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Author Geoffroy-Schwinden, Rebecca Dowd, author.

Title From servant to savant : musical privilege, property, and the French Revolution / Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden
Published New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2022]
©2022

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Description 1 online resource : illustrations
Contents Introduction -- Part I. Musical Privilege. Legal Privilège and Musical Production ; Social Privilège and Musician-Masons -- Part II. Property. Private Property : Music and Authorship ; Public Servants ; Cultural Heritage : Music as Work of Art ; National Industry : Music as a "Useful" Art and Science -- Postlude : A "Detractor" Breaks his "Silence" -- Conclusion : Privilege by Any Other Name
Summary "From Servant to Savant exposes the fundamental role that the French Revolution played in the emergence of modern professional musicianship and music historiography. Like other arts and trades in Old Regime Paris, music professionalized under a system that regulated activities through legal permissions called privilèges. Musicians learned to work within the privilege system to elevate their legal and social status by the eve of Revolution. But the Revolution's Abolition of Privilege on August 4th, 1789, overthrew this feudal order and set in its place a modern property regime requiring strict delineation between public and private property. Geoffroy-Schwinden reveals the profound musical consequences of this reckoning. Before the Revolution, music was an activity that required permission, after, it was an object that could be possessed. Everyone seemingly hoped to gain something from owning music-musicians claimed it as their unalienable personal expression while the French nation sought to enhance imperial ambitions by appropriating it as the collective product of cultural heritage and national industry. Musicians capitalized on these changes to protect their professionalization within new laws and institutions while excluding those without credentials from their elite echelon. As musicians and the government negotiated the place of music in a reimagined French society, new epistemic and professional practices constituted three lasting values of musical production: the composer's sovereignty, the musical work's inviolability, and the nation's supremacy. From Servant to Savant thus demonstrates how the French Revolution set the stage for the emergence of so-called musical "Romanticism" and its legacies that continue to haunt musical institutions and industries"-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on December 9, 2022)
Subject Music -- Social aspects -- France -- History -- 18th century
Musicians -- France -- Social conditions -- 18th century
Musicians -- France -- Economic conditions -- 18th century
Music -- Social aspects
Musicians -- Economic conditions
Musicians -- Social conditions
France
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2021033796
ISBN 9780197511541
0197511546
9780197511527
019751152X
9780197511534
0197511538