Conference Agenda

The relations between art and politics in French modernism, beginning in the late 1880s and extending to around 1930, were particularly tightly wrought and complex. The period saw expansive artistic growth, bolstered by a high degree of institutional stability and equally robust efforts to upset this stability. Recent scholarship has nuanced the emphasis on themes such as nationalism, Republicanism, and the avant-garde by locating continuities in the pre-war and interwar periods and by identifying pragmatic concerns that shaped both reception and creation of repertory works (Kelly, 2013; Wheeldon, 2017; Rogers, 2021; Epstein, 2022). Though this work has revised narratives that once appeared over-determined due to the historicism, self-consciousness, and polemics of contemporaneous critics and musicians, the musical philosophies of this time are still largely vexed by a contrasting problem. An emphasis on mystery, silence, and unknowability seems to resist analyses that would enrich socio-political understandings of this music.

This panel explores this tension and provides new perspectives on the aesthetics and ethics of French modernism through the mutually illuminating hermeneutics of silence, dissonance, and dialogue. It seeks to do so by recapturing historical contingencies in French musical thought and resituating familiar voices in under-examined and unexpected contexts. The first paper offers a view of how different composers treated the same poem by Paul Verlaine, a proto-symbolist who is known for the musicality of his images, but who also explored the importance of silence, an aesthetic quality that took on weighty importance in the philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch. The second paper considers Darius Milhaud’s dissonances as a way of navigating both personal identity and musical heritage. In the same measure that polytonal dissonance became a stylistic calling-card of Les Six, criticism of the group became a synecdoche for populist antisemitism. The third paper approaches settings of Raïssa Maritain’s poetry by Arthur Lourié through the philosophy of Simone Weil, arguing that all three understood music as a dialogue with an unknown Other. This paper examines this pose as both susceptible to political quietism and holding the potential of radical activism.

Many of Paul Verlaine’s poems enticed composers in the fin de siècle with their sonorous references to raindrops, mandolins, and moonlight serenades, however not all of his poetry included such madrigalistic texts. One of his bleakest and quietest poems, “Un grand sommeil noir” appeared in mélodie after mélodie by composers from the French avant-garde milieu such as Stravinsky, Ravel, Honegger, Nadia Boulanger, Marguerite Canal, and Arthur Lourié. The poem appeared in the third section of Verlaine’s 1880 book Sagesse, which was panned by critics and did not contribute to his standing among the popular literary circles in which Symbolist ideas were developing. Aside from a handful of settings of some poems by Debussy, Sagesse was mostly overlooked by the composers who generally appreciated Verlaine. Yet the stark imagery of “Un grand sommeil noir,” its prescient reference to the newly-popular unconscious and dream-states, and its call for silence itself became appealing inspirations for the next generation of composers.

The sparse text of this poem provides an apt frame for exploring one of the most important musical values of the early twentieth century, the idea of mystery. I show in these six settings how composers approached the poem—its repetitious structure, resonant phonemic play, and diction rife with more allusions and connotations than specific meaning—in a common pursuit of what is known yet still unsayable. I argue that the poem’s structure and language invited a particular kind of response relevant to what Vladimir Jankélévitch called the ineffable in music. I offer significant but often overlooked historical information about Verlaine’s collection and its reception and a discussion of how Verlaine’s poetics are treated musically by the six composers in this study. I also read the poem and the music written to accompany it alongside the ideas that underpin Jankélévitch’s infamous concepts of the “inexpressive espressivo” and the relationship between “music and silence.” Studying “Un grand sommeil noir” and its divergent settings allows us to appreciate the mysterious significance of silence in French music and in the aesthetic writings that respond to it.

This paper shows how Darius Milhaud’s Les Six contemporaries incorporated his style of dissonant polytonality into their own compositions, which gave the group a semblance of aesthetic coherence while simultaneously painting the target of antisemitism on their backs. After the First World War, Jean Cocteau called for music to be rebuilt in a way that is “French, of France.” In response, Milhaud devised a compositional style that uses the musical resources of the French Baroque and Classic periods in pursuit of the sound of modernist alienation. Milhaud admired Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal system, yet rather than merely emulate Schoenberg’s Teutonic influence, he combined tonal elements from disjunct tonalities to create polytonal mélanges. Combination became a lifelong preoccupation for Milhaud, who at first stacked triads to yield dissonant sonorities but later combined differently pitched themes before juxtaposing whole movement forms. And despite the originality of Milhaud’s mélanges, his writings assert their connectedness to a contrapuntal tradition that extends back to Zarlino while circumnavigating German Romanticism’s corrupting obsession with tonal unity and organicism. Thus, Milhaud’s dissonances serve an agenda to establish his dual identity as a French and Jewish person by inventing a new compositional language that is nevertheless rooted in tradition (Fulcher 2005).

Although the personal backgrounds, politics, and musical preferences of the Les Six members have dissuaded scholars from trying to articulate a group aesthetic (Shapiro 2011), Milhaud-like mélanges appear in each of the members’ works. For example, Arthur Honegger’s Rugby combines disparate melodies in strict parallel to create sweeping gestures that invoke the movements of hulking athletes. Meanwhile, Germaine Tailleferre’s Marchand d’oiseaux juxtaposes tonal melodies to pantomime fluttering birds while refreshing Classical period structures with modern harmonizations. And in Francis Poulenc’s contribution to l’Album des six, a tonally capricious melody slips playfully in and out of focus with a churlishly stubborn pedal point in the left hand. Whether or not the members of Les Six adhered to a group aesthetic, they were united in being denounced as “ultra-modern,” “Jewish,” and therefore degenerate (Kelly 2013)—by populist, antisemitic critics who could not reliably distinguish polytonality from atonality (Médicis 2005).

On Christmas, 1934, Arthur Lourié (1890-1966) completed a setting of the poem “Procession” by Raïssa Maritain (1883-1960), ostensibly for liturgical use. The poem opens with a citation of Psalm 95, often associated with Christmas, and quickly turns to a meditation on the desire for intimate contact with “the greatness of God,” which terrifyingly “liquifies what it touches or destroys it like fire.” Lourié’s setting, for unmetered piano and duet of treble voices, is similarly charged with an affect of fear and trembling, a limping procession. When he wrote this work, Lourié had only recently arrived in Paris, an exile from the Soviet Union after his botched stint as the first Bolshevik Commissar of Music. He found a natural bond with Maritain, who like Lourié was a Russian émigré and Jewish convert to Catholicism, and with her husband, the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. The idea of a wounded and suffering human’s asymmetrical encounter with an Other suffuses Raïssa Maritain’s poetry, to which Lourié would return in a “post-communion” hymn in 1955, again in exile, this time in New Jersey.

The theological and aesthetic questions raised by Lourié’s music and Maritain’s poetry have political and ethical ramifications, and in this paper, I explore the tensions between art and politics in the French interwar context. While the Catholic revival, of which both Lourié and the Maritains were a part, at times accommodated fascistic tendencies, it also afforded radical leftist action. I turn in particular to the philosophy of Simone Weil, herself a secularized Jew attracted to Catholic thought, to locate the Lourié-Maritain encounter within this spectrum. While the interiority of Lourié's and Maritain’s works sometimes enabled a concomitant social quietism, evidenced by Lourié’s own biography, Weil’s writing on music and attention, as well as her activism, demonstrate alternative possibilities. After Weil, I argue that the themes of suffering and encounter with an unknowable Other found in Maritain’s poetry and Lourié’s music can in fact condition an ethics of radical listening, dialogue, and solidarity.