Historical Interplay in French Music and Culture, 1860–1960

This edited volume presents a selected history of French music and culture, but one with a dynamic difference. Eschewing a traditional chronological account, it explores the nature of relationships in French musical culture between one historical period and another, probing the emergent interplay, intertextualities and scope for subsequent reinterpretation across time and place. It engages with notions of cultural meaning, especially those pertaining to French identity, both national and individual. Each of the book’s five main parts sets out a specific cultural network or temporal interplay, which may result variously in synthesis, disjunction, or historical misreading.