Publications
Corpus of writings published online by DictécoParallel to the database (bibliographic references on composers’ writings) and the dictionary (entries presenting an overview of their writings), Dictéco is also a platform for online publication (corpuses of composers’ writings and/or unpublished archival documents). These publications, in open access, meet all the criteria of a scholarly edition. The following list gives access to the most important corpuses.
1. Correspondence between Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray (composer) and Emile-Louis Burnouf (philologist) by Peter Asimov : "Des airs que j'ai rapportés de Grèce". Lettres de Bourgault-Ducoudray à Émile-Louis Burnouf (1874-1899), transcrites, éditées et annotées par Peter Asimov, dans Dictéco - Dictionnaire des écrits de compositeurs, sous la direction scientifique de Valérie Dufour, 2021 (dernière modification Décembre 2021). Edition available here via the link “Download .pdf of the article”. Among the figures encountered by Bourgault-Ducoudray during his sojourn at the École française d’Athènes in 1874–5, Émile-Louis Burnouf (1827–1901) was to prove decisive for his musical and intellectual career. These eighty letters from the composer to the philologist, conserved in the Fonds Émile Burnouf at the Bibliothèque de lettres et de sciences humaines et sociales at the Université de Lorraine, in Nancy, are published here for the first time. Peter Asimov’s edition offers an important contribution to the social and intellectual networks of musical Hellenism and nascent musicology in France. Made freely available here, this edition of the letters, transcribed and annotated in French, is accompanied by a bilingual preface. Over the past four centuries, there has been a marked increase in writings by composers. This has reinforced the ways in which composers use verbal communication in parallel with their artistic practice. While composers from earlier eras explained themselves to differing degrees through prefaces, libels and treatises, the figure of the musician as a critic and man of letters, as embodied by Berlioz, Liszt, Schumann and Wagner, emerged during the 19th century with the advent of the modern media age. This led to a multifarious body of literary work that was often produced alongside musical works, forming complex but extremely interesting relationships with the latter. In the 20th century, composers wrote systematically, producing numerous books, articles, interviews, concert and other notes, as if music – supposedly “the silence of words” as Jankélévitch famously once said – could no longer stand alone, and words had become music’s necessary counterpart.
General publications relating to writings by composersThe reasons composers regularly use different forms of writing are both historical and contextual. They include the increasingly interconnected nature of musical creation and subjectivity since the Renaissance; the desire to reflect on practice, adopt a position on art or intellectualise pieces by linking them to theory; the desire to improve music’s position in the hierarchy of the arts or make it into something approaching a philosophical discipline; attempting to make music speak, give it meaning and guide the ways in which it is heard and received; the need to make a living by writing and contributing to journals; the desire to educate the public; and the growing awareness – especially in the 20th century – that writing can help complete a musical work by revealing its essence. These motivations give rise to different considerations. Writings by composers, which deal directly with biographical, artistic and aesthetic issues, often touch on the ethical, political, historical (the musician’s place in his/her era and implication in contemporary intellectual debates), sociological (social networks and status in the musician’s time), and media fields (a composer’s construction of his/her career, image and the reception of his/her work). Given the extremely rich subject matter, this unique body of work has become increasingly significant for musicology. From the late 19th century onwards, anthologies of correspondence and collections of theoretical or critical articles from different magazines and journals began appearing. From the 20th century onwards, academic editions of composers’ writings began to be published in France and abroad. Despite the incomplete nature of the critical editions available, researchers in the musicology field have begun taking advantage of these sources – which are studied as an independent corpus or in relation to the musical works of the composers concerned. Bibliography Michel Duchesneau, Valérie Dufour and Marie-Hélène Benoit-Otis (ed.), Écrits de compositeurs : une autorité en questions, Paris, Vrin, 2013, 437 p. Nicolas Donin and Laurent Feneyrou (ed.), Théories de la composition musicale au XXe siècle, Lyon, Symétrie, 2013, 1840 p. Laurence Brogniez and Valérie Dufour (ed.), Entretiens d’artistes. Poétique et pratiques, Paris, Vrin, 2016, 267 p. Timothée Picard (ed.), La Critique musicale au XXe siècle, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2020, 1564 p. Emmanuel Reibel (ed.), Écrits de compositeurs et espaces médiatiques, numéro thématique de la Revue musicale OICRM, vol. 7 n°1 (2020). Websites Médias 19 - http://www.medias19.org/ Music Criticism Network - https://www.music-criticism.com/ France : Musiques, cultures 1789-1918 - http://www.fmc.ac.uk/ |