Katherine Bergeron – författare

Language, education, science, and song come together in surprising ways in Katherine Bergeron's new history of music in the Belle Epoque. Voice Lessons examines the modern musical art known as la mélodie française and its rise to prominence in the years around 1900-a period when France was pouring resources into national literacy and French scholars were beginning to grasp the nuances of the spoken tongue. Bergeron explores the relationship between the free, secular, and compulsory school system of the Third Republic, and the experimental sciences of language that grew alongside it, to observe the ways in which both science and school redefined the verbal arts in France at century's end. The music of Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel; the writings of Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Verlaine; the performances of Maggie Teyte, Reynaldo Hahn, and Sarah Bernhardt; the linguistic studies of Paul Passy and Abbé Rousselot: all these sources offer evidence of the new ideas of expression that proliferated during one of the most idealistic moments in French musical history, when poets, composers, actors, singers, and scientists all learned to imagine-and to speak-their language in new ways. Through close readings of songs, poems, sound recordings, and other historical records, Voice Lessons narrates the development of a rare musical art, seeking to explain why this art emerged, why it mattered, and why it eventually disappeared.

Provocative and timely, Disciplining Music confronts a topic that has sparked considerable debate in recent years: how do musicians and music scholars "discipline" music in their efforts to confer order and meaning on it? This collection of essays addresses this issue by formulating questions about music's canons--rules that measure and order, negotiate cultural constraints, reconstruct the past, and shape the future. Written by scholars representing the fields of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory, many of the essays tug and push at the very boundaries of these traditional division within the study of music. "Fortunately, in a blaze of good-humored ...scholarship, [this] book helps brains unaccustomed to thinking about the future without jeopardizing the past imagine the wonder classical-music life might become if it embraced all people and all musics."--Laurence Vittes, Los Angeles Reader "These essays will force us to rethink our position on many issues...[and] advance musicology into the twenty-first century."--Giulio Ongaro, American Music Teacher With essays by Katherine Bergeron, Philip V.Bohlman, Richard Cohn and Douglas Dempster, Philip Gossett, Robert P. Morgan, Bruno Nettl, Don Michael Randel, Ruth A. Solie, and Gary Tomlinson.

Confronting a topic that has sparked considerable debate in recent years: how do musicians and music scholars "discipline" music in their efforts to confer order and meaning on it?, this collection of essays addresses this issue by formulating questions about music's canons - rules that measure and order, negotiate cultural constraints, reconstruct the past, and shape the future. Written by scholars representing the fields of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory, many of the essays seek to push at the very boundaries of these traditional divisions within the study of music.