Voice Lessons: French Melodie in the Belle Epoque

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List of Figures
List of Musical Examples
Foreword: Telling History
1.
Eve Sings, An Origin Story
Melody
Eve Sings
Muteness
Oral Pleasures
Melos and Mimesis
Mortal Melody
Perfect prosody, androgynous melody
Selfless Singers
NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE
The Mother Tongue Teaching the modern ABCs
The People's Mouth L Figures of Speech Talking Machines Indelible Accents
NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO
Free Speech, Free Verse, and Music Before All Things
Poetry and the People Vibrations of Language Accentus/ ad cantus Music After All Transcribing the voix parlee Unsung symbols
NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 4. L'Art de dire, or Language in Performance Venetian glass and marqueterie
Vibrant noise, expressive elegance Dir(e) Expressions lyriques
Forget that you are singers A Bird in a branch
NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR
5. Farewell to an Idea
La verite
Natural history
Une voix du passe?
Realism revisited
In the shadow of the Faun
Mirages
NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE
Bibliography

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Language, education, science, and song come together in surprising ways in Katherine Bergeron's new history of music in the Belle Epoque. Voice Lessons examines the modern musical art known as la mélodie française and its rise to prominence in the years around 1900-a period when France was pouring resources into national literacy and French scholars were beginning to grasp the nuances of the spoken tongue. Bergeron explores the relationship between the free, secular, and compulsory school system of the Third Republic, and the experimental sciences of language that grew alongside it, to observe the ways in which both science and school redefined the verbal arts in France at century's end. The music of Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel; the writings of Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Verlaine; the performances of Maggie Teyte, Reynaldo Hahn, and Sarah Bernhardt; the linguistic studies of Paul Passy and Abbé Rousselot: all these sources offer evidence of the new ideas of expression that proliferated during one of the most idealistic moments in French musical history, when poets, composers, actors, singers, and scientists all learned to imagine-and to speak-their language in new ways. Through close readings of songs, poems, sound recordings, and other historical records, Voice Lessons narrates the development of a rare musical art, seeking to explain why this art emerged, why it mattered, and why it eventually disappeared.

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Music and Letters

Bergeron is no score-dodger and the music is exactly in the right place: central. Surrounding this is a wealth of detail and context opening up bypaths previously unexplored

Music and Letters

excellently researched and illuminating ... this is a book to be reckoned with. It tells its bedtime story eloquently and it approaches its repertory in more detail than elsewhere

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