Music, Poetry, Propaganda

Claire Launchbury is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in French at the University of Leeds. She studied music at the University of Exeter before doing postgraduate work in music and French studies at Royal Holloway, University of London.

«Launchbury’s ‘Music, Poetry, Propaganda’ is a highly useful contribution to the literature on music at the BBC, as well as to the growing body of literature concerned with the use of music in propaganda and group identity construction in the context of war. Readers interested in musical modernism and nationality will also find much of value in this book, which enriches understandings of how and why works by French composers became such an important part of the post-Second World War repertory. Finally, Launchbury makes a thought-provoking contribution to interdisciplinary understandings of cultural memory, music, and mediation – and the uses and limits of the archive.» (Christina Baade, Music and Letters 94, 2013/3)

• Contents: Cultural memory, soundscapes, and archive theory – Contested nationhood, cultural identity, Anglo-French perspectives on Occupation, exile, development of programming strategies in relation to French topics – French cultural soundscapes, domestic listeners, mediation, BBC Home Service – Music and propaganda broadcasts destined for Occupied France – Poulenc, Éluard, Resistance texts, first performance of Figure humaine in translation, post-Liberation symbolism of Anglo-French cultural renewal – Wartime BBC as an Anglo-French lieu de mémoire.