Déodat de Séverac

Musical Identity in Fin de Siècle France

Robert F. Waters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351569798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Dat de Srac (1872-1921) is best known for his piano music but his compositions included orchestral and vocal works, including opera, cantata and incidental music. Claude Debussy described Srac's music as "exquisite and rich with ideas." The early works were influenced by Impressionist harmonies, church modes, cyclic techniques, folk-like melodies and Andalusian motives. Srac's style changed dramatically in 1907 when he left Paris and began to include Catalan elements in his compositions - a transition that has hitherto gone unrecognized. Robert Waters provides a much-needed study of the life and works of Srac, focusing on the composer's regionalist philosophy. Srac's engagement with folk music was not a patriotic gesture in the vein of nationalistic composers, but a way of expressing regional identity within France to counter the restrictive styles sanctioned by the Paris Conservatory. His musical philosophy mirrored larger social and political debates regarding anti-centralist positions on education, politics, art and culture in fin de siecle France. Such debates involved political and social leaders whom Srac knew and personally admired, including the writer Maurice Barrand the poet Frric Mistral. The book will appeal to those specializing in French music, European ethnic musics, piano music and French music history.

PART I

Introduction, Biography, and Regionalist Philosophy

Chapter 1

Introduction

The results of the Industrial Revolution were not unique to France. Increasing industrialization helped improve medicine throughout much of Europe, which subsequently led to a decrease in child mortality and greater longevity among the general population. From 1870 to 1914, the population of Europe increased by half, from 290 to 435 million people. However, the population growth in France was small when compared to the rest of Europe—9.7%, as compared to 57.8% within the German Empire, 42.8% in Great Britain, 38.3% in Austria–Hungary, 29.5% in Italy, and 20% in Spain.¹ This industrialization led to mechanized factory production, which, in turn, produced a demand for more workers within urban areas. Specialized agricultural production in the provinces also became important, which then resulted in a reduced demand for farm laborers. This rapid industrialization within Western Europe was coupled with an economic depression that lasted from 1873 to 1895. The slump resulted in falling agricultural prices, rural poverty, and unemployment within provincial areas.

Industrialization and poverty forced many rural peasants to migrate to urban areas. According to some historians, however, this urban migration did not preclude migrants from remaining in contact with their rural origins. In France, for example, many industrial workers returned to their villages yearly to help with annual harvests. In Russia, migrants to cities were forced by the state to maintain legal ties to their rural commune because of their continuous responsibility to the tax quota of their particular provincial region.² This trend towards urban migration, coupled with a regard for the provinces, led to an increased fascination with political and cultural regionalism.³

Cultural identity in France became an awareness of regional diversity among various provinces. The idea of living in the rural provinces was, in part, an escape from the tensions of an increasingly industrial age. This idea of escape was inspired by the idealization of rural provinces in literature and poetry.⁴

Yet many writer–philosophers and politicians promoted regionalism in order to inspire national cohesion. Regional identity could be a tool to persuade the population to pay homage to one’s local pays in order to provide a sense of heritage and therefore nationalist feelings towards the patrie.⁵ Carl Dahlhaus suggests this in Between Romanticism and Modernism, when he asserts the so–called volksgeist hypotheses, which stipulates that regionalism was appropriated by the bourgeoisie in order to reassure themselves that their national feelings had roots, which would then validate their own existence.⁶

Despite these arguments, including those made by Dahlhaus, regional styles within the arts nonetheless did develop, especially with regard to so–called folk music, a term primarily characterized as a communal and anonymous form of composition handed down from one generation to another. This oral tradition is thought to have taken place without academic elaboration and involves a continual process of transformation, so that a folk song becomes a collective rather than a personal creation. It is then the community which determines the form in which the music survives.⁷

Certain philosophers argue that the “discovery” of folk music consists of recycling the philosophy of primitivism, the belief that a technologically backward or chronologically earlier culture is in some respects purer than contemporary civilization; that those qualities that are least socialized and civilized are closest to the truth—characteristics such as “raw emotion” and “plain speech.”⁸ This concept echoes Jean–Jacques Rousseau’s Le contrat social of 1762, wherein Rousseau writes of a longing for unspoiled nature in preference to what he perceived as decadent culture.

Other scholars have characterized folk music as having evolved within cities, courts, and churches, and then had simplified; the music existed while cultural centers changed. It is because cities were small and close to rural areas during the Middle Ages that it becomes difficult to identify the roots of this so–called European folk music. It was not until the growth of cities during the Renaissance that provincial life became more isolated and folk music became more easily identifiable.⁹ Because much folk music evolved within churches, many folk melodies are thought to have been derived from chant and some scholars therefore claim that most Western folk melodies are of relatively recent origin.¹⁰

Many nineteenth–century French writers idealized rural culture and its folk music, including François–René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin, Baronne Dudevant (pseud. George Sand, 1804–76), Gérard de Nerval (1808–55), and Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué (1815–95). Nerval collected folk songs, particularly those that he remembered from his childhood in Valois, and some of these songs are documented in Chansons et légendes du Valois of 1852.¹¹ Chateaubriand discussed folk song from his native Brittany in Mémoires d’outretombe of 1849, and George Sand highlighted indigenous music in La mare au diable of 1846.¹² Villemarqué wrote Barzas–Breiz: chants populaires de Bretagne in 1839, the first known publication exclusively devoted to French indigenous music.¹³ The French government subsequently commissioned scholars to collect French folk songs, one such work being Julien Tiersot’s Chansons populaires recueillies dans les Alpes françaises of 1903.¹⁴ Many musicians also harmonized French folk songs and included these harmonizations in publications.

Romanticized theories regarding peasant culture and folk music were also echoed by French writers during the early twentieth century, including the philosopher–writer Maurice Barrès (1862–1923), who used these ideas in defense of regionalism. Barrès argued for the importance of rural culture by alluding to provincial peasants possessing qualities of honesty, seriousness, simplicity, fidelity, and sincerity, and people who live in regions with “unspoiled nature.” Yet, Barrès’s regionalist philosophies were intertwined with nationalism, and this was later echoed by those in Germany’s Third Reich, which associated rural peasantry and ancestry with race. Barrès stipulated that those who felt pride in their native region must also pay allegiance to the nation, and foreigners were suspect.¹⁵ Proponents in the Third Reich later used this philosophy in order to mobilize a politically fragmented, economically backward, and militarily weak society.¹⁶ Nationalism in Germany then became a way of bringing together a diverse group of people into a single nation. The Third Reich accomplished this through criteria such as origin, descent, history, language, and culture, together with a historical territory, common myths, historical memories, public culture, a shared economy, and communal legal rights and duties.¹⁷

The Industrial Revolution further subjected folk music to the influence of popular music, which has often been associated with urban culture and the bourgeoisie that emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century. This new label was, in part, stimulated by the mass dissemination of sheet music, and music styles subsequently developed that were not indigenous to a specific region or ethnic group, but instead the property of the composer. Therefore, the term folk has been traditionally applied to communities uninfluenced by urban popular music.¹⁸

Determining the roots of so–called indigenous music also varies depending upon the location. Spanish composers often stressed regional characteristics in music, an emphasis apparent to many fin de siècle French composers on hearing Andalusian compositions. According to Gilbert Chase, this music was easily attributable to Spanish composers, because this region of Spain was most highly influenced by Arab elements. The melodic augmented second was one characteristic in Spanish music that was in large part influenced by the Islamic invasion, as well as from Gypsy music, a musical culture with a genesis in northern India.¹⁹ Gypsies settled in Andalusia as early as the fifteenth century. The use of modes from Byzantine and Hebraic chant also had an important influence on Andalusian music through ancient Spanish churches and synagogues.²⁰

For this reason, it is much easier to classify Andalusian music when compared to regional music from the French provinces, including music from the region of Languedoc, French composer Déodat de Séverac’s birthplace. Music from this area is more problematic to identify because of various dominions over time within that locale. Troubadours and seamen traveled through Provence and Languedoc and this changed the cultural landscape considerably. Albigenses also flourished in Languedoc during the thirteenth century, and the province was integrated into the royal domain at this time.²¹

Music from Languedoc was therefore the result of much cross–pollination. The music was nonetheless associated with specific characteristics during Séverac’s lifetime, including modal harmonies, particularly the use of the Dorian mode, a prominent use of minor keys, slow lyrical vocal music, and rhythmic dances in sextuple meter. Joseph Canteloube, composer and contemporary of Séverac, in Anthologie des chants populaires français, declared Languedoc music to contain “vivacious rhythms and finesse [and a] profound expression,” and included in his anthology rounds, noëls, a berceuse, a chant de labour (a genre used by Séverac in his piano suite Le chant de la terre), a chanson de mariage, and a chanson de bergère, or song intoned by a shepherdess.²² Also included in Canteloube’s anthology with regard to music from Languedoc is the chanson “O up! As–tu entendu,” which was also heard in the regions of Gascogne and Quercy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but interestingly placed by Canteloube into his collection Chants d’Auvergne.²³ Specific instruments also became associated with Languedoc, such as the fourteenth–century bodega, or type of bagpipe made out of goatskin.

It is also relatively difficult to identify Catalan folk music because of the close relationship between Catalan folk and art music since the Middle Ages. Catalan songs often have melodic shapes and cadential figures that suggest plainsong, and “indig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Illustrations
• List of Music Examples
• Preface
• Part I Introduction, Biography, and Regionalist Philosophy
• Part II Compositions from the Paris Years, 1896–1909
• Part III Catalan Music, 1910–1921
• Appendix: Selective Compilation of Severac’s Work List
• Bibliography
• Index