Jane F. Fulcher

Victoria Johnson

Thomas Ertman

This edited volume brings together academic specialists writing on the multi-media operatic form from a range of disciplines: comparative literature, history, sociology, and philosophy. The presence in the volume's title of Pierre Bourdieu, the leading cultural sociologist of the late twentieth century, signals the editors' intention to synthesise advances in social science with advances in musicological and other scholarship on opera. Through a focus on opera in Italy and France, the contributors to the volume draw on their respective disciplines both to expand our knowledge of opera's history and to demonstrate the kinds of contributions that stand to be made by different disciplines to the study of opera. The volume is divided into three sections, each of which is preceded by a concise and informative introduction explaining how the chapters in that section contribute to our understanding of opera.

Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu

As the field of Cultural History grows in prominence in the academic world, an understanding of the history of culture has become vital to scholars across disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music cultivates a return to the fundamental premises of cultural history in the cutting-edge work of musicologists concerned with cultural history and historians who deal with music. In this volume, noted academics from both of these disciplines illustrate the continuing endeavor of cultural history to grasp the realms of human experience, understanding, and communication as they are manifest or expressed symbolically through various layers of culture and in many forms of art. The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music fosters and reflects a sustained dialogue about their shared goals and techniques, rejuvenating their work with new insights into the field itself.

The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music

In Renegotiating French Identity, Jane Fulcher addresses the question of cultural resistance to the German occupation and Vichy regime during the Second World War. Nazi Germany famously stressed music as a marker of national identity and cultural achievement, but so too did Vichy. From the opera to the symphony, music did not only serve the interests of Vichy and German propaganda: it also helped to reveal the motives behind them, and to awaken resistance among those growing disillusioned by the regime. Using unexplored Resistance documents, from both the clandestine press and the French National Archives, Fulcher looks at the responses of specific artists and their means of resistance, addressing in turn Pierre Schaeffer, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, and Olivier Messiaen, among others. This book investigates the role that music played in fostering a profound awareness of the cultural and political differences between conflicting French ideological positions, as criticism of Vichy and its policies mounted.

Musical Culture and Creativity in France During Vichy and the German Occupation

Renegotiating French Identity

Professor of Musicology Jane Fulcher

Princeton University Press

Claude Debussy's Paris was factionalised, politicised, and litigious. This text aims to capture the complexity of the composer's restless personal and artistic identity within the context of fin-de-siècle Paris.

Debussy and His World

This volume demonstrates a new approach to cultural history, as it is now being practiced by both historians and musicologists, in their quest to grasp the realms of human experience, understanding, communication and meaning through the study of music and of musical practices. Characteristic of their approach is to employ a resonant new methodological synthesis which combines the theoretical perspectives drawn from the "new cultural history" and "new musicology" of the 1980s with recent social, sociological, and anthropological theories, or those which attempt to ground language and symbols within both social reality and a social field of power.

Jane F. Fulcher

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