French Music and Jazz in Conversation

French concert music and jazz often enjoyed a special creative exchange across the period 1900-65. French modernist composers were particularly receptive to early African-American jazz during the interwar years, and American jazz musicians, especially those concerned with modal jazz in the 1950s and early 1960s, exhibited a distinct affinity with French musical impressionism. However, despite a general, if contested, interest in the cultural interplay of classical music and jazz, few writers have probed the specific French music-jazz relationship in depth. In this book, Deborah Mawer sets such musical interplay within its historical-cultural and critical-analytical contexts, offering a detailed yet accessible account of both French and American perspectives. Blending intertextuality with more precise borrowing techniques, Mawer presents case studies on the musical interactions of a wide range of composers and performers, including Debussy, Satie, Milhaud, Ravel, Jack Hylton, George Russell, Bill Evans and Dave Brubeck.

Author: Deborah Mawer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 10/20/2016
Pages: 322
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.13lbs
Size: 9.61h x 6.69w x 0.67d
ISBN: 9781316633878

About the Author
Mawer, Deborah: - Deborah Mawer is Research Professor of Music at Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham City University. Her books include The Ballets of Maurice Ravel: Creation and Interpretation (2006), Darius Milhaud: Modality and Structure in Music of the 1920s (1997), Ravel Studies (Cambridge, 2010) and The Cambridge Companion to Ravel (Cambridge, 2000). Her articles and reviews, also encompassing jazz and dance, have appeared in a variety of books and journals, including the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Twentieth-Century Music, Music and Letters, Opera Quarterly, Music Theory Online and Music Analysis. In 2008 she was awarded a prestigious National Teaching Fellowship.