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L'EHESS vue d'ailleurs

An American in the EHESS

William Weber

Texte intégral

  • 1 MILO, Daniel S., “Le musical et le social : variations sur quatre textes de William Weber (Note cri (...)
  • 2 MILO, Daniel S., “Le nom des rues”, NORA, Pierre (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire, Tome 2 “La Nation”, V (...)
  • 3 WEBER, William, “Mentalité, tradition, et origines du canon musical en France et en Angleterre au X (...)
  • 4 MILO, Daniel S., Trahir le temps (histoire), Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1991.
  • 5 MILO, Daniel S., La dernière mort de Socrate, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2002.

1There I was in a Heidelberg bar in 1988, putting a frothing glass of beer up to my lips, when a Cornell University music historian said: “I enjoyed reading about you in Annales a few days ago.” I was delighted to hear a musicologist cite Annales : Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, since I had taken my degrees in history while working on musical topics. But I was taken aback to hear that I had been mentioned in that august journal. A recent issue included an article by Daniel Milo, a student at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), called “Le musical et le social : variations sur quatre textes de William Weber (Note critique)”.1 Born in Israel and largely interested in literature, Daniel Milo became a student of Jacques Revel and contributed a chapter about origins of street names to Pierre Nora’s eminent book Les lieux de mémoire.2 Jacques then invited me to speak at his seminar, and my paper was published in Annales in 1989.3 Daniel eventually turned back to literature, publishing such books as Trahir le temps (histoire)4 and La dernière mort de Socrate5.

  • 6 WEBER, William, “La culture musicale d’une capitale : l’époque du beau monde à Londres, 1700-1870”, (...)

2That episode typified the critically important role Jacques Revel played in bringing scholars of different countries together at the EHESS, thereby stimulating thinking on a wide range of new subjects. The open-ended mood around the old building on Boulevard Raspail made it easy to meet other French scholars – indeed I remember encountering first Roger Chartier and a few days later Emmanuel Wallerstein while waiting in line in the cafeteria. Even though there existed no program for study of music at the EHESS, Jacques and his colleagues had strong musical interests and soon began developing a degree in the field. I encountered that interest while giving a paper at the EHESS’s antenne in Marseille, now called the Centre Norbert Elias, where I was introduced to Jean-Claude Passeron and music sociologist Emmanuel Pedler. Other eminent French historians were also welcoming; Daniel Roche encouraged my work to a particular extent, publishing an article of mine on musical life in eighteenth-century London in 2007 in the Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine.6

  • 7 FULCHER, Jane F., The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art, Cambridge (...)
  • 8 FULCHER, Jane F., French Cultural Politics & Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War, (...)

3The EHESS provided a particularly enriching context within which American scholars encountered one another. Jane Fulcher had become a major figure in this context, working variously with Jacques Revel, Roger Chartier, and Pierre Bourdieu. Her first book, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art,7 came out in 1987, and a dozen years later she published French Cultural Politics & Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War.8 Controversy that arose over the latter volume opened up new lines of thinking about the intersection of politics and music.

  • 9 MENGER, Pierre-Michel, Le paradoxe du musicien: le compositeur, le mélomane et l’État dans la soci (...)
  • 10 ROUEFF, Olivier et LIZÉ, Wenceslaus, Étude sur les publics et les non-publics du jazz en Bourgogne. (...)
  • 11 DORIN, Stéphane (ed.), Déchiffrer les publics de la musique classique. Perspectives comparatives, h (...)

4Music sociology emerged as a major growing-point of scholars at the EHESS. I made friends with Pierre-Michel Menger, since his book of 1983 – Le paradoxe du musician : le compositeur, le mélomane et l’État dans la société contemporaine9 – sparked my interest in the crisis of public taste for contemporary music, on which I had written for the Harvard Crimson and the Los Angeles Times. More recently visits to the EHESS have widened my acquaintance with sociologists of music – Olivier Roueff and Wenceslaus Lizé, who developed the Synthèse de l’étude sur les publics du jazz en Bourgogne.10 It was also a pleasure giving a paper to Stéphane Dorin’s seminar, given his central position in the EHESS, after which I contributed to his book, Déchiffrer les publics de la musique classique / Unraveling classical music audiences.11 It has been intriguing to see how these figures have been rethinking the Bourdieuean origins of music sociology, questioning hierarchical assumptions while opening up big databases for public musical activity and taste.

  • 12 SCHNAPPER, Laure, Henri Herz, magnat du piano. La vie musicale en France au xixe siècle (1815-1870)(...)

5The degree programs in music at the EHESS have broadened the field of French musicology intellectually in important ways. Their close relationship with the social sciences has brought new interpretive tendencies of the sort followed in such countries as the U.S. and the U.K. It has been a pleasure watching Esteban Buch guide the program while writing major books on aspects of the careers of Beethoven and Schoenberg and then working with composer Sebastián Rivas to produce the opera Aliados about how Augusto Pinochet and Margaret Thatcher met to share memories in 1999. Esteban and his colleagues give seminars of great interest; I’ve most often dropped in the on “Musique et sciences sociales” he runs with Laure Schnapper, who published a book I like about the entrepreneurial activities of composer Henri Herz.12 In May 2016 I was talking there about the problem of when writing that can be called music criticism developed in France in the eighteenth century – it was less the philosophes who did that than a conservative ex-Jesuit named Julien-Louis Geoffroy.

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Bibliographie

DORIN, Stéphane (ed.), Déchiffrer les publics de la musique classique. Perspectives comparatives, historiques et sociologiques. / Unraveling classical music audiences. Historical, sociological and comparative perspectives, Paris, Éditions des Archives Contemporaines, forthcoming 2018.

FULCHER, Jane F., The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 1987.

FULCHER, Jane F., French Cultural Politics & Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War, New York/Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999.

MENGER, Pierre-Michel, Le paradoxe du musicien: le compositeur, le mélomane et l’État dans la société contemporaine, Paris, Flammarion, 1983.

MILO, Daniel S., “Le nom des rues”, NORA, Pierre (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire, Tome 2 “La Nation”, Vol. 3 “La Gloire, Les Mots”, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, p. 283-315.

MILO, Daniel S., “Le musical et le social : variations sur quatre textes de William Weber (Note critique)”, Annales : Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 42/1 (1987), p. 27-40.

MILO, Daniel S., Trahir le temps (histoire), Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1991.

MILO, Daniel S., La dernière mort de Socrate, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2002.

SCHNAPPER, Laure, Henri Herz, magnat du piano. La vie musicale en France au xixe siècle (1815-1870), Paris, Éditions de l’EHESS, 2011.

ROUEFF, Olivier et LIZÉ, Wenceslaus, Étude sur les publics et les non-publics du jazz en Bourgogne. Synthèse, réalisée pour le Centre Régional du jazz en Bourgogne, 15 mars 2010, on-line: http://www.crjbourgognefranchecomte.org/fileadmin/user_upload/contenus/5-Mediatheque/EtudesOuvrages/SyntheseEtudePublicJazzBourgogneWeb.pdf (last accessed 18 January 2018).

WEBER, William, “Mentalité, tradition, et origines du canon musical en France et en Angleterre au xviiie siècle”, Annales : Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 44/4 (1989), p. 849-873.

WEBER, William, “L’institution et son public. L’Opéra à Paris et à Londres au xviiie siècle”, Annales : Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 48/6 (1993), p. 1519-1539.

WEBER, William, “La culture musicale d’une capitale : l’époque du beau monde à Londres, 1700-1870”, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 49/3 (2002), p. 119-139.

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Notes

1 MILO, Daniel S., “Le musical et le social : variations sur quatre textes de William Weber (Note critique)”, Annales : Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 42/1 (1987), p. 27-40.

2 MILO, Daniel S., “Le nom des rues”, NORA, Pierre (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire, Tome 2 “La Nation”, Vol. 3 “La Gloire, Les Mots”, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, p. 283-315.

3 WEBER, William, “Mentalité, tradition, et origines du canon musical en France et en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle”, Annales : Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 44/4 (1989), p. 849-873. An issue of Annales on “Les mondes de l’art” included another piece of mine, WEBER, William, “L’institution et son public. L’Opéra à Paris et à Londres au xviiie siècle”, Annales : Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 48/6 (1993), p. 1519-1539.

4 MILO, Daniel S., Trahir le temps (histoire), Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1991.

5 MILO, Daniel S., La dernière mort de Socrate, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2002.

6 WEBER, William, “La culture musicale d’une capitale : l’époque du beau monde à Londres, 1700-1870”, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 49/3 (2002), p. 119-139.

7 FULCHER, Jane F., The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 1987.

8 FULCHER, Jane F., French Cultural Politics & Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War, New York/Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999.

9 MENGER, Pierre-Michel, Le paradoxe du musicien: le compositeur, le mélomane et l’État dans la société contemporaine, Paris, Flammarion, 1983.

10 ROUEFF, Olivier et LIZÉ, Wenceslaus, Étude sur les publics et les non-publics du jazz en Bourgogne. Synthèse, réalisée pour le Centre Régional du jazz en Bourgogne, 15 mars 2010, on-line: http://www.crjbourgognefranchecomte.org/fileadmin/user_upload/contenus/5-Mediatheque/EtudesOuvrages/SyntheseEtudePublicJazzBourgogneWeb.pdf (last accessed 18 January 2018).

11 DORIN, Stéphane (ed.), Déchiffrer les publics de la musique classique. Perspectives comparatives, historiques et sociologiques. / Unraveling classical music audiences. Historical, sociological and comparative perspectives, Paris, Éditions des Archives Contemporaines, forthcoming 2018.

12 SCHNAPPER, Laure, Henri Herz, magnat du piano. La vie musicale en France au xixe siècle (1815-1870), Paris, Éditions de l’EHESS, 2011.

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William Weber, « An American in the EHESS »Transposition [En ligne], Hors-série 1 | 2018, mis en ligne le 30 janvier 2018, consulté le 07 décembre 2023. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transposition/1802 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.1802

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Auteur

William Weber

William Weber, Professor of History Emeritus at California State University in Long Beach, has written Music and the Middle Class (revised ed. Ashgate, 2003), The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England (Clarendon Press, 1992), and The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge University Press, 2008). He edited Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (Cornell University Press, 1984) and The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700-1914 (Indiana University Press, 2004). He has been a member of doctoral committees in France, Finland and Canada as well as the United States and is an Associate of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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