The Unsuspecting Tour Guide: Sneak Preview

I grew up in the somewhat paradoxical world of Parisian haute société. An error of birth, as they say. Young ladies of the haute bourgeoisie are supposed to play the piano well enough to entertain and learn to direct the flow of elegant conversation. We are supposed to tread the fine line of cosmopolitan savance and polite ignorance, instructed in the finer arts but above the practice of any professional trade. The closer the ties to the old aristocracy, the more true this is.

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Literary and Musical Intersections

When exploring the interconnected art-world of 1924 through a primarily musical lens, it can be easy to sweep literature under the rug. [However,] from the terse prose of Hemingway, to the imagism of Pound, to the stream-of-consciousness of Joyce, to the raw complexities of T.S. Eliot, literature in 1920s Paris was diverse, abundant, and groundbreaking. -Natalie Knopp

Explore four essays on the colorful, intricate ways which compositions of multiple types interacted with one another.

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Beethoven Performances in 1924 Paris: Statistics & Analysis

Beethoven is, as many are aware, one of the most significant figures in traditional readings of Western music history. While it is easy in musicology to say that one composer or another is highly influential, that does not always correlate to being “popular” composers – that is to say, well-liked and recognized by the general public. So how do performances of Beethoven’s works in 1924 Paris match up to the composer’s influence?

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Musical Geography by the Numbers

See numerical representations of how our efforts translated into quantifiable research.

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Download the Database

See what you can do with our data, free to download.

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