Interpreting the Musical Past Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France [Hardcover]

This study of the French early music revival gives us a vivid sense of how music's cultural meanings were contested in the nineteenth century. It surveys the main patterns of revivalist activity while also providing in-depth studies of repertories stretching from Adam de la Halle to Rameau.

Few scholars other than Katharine Ellis could have writtenInterpreting the Musical Past.For this monograph draws extensively on the author's substantial experience with French music criticism, as well as her sophisticated understanding of that nation's political and cultural history. There is also very clearly an active musician behind the pen here, one sensitive to issues of musical style and performance practices. It is an exemplary model for scholars in general of what musicology can be. In treating a subject over the entire nineteenth century - something that is actually quite rare in the study of French music - I believe that she has revealed just how important it is for specialists not to get too bogged down in narrow time frames. Points taken. Lessons learned. Many, many thank Professor Ellis.

Katherine Ellis approaches the subject with great intellectual acuity in her second major work on this subject,Interpeting the Musical Past. Historians will profit from the book's analysis of nationalistic themes in musical ideology and its wide-ranging research on provincial concert life. --H-France Review

This is an excellent source for scholars interested in early musicology, Bach and Handel reception, the emergence of Palestrina as a figure of importance, and the often-conflicting perceptions the French displayed toward their music and its history. --Choice

A masterful, elegantly written study of what it meant for music to be French. In this wonderful interdisciplinary work, Ellis considers the nineteenth century's revival of early music as crucial to the cultural politics of patriotism, nationalism,l#,