The Composer As Intellectual
Music and Ideology in France, 1914-1940
Jane F. Fulcher
Reviews and Awards
"Fulcher succeeds brilliantly in her stated (but not too modest) aim--to show that 'all which we have largely relegated to the "background"...were significant forces in French musical evolution' (323). Beyond that project, her retrieval of music as 'representation' (in the discrusive sense) models an archeological method with which to unearth layers of significance. Fulcher's study in essential reading."--Stephen Schloesser, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
"This remarkable study illustrates the heuristic value of Bourdieu's theory of fields, which has successfully been applied in recent research about literature in the same period. Without reducing musical practices to the simple reflect of external constraints, this research is exemplary in demonstrating that processes of hierarchization always involve ideological stakes."--American Historical Review
"Continuing her previous story of French cultural politics from the Dreyfus Affair to the beginning of World War I, Fulcher now extends her penetrating examination of music and ideology to the beginning of World War II. In so doing she has given us a rarity in the world of musicology: a genuine intellectual history that integrates reactions to official politics and culture with musical, stylistic developments." --Glenn Watkins, Earl V. Moore Professor Emeritus of Musicology, University of Michigan
"The completion of Jane Fulcher's pioneering study of music and politics in Third Republic France, The Composer as Intellectual is welcome and essential scholarship. From Debussy and Ravel to Poulenc and Messiaen, Fulcher shows that the questions 'what kind of music?' and 'what kind of nation?' were consistently posed together. Always attentive to musical form, political and cultural history, as well as the sociology of intellectuals, Fulcher never loses track of the power, mutuality, and subtlety of aesthetic and ideological investments."--Michael P. Steinberg, Director of the Cogut Humanities Center and Professor of History and Music, Brown University
"Jane F. Fulcher's fascinating, and impressively substantial, book of nearly 500 pages presents a wealth of information.... This is assuredly an important book with an innovative stance."--Deborah Mawer, Music and Letters