Henry Prunières (1886–1942): Un musicologue engagé dans la vie musicale de l'entre-deux guerres ed. by Myriam Chimènes, Florence Grétreau, and Catherine Massip (review)

No musicologists of the current age can count to their credit multiple monographs, senior editorship of a composer's complete works, scholarly articles, countless pieces of high-quality musicological journalism, the organization of a successful concert series supporting contemporary musicians, founding membership in international musicological societies, and the creation of a music journal that stood for decades as a juncture between academic study and an interested public readership. Yet this list summarizes only highlights from the career of Henry Prunières. The volume under review is a collection of essays about his work and how it shaped French musicology and the perception of French music abroad.

It is unusual for musicologists to study other musicologists rather than musicians or music. But Prunières was an unusual figure, and the outlines of his career reveal a great deal about the development of the field. He got an auspicious start when he won the favor of Swiss musicologist Romain Rolland, who shepherded him through a dissertation at the Sorbonne and guaranteed him access to the necessary Italian archives for his probing research. Prunières completed his dissertation in 1913 and saw it published the same year as the successful book L'Opéra italien en France avant Lulli (Paris: E. Champion). Despite this early success, Prunières did not secure an aca demic position, and his career took the many winding turns of an entrepreneurial public scholar. His greatest accomplishments were participating in a cultural network that included artists and scholars from across Europe, undertaking projects such as a two-volume history of music and the critical edition of the complete works of Jean-Baptiste Lully, and creating and overseeing La revue musicale for twenty years.

In order to capture the contours of Prunières's varied career and checkered record of success, the editors of the present volume have taken a kaleidoscopic approach. After René Prunières, Henry's son, donated his father's archives to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Institut de Recherche en Musicologie (IRéMus) organized a yearlong seminar on the musicologist in 2009–2010. Although the present collection contains the most outstanding papers from that event, the results are as checkered as Prunières's own professional efforts. The topic is in line with the Société française de musicologie's politic of valorizing French contributions to musical culture, and with the many titles in the Éditions Symetrie catalog that center on non-composer participants in French musical life (e.g. Yannick Simon, Jules Pasdeloup et les origines du concert populaire [2011]; Delphine Grivel, Maurice Denis et la musique [2011]; and Brigitte Cormier, Ewa Podles, contralto assoluto [2015]). But while the method ensures that the object of study is presented in his many facets, it provides only a surface level of critical understanding. What were Prunières's motivations, and how did these inflect his work? Did he steer French musicology or did it steer him? These questions and their answers are missing from the book.

The book's twenty-nine articles touch on the three areas in which Prunières achieved personal success and advanced the mission and visibility of French musicology: his relationships with artists and scholars, his academic work, and his contributions to the

Revue musicale as editor and critic. The first, Myriam Chimènes's biographical sketch, introduces Prunières's unique story and perspective on both history and contemporary music. Chimènes draws on the rich documents at her disposal as research fellow at IRéMus to provide not just the contours of Prunières's career but to explain his motivations and misgivings as well. Using above all a...