Ideology and Pragmatism in Early 20th-Century France

Much relevant scholarship on French organ music from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (Barrera 2017, Cockburn 2011, Douglass 1995, etc.) refers to the repertoire as "French classical," despite "Baroque" being the common term for the period. In this paper I trace that anomaly to Norbert Dufourcq (1904-90), a specialist in the repertoire who vehemently rejected the label "Baroque," viewing it as an inappropriate descriptor of French music. I argue that Dufourcq's defense of "French classicism" emerged from his nationalistic approach to musicology and from his adherence to an old ideological approach to aesthetics-popular in France earlier in the twentieth century-that viewed classicism as a quality intrinsic to the culture of the French nation. 
As Fulcher (1999, 2005, 2018), Iglesias (2015), and Pasler (2009) have shown, classicism became associated with "Frenchness" in the early twentieth century, and the idea evolved through changing political contexts in subsequent decades. Dufourcq espoused this ideology throughout his career, pitting "balanced" and "orderly" French classicism against "fantastical" and "disordered" German romanticism in early publications. For example, he highlighted "classical" qualities in Bach's music in an attempt to remake the German musical hero as French in spirit. As the concept of a "Baroque" period became more common in the 1950s-60s, Dufourcq increasingly framed the opposition between "baroque" and "classical" aesthetics as representative of the same German-French binary, describing "Baroque" as "German terminology" and defending "our [French] classicism" (Dufourcq 1965, 1971). He further argued that the label "Baroque" obscured France's musical achievements during its golden age under Louis XIV (Dufourcq 1961). Dufourcq's defense of "French classicism" thus fits into a career-long trend-documented in published materials and archival records such as such as lesson plans from the Conservatoire National and reports to the French Ministry of Fine Arts-of the scholar using musicological work to promote his nation's cultural heritage within a German-dominated field. Because organ scholarship continues to employ Dufourcq's preferred label, this case study exemplifies the subtle influence of nationalistic projects on musicology today.

Exoticism as Musical Vernacular:
Eugène Bozza's Woodwind _Solos de Concours_ for the Paris Conservatoire


When creating woodwind _solos de concours_, or exam solos, for the Paris Conservatoire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, numerous composers followed an extensive tradition of associating woodwinds with the pastoral and oriental exotic. For centuries, European composers had used Western woodwind instruments to stand in for Pan's _syrinx_, shepherds' pipes, and the instruments of distant lands. In part as a result of this tradition, scholars such as Jean-Pierre Bartoli, János Kárpáti, Myriam Ladjili, Ralph Locke, Deborah Mawer, Susanna Pasticci, and Curt Sachs have primarily regarded exoticism as an aesthetic attribute of music. 


However, as much as _solo de concours_ composers may have been inspired by this aesthetic tradition, it was not their only consideration when relating woodwinds to the exotic in music for the Conservatoire. There were practical concerns associated with creating commissioned works for the state institution as well. By drawing upon the 1930s and 1940s woodwind _solos de concours_ of French neoclassical composer Eugène Bozza (1905-1991), I argue that, in addition to fulfilling possible artistic aims, state-commissioned _solo de concours_ composers applied exoticist tropes in the form of a musical vernacular to satisfy diverse utilitarian and extramusical requirements. In this regard, their employment of exoticist elements paralleled the application of musical topics by artisan composers during the Classical Era. Like many working composers of the eighteenth century, French craftsmen composers in the early decades of the twentieth century juggled continuous compositional deadlines alongside outside musical responsibilities. These intense working conditions required an efficient and effective compositional method, which exoticism could provide. Bozza's music provides an ideal case study of this concept. Although Bozza was not the only composer to use exoticism as a pragmatic compositional tool in this manner, his use of such was extensive and successful, as is evident by his repeated Paris Conservatoire _solo de concours_ commissions.


In sum, by providing an alternative history of exoticism, this paper will challenge the notion of exoticism as solely an aesthetic feature, instead revealing it to be a slippery, polyfunctional attribute with practical applications. 

Over the past twenty years, historians such as Katharine Ellis have disentangled the complexities of the nineteenth-century Palestrina revival, while James Garratt and others have explored its impact on German-speaking composers from Mendelssohn to Bruckner. By comparison, the 'neo-Palestrinian' vocal polyphony that French composers produced as early as 1840, mainly for the Catholic liturgy, remains little-known. This music, and the theoretical reflection that it generated in large quantities, fixated on a basic goal of transcending mere pastiche and reconciling old and new, a concern also central to German Palestrinianism, as Garratt shows. Yet French Palestrinianism proliferated only after encouragement from Rome in 1884, 1894, and especially 1903, by which time concepts of musical modernism, progress, and innovation were themselves evolving rapidly and no longer equated straightforwardly to chromaticism and elaborate orchestration at antipodes to Palestrinian purity.  
My paper investigates French Palestrinianism, in its theory and compositional practice, in relation to the broader field of early twentieth-century discourse on modernism. I use music by Charles Koechlin, Charles Bordes, and Guy Ropartz and critical and historical writings propagated in composition manuals, the press (especially the specialist church-music press), and church-music congresses, including those of Vincent d'Indy, Fernand de La Tombelle, and other associates of the Parisian Schola Cantorum. Drawing on longstanding fears of exhaustion of "the musical language", these apologists of Palestrinianism construed the remote musical past as a deposit of musical "resources" that could sustain formal innovation and tonal expansion within the bounds of what "the ear" could tolerate. In postulating a move towards austerity as the next stage demanded by musical progress, they retained the imperative of innovation but re-conceptualised it in non-linear terms. Collectively, this literature made up a vital element of French debates over musical evolution after the turn of the century, which topic has, since Jann Pasler's prospectus in 1991, received less than the attention it deserves.