Music, Poetry, Propaganda: Constructing French Cultural Soundscapes at the BBC during the Second World War

by Claire Launchbury, Peter Collier (Editor)

Overview

Offering new perspectives on the role of broadcasting in the construction of cultural memory, this book analyses selected instances in relation to questions of French identity at the BBC during the Second World War. The influence of policy and ideology on the musical and the poetic is addressed by drawing on theoretical frameworks of the archive, memory, trauma and testimony. Case studies investigate cultural memories constructed through three contrasting soundscapes. The first focuses on the translation of ‘Frenchness’ to the BBC’s domestic audiences; the second examines the use of slogans on the margins of propaganda broadcasts. In the third, the implications of the marriage of poetry and music in the BBC’s 1945 premier of Francis Poulenc’s cantata setting of resistance poems by the surrealist poet Paul Éluard in Figure humaine are assessed. Concentrating on the role of the archive as both narrative source and theoretical frame, this study offers a new approach to the understanding of soundscapes and demonstrates the processes involved in the creation of sonic cultural memory in the context of global conflict.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783034302395
Publisher:	Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Publication date:	04/23/2012
Series:	Modern French Identities , #78
Pages:	211
Product dimensions:	5.91(w) x 8.86(h) x (d)

About the Author

Claire Launchbury is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in French at the University of Leeds. She studied music at the University of Exeter before doing postgraduate work in music and French studies at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Table of Contents

Contents: Cultural memory, soundscapes, and archive theory – Contested nationhood, cultural identity, Anglo-French perspectives on Occupation, exile, development of programming strategies in relation to French topics – French cultural soundscapes, domestic listeners, mediation, BBC Home Service – Music and propaganda broadcasts destined for Occupied France – Poulenc, Éluard, Resistance texts, first performance of Figure humaine in translation, post-Liberation symbolism of Anglo-French cultural renewal – Wartime BBC as an Anglo-French lieu de mémoire.

Preface

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Editorial Reviews

«Launchbury’s ‘Music, Poetry, Propaganda’ is a highly useful contribution to the literature on music at the BBC, as well as to the growing body of literature concerned with the use of music in propaganda and group identity construction in the context of war. Readers interested in musical modernism and nationality will also find much of value in this book, which enriches understandings of how and why works by French composers became such an important part of the post-Second World War repertory. Finally, Launchbury makes a thought-provoking contribution to interdisciplinary understandings of cultural memory, music, and mediation – and the uses and limits of the archive.» (Christina Baade, Music and Letters 94, 2013/3)

From the Publisher