Le Conservatoire national de musique et de déclamation, 1900-1930: Documents historiques et administratifs by Anne Bongrain (review)

Rare are the figures in French musical life not educated, at least in part, at the Paris Conservatoire, and even the exceptions to this rule are better understood when one has a clear grasp of what the institution and its instruction represented to French musicians. During the first thirty years of the twentieth century, under the successive directions of Théodore Dubois, Gabriel Fauré, and Henri Rabaud, the conservatory was in constant evolution. Changes included the increasing integration of women in the conservatory classes (with the enrollment of female students steadily rising to ultimately outnumber their male colleagues from 1925 onward), adjustments accommodating the profound social and demographic impact of World War I, and the opening of conservatory classes to foreign auditors starting in 1929, not to mention pedagogical changes that were less visible from the outside but no less influential upon determining the school's mission. In publishing this complete, annotated version of more than five hundred pages of anonymous manuscript, tentatively attributed to the administrators Gaston Barreau and Paul Hugon-Roydor and rediscovered during the Paris Conservatoire's move to its current location at the Cité de la Musique in 1996, Anne Bongrain is the last in a line of researchers and administrators who have patiently worked to compile a reference tool which effectively covers the period 1900-1930. Her work continues in the footsteps of Constant Pierre's invaluable 1900 text, Le Conservatoire national de musique et de déclamation: Documents historiques et administratifs, which addresses the history and function of the institution during the nineteenth century in an almanac format inspired by the conservatory's yearly annuaires.

Bongrain's volume opens with an informative introductory essay that discusses the major events, figures, and changes at the conservatory between 1900 and 1930. This introduction also clarifies a number of potentially confusing issues such as the roles of various administrators or the differences between counterpoint, fugue, and composition classes. Even those researchers who will not immediately have use for the reference sections would profit from reading this text, as I have rarely seen the complicated details of conservatory function treated with such precise concision.

The contents of the book are divided into a series of sections where information is provided first in chronological order, then broken down and summarized in individual indexes and syntheses. These sections include: the complete official regulatory texts governing the conservatory's operations (compiled with the meticulous aid of Rémy Campos); lists showing the influential figures who were part of the institution's administrative board (the Conseil supérieur), as well as its exam committees and juries; the composition of the conservatory's administration and faculty; the complete programs of official concerts given by conservatory students (exercices publics des élèves); the results of the year-end juries arranged by discipline with a summarized palmarès for each student; the texts of official speeches and concert programs that marked commencement ceremonies (distribution des prix); a list of laureates for the individual special prizes endowed by the conservatory's private donors; information on provincial conservatories and music academies with official ties to the Paris Conservatoire, accompanied by the regulatory texts indicating the legal nature of those ties; and finally, a series of six appendices treating other topics such as enrollment and the names of former students killed on the battlefield during World War I. The bibliography is, to date, the most complete compilation of general sources on the conservatory during the early twentieth century and includes archive inventories and summaries of pertinent catalog numbers at the French national archives (Archives nationales).

In general, the system of pairing sections on subjects such as the composition of committees, juries, and prize winners with alphabetically organized syntheses of individual figures' activities works quite well—although in some cases one must take the time to look at the...