Professor Jane F. Fulcher's chronicle of musical life in France since the 1820s has now reached its third volume, and the turbulent quarter-century 1914–40. The scope is still encyclopedic, yet rather than embrace the panoramic ambitions of the general historian, she selects, slants. Her first volume, French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art,Footnote ¹ focuses on a single genre and (in theory) a single context. The second volume not only keeps the focus on cultural context but gives that phenomenon the lead role: French Cultural Politics and Music: from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War.Footnote ² Clearly, concepts like ‘politicized art’ and ‘cultural politics’ challenge the writer to define and defend precisely what art, culture, and music have to do with politics and politicization, and authoritative reviews of Fulcher's first two volumes expressed degrees of unease about her tendency to map the political onto the musical with too little regard for nuance and ambiguity. This new study muddies the waters further, since in place of politics we have ‘ideology’, and in place of a genre we have ‘the composer’ – and not just the composer as composer, but the composer as intellectual.

The suggestion that composers might be driven – even in their creative work – by some political ideology (even if that is more the result of psychological disposition than of intellectual conviction) is hardly controversial. But it is more difficult to think of worthwhile composers as being truly intellectual, if that is meant to indicate a defining interest in other-than-musical ideas for their own sake. Still, Fulcher has no reservations about using the term, as in her claim that Honegger ‘like Auric and Milhaud, was a true intellectual, an avid reader, seeking out writers who addressed issues of the day, as he himself would do in print in the thirties’ (184). She also writes that, in the late 1930s, ‘contrary to their career interests and hopes for commissions, some composers, as intellectuals, resisted the inescapable hegemony of the Right, motivated by their beliefs or by their Communist sympathies’ (316). Do ‘beliefs’, ‘sympathies’, and even ‘seeking out writers’ who address ‘the issues of the day’, amount to a truly intellectual engagement with political issues and ideas? Maybe it matters more to acknowledge the relevance of that engagement than to quibble about whether or not it is genuinely intellectual. Nevertheless, given what often appears to be the naïvety of composers' political positions, especially in the twentieth century, there remains a nagging suspicion that deeming them intellectual risks missing the point – a suspicion not allayed by the argument that composers also understood, and consciously manipulated, the ‘symbolic’ character of their work.

It would indeed be surprising if traces of the intense left/right disputes and dialogues of the 1920s and 1930s could not be detected in the compositions as well as in the letters and essays of composers. But it remains difficult to see how far such thinking can be taken into the details of composers' technical decision-making. Fulcher argues in one of her more explicitly ideological comments that ‘musicians were well aware of the fact that musical signification was affected by this process [that is, the symbolization of political ideals, with the result that artistic matters were drawn directly into the political sphere], and many, far from being apolitical, responded as intellectuals, taking a public stand through symbolic means’ (320). It therefore follows – for example – that d'Indy's works make sense in relation to right-wing convictions and Ravel's by way of an unaligned but humanistic (that is, sceptical) liberalism. If, in addition, evidence can be found in their writings or recorded comments that they were not only aware of such political, cultural, and ideological phenomena but were positively committed to them, and intended their compositions to confirm that commitment, then it makes sense to accept these facts and discuss their compositions in that light. Such is Fulcher's conviction, spelt out in the claim that her chosen composers

This contention – included, I suspect, as a specific response to critics of Fulcher's earlier books – seems eminently reasonable as the basis for a history that focuses on composers and their works and shows what the effects of those various kinds of ‘deep engagement’ were, while leaving all other contexts, especially those of critics, sociologists, cultural commentators, and other ‘receiving’ ancillaries out of account – save when their comments serve to enrich the author's own interpretation. But the path from concept to conclusion is strewn with potholes, especially for music historians who feel the need to theorize and not merely narrate an ideological context, thickening their history by reference to events and arguments in which composers did not directly participate. After the widely admired and often imitated work of Lawrence Kramer, we expect music to absorb and reflect the perspectives of cultural practice, its ‘pure’ style invaded by and contending with a host of topics and issues of much more than merely musical relevance. This can still be done from within a composer-and-work centred narrative, as Kramer has often shown. Yet what of the aspiration to move the narrative on from notions of cultural practice to those more specifically sociological concepts, like ‘symbolic domination’ and ‘symbolic violence’, courtesy of Pierre Bourdieu, as Fulcher claims to do?

That French culture, as officially conceived and controlled, should have been ‘defensive and protectionist’ (90) after 1918 was only to be expected, and these qualities can be mapped onto various compositional tendencies without awkwardness. The challenge to the historian is not so much to justify such mappings, but rather to find ways of tracing the varying degrees of closeness-of-fit between the ideological and the musical without either labouring the obvious at one extreme or straining credulity at the other. Fulcher's style, striving to be eminently reasonable, scrupulously fair, and anxious above all to keep all classes of reader on board, packs in so many strands of material, and so many qualifications, that the stimulating, exploratory topics identified in her chapter and section headings risk being buried in a dense and under-fertilized verbal topsoil. She also risks giving too little weight to the fraught topic of how music might be said to ‘symbolize’ effectively: that is, to symbolize in such a way that a consensus as to what is being symbolically represented can emerge – difficult though it always is to establish whether such consensuses exist or not.

Fulcher comes up with a few telling points that strengthen her case for composers' awareness, however naïve, of what the social and cultural significance of their work might be. For example, with Koechlin's Symphonie d'hymnes (1937) she writes that the composer ‘not only believed that “ideas” could and should be expressed in music, but that they could effectively be communicated in an uncompromising language that might still reach the masses’ (219). But this could simply be the self-exculpatory strategy of the composer down the ages who fears incomprehension. Contrast Koechlin's claim with Honegger's comment that ‘my inclination and efforts have always been to write music which would be comprehensible to the great mass of listeners, and at the same time, sufficiently free of banality to interest genuine music lovers’ (269, italics added). Would a true intellectual ever have allowed quite so artlessly ambivalent a comment to pass?

Gallic wit and confrontational relish are the most regrettable absentees from Fulcher's own style. In particular, there are places where the nudging repetitions of ‘as we have already noted’, ‘as we saw’, ‘as we have seen’, ‘as we have also seen’ become so persistent that the author's fears about not carrying her readers with her seem more central to her narrative style than any concern to challenge or even stimulate those readers with new and distinctive perspectives, ‘symbolic violence’ and all. The problem is the greater, given the relative familiarity of the rich crop of composer-intellectuals and other musicians or cultural figures she focuses on: Fauré, Saint-Saens, d'Indy; Satie, Ravel; Les Six; Roussel, Koechlin; Jeune France; Boulanger, Cocteau, etc. etc. It is indeed a challenge to find new and interesting things to say about many of these figures, at least at less than monograph length. And, given that much of the most interesting material here comes from Fulcher's indefatigable trawling through journals as well as contemporary historical and technical writing, it might have been preferable to focus more exclusively on such commentaries – on reception history. Fulcher builds up a particularly constructive engagement with such commentators in her discussion of the pre-1940 Messiaen – though she seems to say at one point that all the modes of limited transposition contain eight notes (299). But in any case, the sections of the book that are primarily about composers as composers can do little more than offer dictionary-type surveys, creating a lopsidedness which is all the more irritating in that the only music examples are relatively extended, double-page scannings of published scores by composers whose music is (usually) familiar, leaving a mass of other references to less well-known music unillustrated.

Another track worth following in its own terms would have been the institutional one, since performance ‘sites’, like the Paris Opéra, and teaching establishments of varying degrees of eccentricity, feature prominently anyway. If it is the shifts of perspective between these various histories that matter to Fulcher, then the book is not discriminating enough, its ambition ‘to reintegrate [sic] two previously separate histories – that of official politics and culture, and responses to them, with that of musical, stylistic development’ (17) – impossibly ambitious, despite its considerable length. Although the main text is only 323 pages long, the small print means that each page has (an admittedly impressionistic estimate) upwards of 500 words on it. Then there are 100 pages of endnotes, many of them containing further evidence and discussion. One can sympathize with Fulcher's desire to do something different from other recent labourers in the French interwar vineyard like Glenn Watkins or Roger Nichols; but sometimes, especially today, idiosyncrasy can be a strength – provided it is not deployed too arbitrarily or mindlessly.

Readers who persist with Fulcher will be rewarded with a good deal of food for thought on such vital matters as nationalism (French music and the ‘âme nationale’) and also the complex, even contradictory nature of twentieth-century classicism, with its various disguises and defences (‘neo’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘critical’, or even ‘the classic avant-garde’ – see p. 167) during the era of modernism. The discussion of Albéric Magnard, brief though it is, is exemplary here, as are the references to contemporary commentaries on Stravinsky (see for example p. 112). More generally, however, the difficulties of relating music to world without labouring the point remains patent. Take Fulcher's comments about Parade. This ‘provided a means of response to the control of the production of meaning that had characterized French wartime culture, including the theater’ (71). Further, ‘like Picasso, Satie was disposed to a subtle kind of provocation that aimed to expose and ridicule the cultural orthodoxies imposed on artists during the war’ (82), and the lesson of Parade for the next generation of French composers was ‘the necessity of a patriotic discourse to defend artistic innovations’ (84). Well and good, but has this work ever plausibly been seen in any other way? Given such issues, it will be interesting to see how, in Volume 4, the Fulcher style copes with the delirium and general mayhem of the Boulez-centred post-war years, with characters like Artaud, Genet, and Sartre to contend with. Even more challenging: can the ‘music and society’ rubric continue to exclude popular and film music from its remit? If the challenge encourages Fulcher to cut loose, to be as disrespectful of conventions as Boulez himself has been, French music history will surely be the better for it.