Music, Travel, and Imperial Encounter in 19th-Century France: Musical Apprehensions

Description

A great deal of recent scholarship explores how narratives of encounter found in travel writing, whether scientific or literary, have historically related to colonial agendas, imperial rhetoric, and Orientalism. With a particular emphasis on sites and music at the imperial margins of nineteenth-century France, this book approaches its subject through the activities and writings of early song collectors and proto-ethnomusicologists, memoirists, and other "musical travelers." Each of the book's discrete but interrelated chapters is devoted to a different geographic and discursive site, examining French representations of musical encounters in North America, the Middle East, as well as in contested areas within the borders of metropolitan France. Rosenberg highlights intersections between an emergent ethnographie musicale in France and narratives of musical encounter found in French travel literature, connecting both phenomena to France's imperial aspirations and nationalist anxieties in the period from the Revolution to the late-nineteenth century. It is therefore an excellent research tool for scholars in the fields of cultural studies, literary history, and postcolonial theory. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Musical Apprehensions Part I Apprehending Other Worlds: Musical Journeys in New and Old Empires 1 Imperial Ears: G.A. Villoteau and Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign (1798–1801) 2 The Music of France’s Lost Empire and the Romantic Travelogue Part II Apprehending France: The Meaning of Folksong Within and Without 3 Between Paris and the Provinces: Ideologies of Song and Folksong Collection 4 France’s Furies: Women’s Laments and the Imagination of Corsica Bibliography Index