Fanfare for a City

Fanfare for a City: Music and the Urban Imagination in Haussmann’s Paris. University of California Press, 2024. 264 pages.

Fanfare for a City invites us to listen to the sounds of Paris during the Second Empire (1852–1870), a regime that oversaw dramatic social change in the French capital. By exploring the sonic worlds of exhibitions, cafés, streets, and markets, Jacek Blaszkiewicz shows how the city's musical life shaped urban narratives about le nouveau Paris: a metropolis at a crossroads between its classical, Roman past and its capitalist, imperial future. At the heart of the narrative is "Baron" Haussmann, the engineer of imperial urbanism and the inspiration for a range of musical responses to modernity, from the enthusiastic to the nostalgic. Drawing on theoretical approaches from historical musicology, urban sociology, and sound studies to shed light on newly surfaced archival material, Fanfare for a City argues that urbanism was a driving force in how nineteenth-century music was produced, performed, and policed.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1 • Baron Haussmann’s Musical Imagination

2 • Fanfare City: The Expositions universelles

3 • Urban Planning Lessons from the Café-Concert

4 • Street Music: Between Regulation and Liberation

5 • Street Cries: Constructing the Old City

Epilogue

Reviews

"Overall, for the Francophile, researcher of urban studies, curious traveler, or musicologist (including college or university music history instructors), Blaszkiewicz provides an enlightening look at nineteenth-century Paris in a way not often considered…Blaszkiewicz’s study, utilizing Second Empire monumentality and spectacle as a jumping off point, challenges readers to consider Paris at the street level by imagining and listening to the voices and the stories of those who made the city “the city” and who brushed up against the barrier between old and new Paris."

— Notes: the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association

“Fanfare for a City is an impressive, deeply researched achievement that offers a fresh perspective on the relationship between soundscape and cityscape in the Second Empire. For musicologists and readers interested in nineteenth-century French culture, the book provides new insights about musical practices and genres that have been little explored. “

— Nineteenth-Century French Studies

"Beautifully organized through contrast and variation evocative of a musical composition, Fanfare for a City is a lively and engaging work of scholarship on music, urban space, and power. Jacek Blaszkiewicz convincingly traces how Baron Haussmann's individual taste in music shaped the tuning of Paris's urban design and policy, and conversely how Haussmannization had a lasting impact on musical spaces and tastes."

—Aimée Boutin, author of City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris

"An important contribution to the literature on Baron Haussmann's famous reconfiguration of Paris during the Second Empire. Blaszkiewicz expertly maps musical life of the period onto the rapidly changing cityscape. In its move away from traditional methods and engagement with the burgeoning field of sound studies, this work offers a refreshing perspective on wider musical culture beyond the opera house, concert hall, and salon."

—Steven Huebner, author of Les opéras de Verdi: Éléments d’un langage musico-dramatique

"Fanfare for a City demonstrates in fascinating detail that the making of modern Paris in the nineteenth century was as much a matter of sound as of space. The book—highly readable, deeply informative—is a major contribution to a growing body of literature that recognizes sound as a fundamental cultural force."

—Lawrence Kramer, author of Music and the Forms of Life

"A sophisticated and rich exploration of the relationship between music and its urban environment, which sheds new light on little-studied musical phenomena, including street hawkers, as well as more familiar environments, such as world's fairs and cafés-concerts, all in the context of Haussmann's urban renewal project in Second Empire Paris."

—Sarah Hibberd, author of French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination

"Deeply researched and engagingly written, Fanfare for a City has a great deal to teach us about the contested soundscapes of Second Empire Paris. A very impressive work."

—Brian Hart, editor of The Symphonic Repertoire, Volume V: The Symphony in the Americas

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