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Notes 58.3 (2002) 548-549



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Book Review

Dictionnaire musical des villes de province


Dictionnaire musical des villes de province. By François Lesure. (Domaine musicologique.) Paris: Librarie C. Klincksieck, 1999. [367 p. ISBN 2-252-03284-0. Fr 280.]

François Lesure died 25 June 2001 at the age of 78. He was a prolific and respected musicologist, historian, and archivist, who held degrees from the Sorbonne, the École nationale des chartes, and the École pratique des hautes-études. Throughout his career Lesure held positions as the director of the music department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, where he organized major exhibitions devoted to Mozart, Berlioz, Debussy, and Parisian opera; as professor of musicology at the Free University of Brussels; and as the director of studies at the École pratique des hautes-études. In his scholarship Lesure utilized his skills as an archivist and paleographer in diverse editing projects, such as his bibliographies of sixteenth- and eighteenth- century musical editions, volumes for Répertoire international des sources musicales (RISM), and the complete works of Debussy.

Dictionnaire musical des villes de province is part of a series edited by Lesure and dedicated to diverse aspects of French musical culture ranging from medieval minstrels to Debussy. The dictionary provides overviews of musical life for almost 120 French cities, with the explicit exclusion of Paris. Entries are usually accompanied by a substantial bibliography and range from a few paragraphs to eight pages. The emphasis on provincial cities is extremely valuable since scholarship concerning musical life in the French provinces has been marginalized in comparison to Paris. This pattern in scholarship is related to the apparent gulf in the quality of music making between Paris and the provincial cities of France, one of the issues Lesure addresses in the introduction to the dictionary. Lesure notes that by the seventeenth century the notion of the superiority of musical life in the capital was already well entrenched throughout France, leading to such practices as sending organists to Paris, and particularly to Notre Dame, "to perfect themselves." During the late nineteenth century the concept of "decentralization" appeared in the musical press although little actually changed. While provincial institutions, academies, and competitions were established, musicians still needed to go to Paris to pursue a national reputation. In the dictionary, Lesure draws attention to the richness of musical practices outside of Paris and facilitates further research on these cities, some of which have received minimal scholarly attention.

Reflecting the scope of Lesure's interests, the entries in the dictionary touch upon all historical periods from troubadours to current musical organizations. For this nine- hundred-year span, Lesure focuses upon particular musical institutions, discussed in the introduction. These institutions include the ecclesiastical maîtrises attached to cathedrals and collegiate churches for the training of young singers, the academies formed in the seventeenth century to cultivate music and other disciplines, the lyric theatre, philharmonic societies, and conservatories. The entry for Lille, for example, documents the early musical history of the collegiate church of St. Pierre in the thirteenth century, the formation of a maîtrise under the Duke of Burgundy in the fifteenth century, a concert series associated with the Académie de Lille in 1726, the recognition of the academy as a branch of the Paris Conservatory in 1816, and the existence of other music societies and ensembles up to [End Page 548] the institutions of today, including the Orchestre de Lille and the Opéra du Nord.

When such a comprehensive work is attempted, emphases and priorities are inevitable--are indeed essential--but should be clearly articulated. Lesure weights the later centuries over the earlier ones, religious institutions over secular ones, and almost exclusively classical traditions over folk or popular traditions. Considering the traditional historical emphasis upon and elevation of musical life in Paris, it would have been of particular value to address the unique aspects of a city's musical history and to venture beyond the standard institutions and outside the realm of classical music. In addition, a few points of civic history are provided for each city, but...

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