Carian and Ancient Greece and Rome, Iran, Great Britain-Scotland-ancient Caledonia, Western Europe, and North America—but also a diverse choice of artwork and artifacts, eras, and the nature of the wars being fought. This book will be of value to those interested in gender across history and its interplay in the field of war.