Research Fellow on the three-year AHRC-funded project, ‘Accenting the Classics: Durand’s Édition classique (c.1915–25) as a French Prism on the Musical Past’.
Patriotism Under Pressure: Musical Exchange and Allied Identity during WWI
This is a Leverhulme-funded project focussing on musical exchange between Paris and London during the First World War. Music in wartime can play a vital role in bringing people together and creating a sense of belonging to a national cause; this project develops this idea by combining ideas of nation with those of an emerging Allied force. It examines a wide range of musical exchange between Paris and London, to explore how interaction between two capital cities both sustained and challenged national identities within the context of an emerging Allied Entente. The project is archive-based and includes research on areas such as the cross-channel activities of touring theatrical troupes; government use of music to foster cultural and political relationships; mass Allied concerts in Paris; informal music-making and street music, in particular interaction between French and British solider-musicians on leave in Paris. The research questions with which this project deals are particularly poignant in today’s society: there are striking similarities between this period in which national identities were put under strain by the emergence of a transnational Allied power, and the growth of modern-day supra-national organisations such as the EU, and the current tensions and conflicts between EU-membership and national interests of individual countries. The main output of the project will be a second monograph.
French Music Publishing in the early twentieth-century
This research project forms part of a three-year AHRC-funded project led by Deborah Mawer, entitled ‘Accenting the Classics: Durand’s Édition Classique as a French Prism on the Musical Past’. It explores the French music publisher Jacques Durand’s major edition of music, the Édition Classique—a significant collection of European instrumental music from the 18thC and 19thC centuries, which was published by Durand from 1915 onwards. The editions were edited by some of France’s leading composers, musicologists, and teachers. My research as part of the project combines detailed analytical case studies of the edited music, along with consideration of the broader artistic climate of the time in which it was produced and used. It will offer new insights into early twentieth-century French cultural identity, and shed light on the history of music publishing but also on the ways in which international publishing markets and cultural networks operated. Outputs will include: a single-authored case study on the editions of Beethoven’s music in the collection; book chapters on the marketing of the Édition and of publishing markets and networks in early twentieth-century Europe and America; a co-organised international conference on music publishing in early twentieth-century; a performance workshop involving students, and a public concert of works from the editions.
Transatlantic Encounters: Andean Music in France in the 1920s and 1930s
My work on WWI has explored the French government’s creation of an official office for musical propaganda, and the international musical activities of this body in the post-war years. This research provides the foundations for a project on musical propaganda and exchange between France and South America in the 1920s and 1930s. The project has two main focuses: the activities of French musicians sent to South America on musical missions in the 1920s; the influence of indigenous music from the Andes in France from the 1930s onwards. My starting point for this project is an encyclopaedia of Inca music, La musique des Incas et ses survivances, published in Paris in the 1920s. One of the most influential and detailed studies of indigenous music from South America, this volume had an important influence on French composers such as Olivier Messiaen.
MUS6049: The Sounds of War: France and Britain, 1914–1918
