The Conservatoire Américain, the French musical institution at the Palais de Fontainebleau, was responsible for training generations of American musicians. Its students and faculty are among some of the most influential musical figures of the twentieth century, including Aaron Copland, Nadia Boulanger, and Elliott Carter. Within its walls,…[Read more]

What were the sounds of war in the early modern period? What were the sounds of peace? The period between 1570 and 1750—roughly coincident with the cultural era known in Western contexts as “the Baroque”—was characterized by almost continual conflict in Europe. Whether caught up in the French Wars of Religion, the English Civil War, the Thirty…[Read more]

Review of James Cook, Alexander Kolassa, and Adam Whittaker, eds.
Recomposing the Past: Representations of Early Music on Stage and
Screen. Ashgate Screen Music Series. New York and London:
Routledge, 2018. xii, 259 pp. ISBN: 9781138287471 (hardback).

Between 1908 and 1927, when sound film became standard, numerous American publications for both those involved in the film industry and the general public, such as Moving Picture World, Motion Picture News, and Exhibitors Herald, included regular columns by cinema conductors, composers, and arrangers like Samuel Berg, Ernst Luz, and Clarence Sinn…[Read more]

The silent film era, usually defined as 1895-1927, coincided with a revival of belief in spiritualism in America. Desperate to find meaning in the deaths of the Great War and the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, the bereaved sought contact with the dead and evidence of an afterlife. Given this fascination with spiritualism, it is not surprising that the…[Read more]

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