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 betweenthe 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 newways. 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.
Editorial Reviews
Review
"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
Review
Language, education, science, and song come together in surprising ways in Katherine Bergeron's new history of music in the Belle Epoque.
Review
"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
About the Author
Katherine Bergeron is Professor and Dean, College of Music, Brown University
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