Conference Agenda

Singer and actor Guy Ferrant (1898–1954) is today little more than a footnote in French music history, known primarily (if at all) for having bequeathed to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) the papers of his long-time partner, composer Reynaldo Hahn. Within his own lifetime, however, Ferrant was better known, and for another bequest: his personal collection of 1,863 rare shellac discs and 65 even rarer wax cylinders, which in 1937 he publicly undertook to leave to the Sorbonne-sponsored Musée de la Parole (later incorporated into the state-sponsored Phonothèque Nationale, founded in 1938 and integrated into the BnF in 1977). Overwhelmingly oriented around early-twentieth-century operatic voices, Ferrant’s collection is now a cornerstone: it is thanks to him, for example, that the BnF has in its collection copies of the recordings Mary Garden and Claude Debussy made together in 1904. Yet despite its obvious significance to histories of singing, sound recording, and sonic heritage preservation—and despite having been digitized in the early 2000s—Ferrant’s legacy remains largely unknown beyond the BnF’s Département Son, Vidéo, Multimédia.

In this paper, I take the first steps toward contextualizing Ferrant’s recordings. I begin by examining the mid-century reception of Ferrant’s promised bequest in the Parisian press and on French radio, the rhetoric of which gives us a rare glimpse of how—and when—sound recordings began to be understood as artifacts, "incunables du son" (as one author put it) worthy not just of collection but also expensive cutting-edge conservation efforts. I then trace how this collection has been patrimonialized over the intervening seventy-five years, exploring how the recordings came to be digitized and separately itemized in the online catalogue of the BnF—and what has been lost along the way (among other things, Ferrant’s own idiosyncratic cataloguing system, which tells us much about how he himself understood the corpus). Finally, building on recent work in the area of digital heritage studies (Thylstrup 2019; Bohet and Pringuet 2022), I tell a cautionary tale about the complex and competing aims of national institutions, private libraries and unaffiliated individuals over the past century.

The northern French city of Lille had a vibrant artistic culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The city was home to several trouvères, and it had a poetry guild, the Puy de Notre Dame, which is referenced in Jiacamart Giélée’s Renart le Nouvel (1288). Lille was also an important pilgrimage site, which led to the foundation of processions and festivals that were major musical events. Despite documented references to musicians and their performances in Lille, we have few surviving music manuscripts from the city (Peters, 2012). Due to this, music composition in Lille has not been well-studied.

Lille, Bibliothèque municipal MS 316 is one of the earliest extant music manuscripts from Lille. It contains an interpolated Latin work, the Ludus Anticlaudianum (c.1284), written by a local priest named Adam de la Bassée. The Ludus has been the subject of several studies that have focused on its plot and on identifying the sources for its music interpolations, but La Bassée’s original compositions in the Ludus have fallen outside their scope (Bayart 1930, Hughes 1974, and Barnard 2008).

This paper examines how we can reconstruct the musical communities of late-medieval Lille by tracing their influence on La Bassée’s work. I show how recently uncovered documents preserved at different public archives in the city shed new light on musicians working there, and on the composition of new plainchant and Latin and French song preserved in liturgical books and song compilations from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. An analysis of La Bassée’s original compositions in the Ludus shows how his works were inspired by this locally produced repertory. Composers of plainchant and composers of vernacular and Latin song are in many cases the same people, and as I have shown in previous studies, sites of compositional activity revolve around local poetic societies, confraternities, and guilds (Long 2021). Exploring the contents of the Ludus along with the musical output of these communities provides a rare window into a network of musicians in Lille.

The influx of partimento methods in early nineteenth-century France marked the beginning of a process in which a vibrant aural tradition from Italy based on improvisation, counterpoint and performance was largely reduced to accompaniment and harmony pedagogy in France. Various authors have offered speculations as to why these changes took place; Robert Gjerdingen suggests the prevalence of the Bolognese rather than Neapolitan tradition (2007a) and the transition from a literary rather than aural culture (2007b), while Lydia Carlisi cites the latent influence of Rameau and the need to train accompanists for singers (2023). Following Marx’s characterization of the commodity as a “social hieroglyph” (1976), this paper considers the influence of emergent notions of property and the print market on the French reception of partimento through two related lines of inquiry. Firstly, I consider the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars as the political context for France’s institutionalization of partimento, as both scores and treatises of Italian composers were often acquired by the Paris Conservatoire through imperial plunder (Geoffrey-Schwinden 2022). This context moved partimento from a relatively insular aural culture, in which sources with very little text circulated informally through manuscripts in Italy, to being sold as (often luxurious) printed editions on the market in France with extensive text descriptions. By examining publications by Choron and Fiocchi (1804), Fenaroli and Imbimbo (1814), and François-Joseph Fétis (1823), I demonstrate that these treatises failed to reproduce the social relations that were essential for partimento’s pedagogical efficacy in Naples. Secondly, I discuss the peculiar ontological status of partimento, which Gjerdingen describes as “not quite a work” (2007a) and Sanguinetti characterizes as only potentially a work (2012). Due to its improvisatory and multi-authored nature, partimento challenged notions of private property established during the French Revolution, which was mobilized by musicians to encompass musical works as the inalienable property of genius (Geoffrey-Schwinden 2022). Because of these factors, partimenti did not match the regulative ideal of the musical work (Goehr 1992) and failed to be legible to French musicians outside of its pedagogical function, resulting in it becoming progressively unmoored from its relationship to counterpoint, improvisation, and performance.