Introduction. "La Plus Grande Consolatrice" : Music as a Corporeal Technology of Consolation in Interwar France -- Music Making as Emotional Care: Negotiating Trauma, Expressional Norms, and Politics in Wartime France -- Embodying Sonic Resonance As/After Trauma : Vibration, Music, and Medicine -- Soothing Movements : The Consolatory Potential of Musique Dépouillé's Rhythm and Repetition -- In Search of a Consolatory Past : Grief and Embodied Musical Memory -- Rire as Release and Rapport : Pleasure and Laughter in French Interwar Musical Theater -- Conclusion. Touched by Music Making : Intimacy and Love in the Wake of Trauma.
Summary:
"French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars illustrates that coping with trauma was a central concern for French musicians active after World War I. The losses and violent warfare of World War I shaped how interwar French musicians-from those fighting in the trenches and working in military hospitals to more well-known musicians-engaged with music. Situated at the intersections of musicology, history, sound and performance studies, and psychology and trauma studies, Resonant Recoveries argues that modernists' compositions and musical activities were sonorous locations for managing and performing trauma. Through analysis of archival materials, French medical, philosophical, and literary texts, and the music produced between the wars, this book illuminates how music emerged during World War I as an embodied technology of consolation. Resonant Recoveries demonstrates that music making came to be understood by French interwar musicians as a consolatory practice that enhanced their abilities to remember lost loved ones, gave them opportunities to perform their grief publicly and privately, allowed them to create healing bonds of friendship, and soothed them with sonic vibrations and the rhythmically regular bodily movements required in order to perform many French neoclassical compositions. In revealing the importance music making held for interwar French musicians, this book refigures French modernist music as a therapeutic medium for creators, performers, and audiences, while also underlining the importance of addressing trauma, mourning, and people's emotional lives in music scholarship"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.