Passeism in the Musical Culture of France

The specialists note and highly appreciate the openness to creative dialogue with different European and regional cultures in their works about the artistic history of France. In the introductory section, the article is focused on the importance of the opposite trend, developed in the 19th — early 20th century in all spheres of art. The purpose of the new movement is “national revival”, interest in the ori­gins of the great heritage of the French masters of past epochs. The author concentrates on the peculiarities of interaction between leading composers, musicians-performers and teachers with the traditions of music professionalism of the French compo­ser school. Furthermore, she explains the main reason of “back to the past” addiction by desire to preserve the unique distinction of artistic thinking in the terms of intensive cultural influences in Italy, Germany and Russia. The article provides the facts of creative activity of the leaders of “national renewal”. There are presented some journalistic statements of the leading French composers to confirm their unanimous recognition of the actual value of national classics to the future of French culture. There is explicated the pa­norama of creative experiments (C. Franck, C. Saint-Saëns, E. Satie, impressionists and composers of the “young generation”) on reconstruction of national traditions of distant epochs. The coverage of events and display of artistic phenomena of musical and cultural life of France allowed the author to form a context to consider the problem of aesthetic and stylistic character: new understanding of the phenomenon of “artistic tradition” and “dialogue with tradition” in the epoch of modernism. The comparison of diffe­rent forms of “dialogue with the past” in the Russian culture of the beginning of the 20th century and in creative works of the leader of European retrospectivisme I.F. Stravinsky gave grounds to use the concept of “passeism” to characterize the special French type of inheritance of the “lessons” of the predecessors. Introducing the concept of “passeism” in contrast to the accepted in Russian musicology “musical neoclassicism” and giving reasons of the effectiveness of its application, the author seeks to identify the idea of preser­ving soil foundations of tradition as a way of national self-identity (prosody, rhetoric, form) pertaining to the French composer school.

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