Edwin Sheard

Topic

Conceptions of Mode in Maurice Emmanuel’s XXX Chansons Bourguignonnes

School of Music

Date & location

• Thursday, August 8, 2024
• 10:00 A.M.
• MacLaurin Building, Room B117

Examining Committee

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Joesph Salem, School of Music, University of Victoria (Co-Supervisor)
• Dr. Alexis Luko, School of Music, UVic (Co-Supervisor)

External Examiner

• Prof. Steven Huebner, Schulich School of Music, McGill University

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Melissa Berry, Department of Art History and Visual Studies, UVic

Abstract

This thesis explores intellectual and ideological contexts surrounding the French composer Maurice Emmanuel’s (1862–1938) arrangements of Burgundian folk songs, published in the collection XXX Chansons Bourguignonnes (1917). Equal parts scholar and composer, Emmanuel believed that the songs in XXX Chansons substantiated his distinctive compositional methods and linked them to an “opulent” Indo-European heritage largely extinct in contemporary art music. Focusing on Emmanuel’s lifelong desire to rejuvenate diatonic practices, I compare his treatment of mode in music-historical writings with composition techniques in XXX Chansons. I suggest that XXX Chansons serves as an arena for Emmanuel to workshop and perform modal gestures that convey his attitude towards historical topics, formed largely in reaction to the institutionalization of common-practice tonality. Further, I situate Emmanuel’s work within a nineteenth-century French tradition of folk-song transcription and arrangement linked to the construction of music-historical narratives. Given Emmanuel’s position as chair of music history at the Paris Conservatoire (1909–36), the relatively simple arrangements in XXX Chansons read as an unofficial treatise on modal harmonization in a contemporary context-particularly as a secular complement to his Traité de l’accompagnement modal des psaumes (1913). Through the lens of XXX Chansons, Emmanuel’s intellectual activity provides a unique insight into undercurrents in the development of French modernist musical aesthetics at the turn of the twentieth century.