The Landscape of Sound in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Extract

Alain Corbin, Les cloches de la terre. Paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes au XIXe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 359 pp., €8.69 (pb), ISBN 2080814532.

Glenn Watkins, Proof through the Night. Music and the Great War (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003), 598 pp., $49.95 (hb), ISBN 0520231589.

Jeffrey Jackson, Making Jazz French. Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 266 pp., $21.95 (pb), ISBN 0822331373.

Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club. Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 388 pp., $55.00 (hb), ISBN 0226287351.

David Looseley, Popular Music in Contemporary France (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003), 254 pp., $25.00 (pb), ISBN 1859736319.

Though undoubtedly thriving, the history of music is still a somewhat peripheral area of research which many historians dismiss as secondary. For many years publication in the subject remained the domain of two kinds of researchers, either musicologists – ‘insiders’ au fait with the technical vocabulary – or sociologists and practitioners of ‘cultural studies’ – ‘outsiders’ chiefly interested in the reception of musical phenomena and their role in the constitution of individual and collective identities. This division has become very blurred over the last few years, which have seen the emergence of a number of works with an interdisciplinary approach. But for most historians the history of music remains a largely unfamiliar theme which they struggle to include in any global social or cultural analysis. This struggle is apparent at two levels: first, the difficulty of developing guidelines to the historicity of musical events and, second, the difficulty of escaping the chronology of classical music, which is predicated on a succession of styles and composers. Based on these two points, this article will attempt to develop, through a transverse reading of certain recent works, some working hypotheses centring on the notion of a ‘landscape of sound’ or paysage sonore, as proposed some ten years ago by Alain Corbin, a notion which, it seems to me, may make a valuable contribution to rejuvenating the history of music.