While sight-reading remains one of the most fundamental skills for a keyboardist to cultivate, its emergence as a form of musical literacy remains underexplored in musicology. Its outsized coverage in the Parisian press, particularly around the annual concours publics du Conservatoire, reveals a critical discourse of sight-reading as a metric for award-worthy pianism. This article recounts the pedagogical and critical history of sight-reading at the Paris Conservatoire, bringing together curricular records, pedagogical texts, press reviews, and morceaux de déchiffrage composed by Luigi Cherubini, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel, Nadia Boulanger, and Jeanne Leleu. Sight-reading’s critical press reception, while gendered, also created avenues for female Conservatoire graduates —such as Boulanger, Leleu, Eugénie Carjat, Hortense Parent and many others—to build careers out of the ability to decipher music at first sight. While the sight-reading portion of the concours publics remained controversial through the end of the nineteenth century, the unique imbrication of spontaneous and premeditated modes of performance provided a platform on which women could recast fluent reading as a marketable facet of a modernizing pianistic economy.
"Verdi, Auber and the Aida-Type," in Cambridge Opera Journal.
This article presents a literary genealogy of the titular character in Verdi's Aida. While scholars have explored the opera's resonances with late nineteenth-century conceptions of Orientalism, Blackness and the imagined ‘East’, Aida's etymology and character traits reflect a much broader archetype that extends back a century from its 1871 premiere. Her name is not Egyptian or Ethiopian but Greek, and her backstory was modelled on characters named ‘Haidée’ and ‘Haydée’ who appeared in works by Lord Byron and Alexandre Dumas fils, as well as in a celebrated opéra comique by Daniel Auber. Aida was thus an assemblage of ready-made character archetypes and scenarios rather than an author's sui generis depiction of non-Western culture. An intertextual reading of Aida offers a broader perspective on alterity in the nineteenth century, which eschewed geographical specificity for archetypes, quotations and allusions. It also offers another way to confront claims of authenticity made by current-day defenders of brownface in Verdi's work.
"Chez Paul Niquet: Sound, Spatiality, and Sociability in the Paris Cabaret," in 19th-Century Music.
Years before Montmartre’s cabarets artistiques took Europe by storm, the Cabaret Paul Niquet thrived as a Right-Bank tavern popular among Paris’s laborers, vendors, and criminals during the early nineteenth century. It became notorious not only for its clientele, but also for its vivid representations in travel literature, fiction, popular song, and vaudeville. Even after its demolition by Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire, the cabaret remained a fixation among Paris’s musical and literary class. The interest in this lowly tavern reveals a sustained middle-class preoccupation with the spatial and sonic practices of the most destitute of Parisian citizens. Yet this preoccupation was not merely a condescending fascination with the poor. Niquet’s cabaret serves as a lens through which to examine social and sensory changes brought on by urbanization. Bringing urban geography into conversation with the historiography of French theater, this article contends that the city’s proletarian leisure spaces offered a relational form of sociability that was at odds with the spectacular aesthetic of Haussmannization. The sounds emanating from Niquet’s cabaret, from clanging glasses to spontaneous songs, defined the cabaret institution spatially: not merely in acoustic terms, but also as a democratized site of leisure for workers and literati alike.
"Berlioz: Conductor and One-Man Band," in Berlioz and his World.
Two caricatures—one famous, the other slightly less so—depict Berlioz in a chaotic state of creativity. The usual Berliozian physiological tropes are present: wiry hair, prominent nose, furrowed brow, stringy physique. A quill appears in both right hands, indicating that these are caricatures of Berlioz the composer (as opposed to the many bombastic images of Berlioz the conductor). Both Hectors simultaneously write and play music—a difficult balancing act, considering the diverse array of instruments at their disposal. In the better-known image, from the November 1, 1838 issue of La Caricature provisoire, Hector is in the middle of writing Benvenuto Cellini, the first of his forays—and failures—in the realm of French opera. Perched above Commedia dell’arte stock puppets, he buzzes into a number of brass instruments. In his left hand is a mallet, which he deploys either to strike a bass drum, or to discipline the diminutive thespians below.
"Will Sound Studies Ever 'Emerge'?" Journal of the History of Ideas Blog
Historians do not “discover” sound. Sound was always there, even though it is not always apparent in the written archive. It does not belong to any discipline, nor does it need to be claimed. Sound does not imprint itself; it is reproduced through notation, oral tradition, formal education, or technology. It also resonates, which makes reflexivity a crucial component of its study.
"Listening to the Old City: Street Cries and Urbanization in Paris, ca. 1860," in Journal of Musicology.
The ubiquitous din of Paris’s street hawkers, known as the cris de Paris or the “cries of Paris,” has captured the Parisian imagination since the Middle Ages. During the 1850s and 1860s, however, urban demolition severely disturbed the everyday rhythms of street commerce. The proliferation of books, poetry, and musical works featuring the cris de Paris circa 1860 reveals that many in the Parisian literary community feared the eventual disappearance of the city’s iconic sights and sounds. These nostalgia discourses transpired into broader criticism of Georges-Eugène Haussmann and the discriminatory mode of urbanism that he practiced. Haussmannization irrevocably altered the Parisian soundscape by displacing, policing, and thus silencing the working-class communities that made their living with their voices. As an ideological device, nostalgia offered a counternarrative to Second Empire ideas of progress by suggesting that urbanization would vanquish any remaining image of what came to be known as le vieux Paris. An analysis of Jean-Georges Kastner’s symphonic cantata Les cris de Paris (1857) shows how representations of the urban soundscape articulated a distinctly Parisian notion of modernity: a skirmish between a utopian “capital of the nineteenth century” and a romanticized Old City.