University Lectures
Guest Speaker
Jann Pasler (profile)
Professor of Music
University of California, San Diego
Location: Morphy Hall, Humanities 2330
As the French increasingly looked to the origin of their nation for the foundation of what they shared as a people—racial and cultural origins that long predated the eighteenth century—music helped them come to grips with a history characterized not by homogeneous coherence, but by invasions, conflict, and accommodation. Were they only the product of assimilation, their music the “juste milieu” between Italian and German music, or was there something distinct that could be heard in their music, traces of predecessors who resisted assimilation? If gender differences and female allegories continued to help clarify what the people valued as a nation, what happened in music when successful resistance to the French in West Africa, particularly by the Dahomean amazons, and the emergence of the “new woman” threw into question traditional gender hierarchies? And what impact did elites’ need for distinction from the masses have on their musical tastes, their relationship to music, and the meanings they heard in it? Such questions lead us to examine how, through their music, the French, particularly at the end of the century, engaged with identity from the perspectives of race, gender, and class.
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