Paul Taffanel (1844-1908) is essentially the father of modern flute playing. Drawing on previously unavailable material from a private archive in Paris, Blakeman describes and evaluates Taffanel's life, career, and works, with particular reference to his influence as founder of the modern French School of flute playing.

Jody Blake demonstrates in this book that although the impact of African-American music and dance in France was constant from 1900 to 1930, it was not unchanging. This was due in part to the stylistic development and diversity of African-American music and dance, from the prewar cakewalk and ragtime to the postwar Charleston and jazz. Successive groups of modernists, beginning with the Matisse and Picasso circle in the 1900s and concluding with the Surrealists and Purists in the 1920s, constructed different versions of la musique and la danse negre. Manifested in creative and critical works, these responses to African-American music and dance reflected the modernists' varying artistic agendas and historical climates.

Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces provides the first fundamental reconsideration of music's role in the relationship between the French state and the Catholic Church in the Third Republic, revealing how composers and critics from often opposing ideological factions undermined the secular/sacred binary through composition and musical performance [editor].

Ce volume présente les délibérations des Deuxièmes Rencontres Internationales harmoniques du printemps 2004. Les conférences ont été données par des experts des instruments à claviers et des cuivres. L'accent a été mis sur une variété de traditions historiques de facture instrumentale et sur l'histoire du renouveau de l'utilisation d'instruments anciens. Les contributions traitent non seulement des paramètres des pratiques instrumentales, mais encore de l'inspiration donnée dans ces domaines par quelques pionniers du renouveau de la musique ancienne. Dans bien des cas, les auteurs se sont penchés plus spécialement sur l'interprétation de la musique de Johann Sebastian Bach. This volume presents the proceedings of the second International Congress organised in Lausanne by the harmoniques Foundation and held in the Spring of 2004. The papers were given by experts on brass and stringed keyboard instruments. The emphasis was on a variety of historical instrument-making traditions and on the history of the revival of the use of early instruments. The contributions not only included detailed discussions regarding the parameters of performance practice and the use of historical instruments but also about the inspiration given by some of the leading revivalists in these fields. In many cases the contributors placed a special focus on the performance of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.