French Vocal Literature: Repertoire in Context by Georgine Resick (review)

For many performers, encounters with academic writing in musicology can be disorienting and even frustrating. Musicologists take up questions about the social function of music and address where the formal and stylistic elements of certain composers or whole schools originate. But these questions can seem wildly irrelevant to people with performance backgrounds or futures. Even music history pedagogy, when directed specifically toward students who may not pursue such academic ideas, can sidestep the material students really want to know: how to perform music better, how to appreciate it more, and how to make others appreciate it.

One way in which music history pedagogy can feel acutely disassociated with pragmatic concerns is its scope. Pedagogical texts offer, all too often, a synthetic approach to the history of music, attempting to cover all time periods, genres, situations, and influential figures who made their mark on the highbrow cultural activity known as art music. On the other hand, scholarly studies on specific research topics are so narrowly focused that many students who encounter them with hopes of finding an explanation of sound, form, or meaning walk away with more questions than answers. Georgine Resick's French Vocal Literature: Repertoire in Context offers an interesting corrective to the problem of scope. Although encompassing a large swath of historical music activity, the book maintains laser-like focus on vocal literature for recitals, all of it composed in France. Most of the music Resick presents comes from the realm of solo song, particularly mélodies and other airs, with additional reference to operatic arias and works for small (generally unaccompanied) vocal ensembles. For use as a text or a reference work in vocal performance coursework at a master's level, Resick's book fills an apparent lacuna: no other music history book focuses specifically on vocal literature or stands as a reference for how songs relate to French history.

In this book, a 350-page volume with a companion website, Resick places vocal literature in the context of contemporaneous art, literature, politics, and culture. The text is divided into fourteen chapters corresponding to time periods. These periods are idiosyncratic to Resick, though they align with major events in French history. The earlier chapters cover long periods of history (chap. 1, for example, covers roughly four hundred years, from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries), while the later chapters cover a decade or so each (e.g., chap. 7, 1870–80; chap. 9, 1885–94; and chap. 10, 1894–1906). Chapters are generally laid out in three sections, beginning with a summary of the major political or military events that define the particular period, then covering intellectual and artistic movements. Each chapter ends with a lengthy section in which Resick devotes one to two pages to individual composers. Chapter headings include a list of the composers covered within, most of whom appear only once in the book, whether or not they were active during more than one of Resick's historical periods.

As to be expected with a book that takes such a long view of history, there are some shortcomings with respect to chronology and context. In short, the historical narrative Resick relates is overly simplistic. Many of the sections are interesting and make for engaging reading, such as the brief primer on the "Wars of Religion" (pp. 19–20) and the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIII. But the connection to the music is tenuous or confusing, since at the start of the next section, Resick writes, "As a genre, the air de cour reflected the shifting tides of courtly ideals but also owed a great deal to the cultivated influence of the Parisian salon," effectively turning away from the historical context she had just laid out (p. 21). Likewise, in chapter 6, "Middle-Class Mélodie (1848–1870)," the historical information about revolution and rebuilding is quickly jettisoned in favor...