Believe it or not (I don’t), the first week of this summer’s CURI project has come and gone, leaving me tired, excited, and a little hungry. We spent the week reading, writing, typing, thinking, plotting points on maps, and getting to know each other; it’s been busier than my typical first week of summer. As quickly as this week went, however, I already feel like I have a handle on our project. I’ve learned that Paris in the 1920s was complex, eclectic, and constantly evolving, and that music was just one thread in the tapestry. I’ve learned that my favorite composers ate lunch together, shared ideas, fought, and dedicated their works to one another, and that the halls in which these works were premiered caught fire much too often for comfort. Music in 1920s Paris was shaped by a context of conflict, pride, loyalty, tourism, fashion, and constant change; basically, it existed in the real world. Maybe that’s obvious — where else would it have been? — but it’s hard not to imagine Ravel and Milhaud living in their own separate universes, floating around in the same music-history-space, but never actually meeting.
With the first few background readings behind me, I’m hoping to explore two topics in more depth. The first is the French chanson. As a singer who loves French vocal music, I’m always interested to know more about where the music I sing comes from. Beyond knowing what the text means, or what Fauré may have been thinking when he wrote “En sourdine,” I want to know who else heard the song, what they thought, why he wrote in a particular style, who he learned from, and what other music he heard that may have informed his compositions. A common theme among a few of our first readings is that there’s a difference between knowing and understanding. This summer, I hope to gain the tools to understand 1920s French vocal music as fully as possible.
I’m also hoping to learn more about the relationship between France and Russia during this time period. I’ve never been particularly interested in international politics, but the prevalence of Russian music in 1920s Paris has reappeared constantly throughout our research this week. I’ve always considered France and Russia to be very different countries, so it surprised me to discover how much they had in common. Why Koussevitsky? Why Stravinsky? Why the Ballets Russe? These are questions that will quickly become more specific.
Lastly, I’m excited to spend the coming weekend nerding out with HTML, CSS, Javascript, SQL, and any other programming language I can find an excuse to use. Spending two days in a row entering data into a spreadsheet has served to motivate me to finish the web form I’m working on right now. This web form is similar to a spreadsheet, but smarter; it fills in certain values for you, helps researchers avoid typos and missing diacritics, and will save the data we collect into SQL tables that can be queried, edited, and exported with ease. It will save us a lot of time, and will hopefully make it easier to plug our data into various mapping platforms. On the top of the list of things I am thrilled about is the fact that this project combines two of my main interests: music and programming. It’s the liberal arts in ten weeks! Hopefully they don’t all go as quickly as the first one did….
How to succeed in research without cranial frying? I’m not sure yet, but I’m going to start by going to bed.
Love this sentence: “Music in 1920s Paris was shaped by a context of conflict, pride, loyalty, tourism, fashion, and constant change; basically, it existed in the real world.” You remind me that in the music history survey, it’s easy to miss the trees because we’re so busy gaping at the mountains in the distance. Composers were real people! They ate food and dealt with personal hygiene and got in dumb fights with their loved ones! If we can somehow make this simple truth more apparent to the music history students of the future, we’ll have done them a great service.
The French chanson is a huge and hugely important topic that I really hope you’ll explore further. While the heyday of the chanson is often thought to have been in the time of Faure and Debussy, clearly it was still an important genre through the 1920s and 1930s, and several of “our” composers (especially Les Six, Ravel, and later Sauguet and Jolivet) contributed wonderful pieces to the repertory. Let’s think about how we might incorporate work on the chanson into our overall project.
Similarly, the Franco-Russian love fest that lasted from the aughts through the twenties (with brief break-ups around the time the Russian civil war started and again over economic issues later in the twenties) is a topic as large as it is fascinating. Brea Olson did some work on this last summer, and I’d recommend reading her blog posts (or asking her if you can read the paper she wrote about a particular Russian music critic). We should *definitely* have a map related to Russians and Russian music in Paris in the 1920s. Keeping thinking big thoughts!