Featured along with Debussy's music will be works by Bizet, Gounod, Massenet, Saint-Sa ns, Franck, Ravel, Stravinsky, and others. Claude Debussy's life and music offer an opportunity for the Bard Music Festival to reexamine the musical paths taken by French composers from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, a time which saw the evolution of modern French nationalism, the transformation of painting, photography, and sculpture in France, and the emergence of modern poetics and the modern novel. The festival will explore Debussy's role in the evolution of a distinctly French aesthetic, which began with the generation of C sar Franck and developed in a factional music scene that included such composers as Saint-Sa ns, Dukas, Widor, Chausson, Magnard, and others. As with past festivals, Princeton University Press will release a collection of essays and articles by noted scholars at the start of the festival. This season's volume, Debussy and His World, is edited by Jane Fulcher of Indiana University.
Photographs are available, in transparency and electronic form, by request.
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