Voice Lessons: French Mélodie in the Belle Epoque

by Katherine Bergeron

Overview

Language, education, politics, and music come together in Katherine Bergeron's Voice Lessons, a study of the French mélodie in the Belle Epoque. Close readings of songs by Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel, along with poems, sound recordings, and other historical documents, seek to uncovers the cultural meanings of this art: why it emerged, why it mattered, and why it eventually disappeared.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199887545
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/20/2010
Series:	New Cultural History of Music
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	27 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Katherine Bergeron is Dean of the College and Professor of Music at Brown University

Table of Contents

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
2. The Mother Tongue
Teaching the modern ABCs
The People's Mouth
Figures of Speech
Talking Machines
Indelible Accents
NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO
3. 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 parlée
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 vérité
Natural history
Une voix du passé?
Realism revisited
In the shadow of the Faun
Mirages
NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

"Bergeron succeeds in presenting both music professionals and amateurs with an invaluable resource on French mélodie in the Belle Epoque. The reader gains a comprehensive understanding of the genre and may even develop an appreciation and inquisitiveness for period recordings. Bergeron set out to bring to life a lost tradition and in so doing achieves her goal of explaining to the reader what the French mélodie meant to the people of its time and why it mattered to them." —Notes

"Voice Lessons works well: one reads text, examines the pictures, studies printed score, and hears the historic and modern sounds all at once, cross-referencing at will." —H-France Review

"The early recordings she discusses are essential to her analysis, and their presence on Oxford's website is invaluable...Bergeron's writing is poetic and even luminous...She is a careful guide." —French Studies

"Bergeron's commentary is limpid, well crafter, at ease with the multiple vocabularies in play. Her affection for the material is catching."—H-France Review

"This is not a book that one merely reads—one "hears" it...Overwhelmingly full of valuable insights, excited prose, and numerous MRMs about that most basic of questions about vocal music—of any place or era—the relationship between text and music." —Nineteenth-Century French Studies

From the Publisher