CORRECTED VERSION! (I MENTIONED THE MASSENET CHAPTER BUT OMITTED ITS WONDERFUL AUTHOR: CLAIR ROWDEN.—Apologies to all: R Locke)
A book that was published this past year and that includes six chapters by French, British, and American musicologists (including myself) just won a major award in France.
--The book is Berlioz, Flaubert et l’Orient (Berlioz, Flaubert, and “the East”), edited by Cécile Reynaud and Gisèle Séginger.
--The Prix René Dumesnil is given every other year to a book of extraordinary merit about music. Here is the official announcement: https://www.academiedesbeauxarts.fr/prix-rene-dumesnil-2022<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/www.academiedesbeauxarts.fr/prix-rene-dumesnil-2022__;!!CGUSO5OYRnA7CQ!do517Eqzo4vl76EfXsi0sji661F6iiiK2n3_d7XRbCoeLc7duIIhVg9PzSrE9hbTtuxgsm3ZJB-Yic2kOfIwb8xV-l5xd4I2$>
--The book is as beautiful to look at as it is gratifying to read.
--The editors, Cécile Reynaud and Gisèle Séginger, are, respectively, a musicologist and a literary historian. The book, correspondingly, is deeply interdisciplinary, touching also on art history.
--The illustrations are numerous, pertinent, and exquisitely reproduced.
--Berlioz and Flaubert’s lives and careers overlapped somewhat, but they ran in different circles.
--So the book connects them through a fascination that they—and many of their contemporaries—shared.
--That fascination concerned the Turkish-, Arab-, and Persian-speaking worlds: the vast and varied region stretching from (in today’s terms) Morocco to Iran, plus the ancient civilizations that flourished on those same terrains.
--Stereotypes of “Easterners” abounded. The scholars in this book explore the resonances that such images and generalizations (often distorted and simplistic) held for audiences and readers alike.
--I contributed a chapter about the representation of this geographically broad “Orient” in musical works of the nineteenth-century generally (especially but not exclusively in France).
--My chapter was superbly translated by Sabine Le Hir, who has a chapter of her own in the book, as do four other musicologists: Peter Bloom, Anastasia Syreishchikova-Horn, Sylvie Douche, Clair Rowden, and co-editor Cécile Reynaud. One or another of the six discuss works by Berlioz and by a number of composers who (unlike Berlioz) created works based on writings of Flaubert, including Musorgsky, Massenet, and Ernest Reyer.
--There’s lots to discover in this book! I hope that some of the chapters will eventually be translated into English. (I freely based mine on a chapter I published, some years ago, in Jonathan Bellman’s “he Exotic in Western Music” but brought it up to date in many ways.)
Ralph Locke
Ralph P. Locke
Professor Emeritus of Musicology, Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester)
Senior Editor, Eastman Studies in Music (University of Rochester Press)
Research Affiliate, University of Maryland School of Music
postal address:
Ralph P. Locke
11901F Breezy Meadow Dr.
Apt. F
Clarksburg MD 20871
USA
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Short biography and list of published writings: https://www.esm.rochester.edu/faculty/locke_ralph/
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