Awards

• Winner of Winner, Lewis Lockwood Award for Outstanding Work of Musicological Scholarship, American Musicological Society.

Overview

Before the French Revolution, making music was an activity that required permission. After the Revolution, music was an object that could be possessed. Everyone seemingly hoped to gain something from owning music. Musicians claimed it as their unalienable personal expression while the French nation sought to enhance imperial ambitions by appropriating it as the collective product of cultural heritage and national industry. Musicians capitalized on these changes to protect their professionalization within new laws and institutions, while excluding those without credentials from their elite echelon. From Servant to Savant demonstrates how the French Revolution set the stage for the emergence of so-called musical ""Romanticism"" and the legacies that continue to haunt musical institutions and industries. As musicians and the government negotiated the place of music in a reimagined French society, new epistemic and professional practices constituted three lasting values of musical production: the composer's sovereignty, the musical work's inviolability, and the nation's supremacy.

Full Product Details

9780197511510

Table of Contents

Reviews

Geoffroy-Schwinden has made a big breakthrough in reinterpreting what happened in musical culture during the French Revolution. By digging deep into the social contexts surrounding musical events she demonstrates how musicians reinvented themselves as professional savants to wield a broad new authority. * William Weber, Department of History, University of California, Long Beach * A pioneering assessment, conjoining musicological assessment with research into professionalisation, institutional history, and cultural history. Geoffroy-Schwinden promises to transform our understanding of a key period in European musical history. * Mark Darlow, University of Cambridge * Balancing evocative narratives with historically-informed analysis, Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden brilliantly reveals how French revolutionaries dethroned privilege in the musical world. In its place, they installed music as property. With inventions legally protected and works commercially produced, musicians became professionals. As contemporaries elevated musical monuments to represent national and universal values, the foundations of modern music history took root. * Jann Pasler, Distinguished Professor of Music, UC San Diego *

Geoffroy-Schwinden provides a compelling new framework for investigating the politics of music-making in the French Enlightenment, one rooted in the ethics and practices of musicians' labour. This study has the potential permanently to upend our understanding of the musical work in the eighteenth century by offering novel ways of looking at old problems of Revolutionary historiography. * Callum Blackmore, Eighteenth-Century Music * This interesting book provides documentary and archival evidence for a transition in the source of musicians' support in France at the time of the French Revolution. * W. E. Grim, Strayer University, CHOICE * ...an insightful examination of the years around the French Revolution when the legal protections for music moved from a system of monopolies granted by the sovereign that regulated music as an activity to a framework that assumed music was a kind of property. * Kristen M. Turner, North Carolina State University, New Books Network * Geoffroy-Schwinden has made a big breakthrough in reinterpreting what happened in musical culture during the French Revolution. By digging deep into the social contexts surrounding musical events she demonstrates how musicians reinvented themselves as professional savants to wield a broad new authority. * William Weber, Department of History, University of California, Long Beach * A pioneering assessment, conjoining musicological assessment with research into professionalisation, institutional history, and cultural history. Geoffroy-Schwinden promises to transform our understanding of a key period in European musical history. * Mark Darlow, University of Cambridge * Balancing evocative narratives with historically-informed analysis, Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden brilliantly reveals how French revolutionaries dethroned privilege in the musical world. In its place, they installed music as property. With inventions legally protected and works commercially produced, musicians became professionals. As contemporaries elevated musical monuments to represent national and universal values, the foundations of modern music history took root. * Jann Pasler, Distinguished Professor of Music, UC San Diego *

Author Information

Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden is an Associate Professor of Music History at the University of North Texas who works on eighteenth-century music cultures and musical labor during the early Age of Revolution.

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