Product Description

In a book that challenges modernist ideas about the value and role of music in Western society, Composing the Citizen demonstrates how music can help forge a nation. Deftly exploring the history of Third Republic France, Jann Pasler shows how French people from all classes and political persuasions looked to music to revitalize the country after the turbulent crises of 1871. Embraced not as a luxury but for its "public utility," music became an object of public policy as integral to modern life as power and water, a way to teach critical judgment and inspire national pride. It helped people to forget the past, voice conflicting aspirations, and imagine a shared future.
Based on a dazzling survey of archival material, Pasler's rich interdisciplinary work looks beyond elites and the histories their agendas have dominated to open new windows onto the musical tastes and practices of amateurs as well as professionals. A fascinating history of the period emerges, one rooted in political realities and the productive tensions between the political and the aesthetic. Highly evocative and deeply humanistic, Composing the Citizen ignites broad debates about music's role in democracy and its meaning in our lives.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1039758 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 817 pages

From the Inside Flap
"Jann Pasler's remarkable Composing the Citizen reaches well beyond what any book concerned with music in society has ever attempted. Concentrating on France of the Third Republic, from the 1870s through the early 1900s, she demonstrates convincingly how music--whether new, old, popular, or élite, whether performed at institutions of state (such as the Opéra), the Folies Bergère, concert halls, or the zoo--helped to redefine what it meant to be French under evolving political circumstances. Equally adept in the languages of history, sociology, political science, reception history, and music analysis, Pasler establishes music's cultural significance and implicitly illuminates the role it can still play in countries like the United States."--Philip Gossett, The University of Chicago and University of Rome, La Sapienza

"Composing the Citizen offers nothing less than a new paradigm for the study of musical cultures. Rather than forcing French music into the moulds developed for the Austro-German canon, Pasler simply studies the social uses of music in fin-de-siècle France. Her painstaking archival research allows her to present an astonishingly detailed account of musical practices, tastes, and activities; new names and genres come to the fore to engage in a variety of dynamic artistic scenes most of us never knew--or only thought we did by virtue of having read Proust. A masterwork of a scholar at the very peak of her career."--Susan McClary, MacArthur Fellow 1995 and author of Georges Bizet: Carmen and Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madgrigal

"Utilité publique: a common-sense republican notion of sweeping consequence. In this greatly anticipated volume Jann Pasler uses it as touchstone, showing how and why musical life so mattered in Third-Republic France: layer after layer of it, in a journey that takes us past the Opéra and Conservatoire to the pops concerts, department stores, the zoo, the world's fairs, the overseas colonies. Companionable as a well-worn Baedeker, seductive as Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years, this exquisitely styled and paced achievement is also a compelling read."--D. Kern Holoman, author of Berlioz and The Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 1828-1967

About the Author
Jann Pasler is Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. Among her books is Confronting Stravinsky: Man, Musician, and Modernist (UC Press) and Writing through Music: Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics.

Customer Reviews

An Extraordinary Achievement
Jann Pasler's book, "Composing the Citizen," is surely one of the greatest musicological achievements of the past fifty years: this book is destined to become a classic in its field. Pasler's prose is lucid, lapidary, but engaging. The scope of "Composing the Citizen" is vast, and the expertise with which Pasler marshals her research--most of it absolutely original--is breathtaking. Pasler wears her learning lightly, however, and anyone interested in the cultural life of France during the nineteenth century will find this book engrossing, revelatory, and entertaining.

Music as an art links leisure and personal enjoyment with the social good
"Composing the Citizen" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. Professor Pasler's book interview ran here as cover feature on July 3, 2009.