Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Music, Pantomime and Freedom in Enlightenment France

Music, Pantomime and Freedom in Enlightenment France

Law, Hedy

Hardcover

Classical MusicGeneral World HistoryMusic Reference

ISBN10: 178327560X
ISBN13: 9781783275601
Publisher: Boydell Press
Published: Oct 16 2020
Pages: 286
Weight: 1.27
Height: 0.69 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
How did composers and performers use the lost art of pantomime to explore and promote the Enlightenment ideals of free expression?

This book explains the relationships between music, pantomime and freedom in pre-Revolutionary France. It argues that composers and performers recognized their agency when they attempted, from the 1730s through the end of the Old Regime, to revive a lost art called 'pantomime' for their compositions. In musical settings of pantomimes in French operas and instrumental works, leading composers of the time - Rameau, Rousseau, Gluck, and Salieri - used pantomime as a type of expressive dance and acting style that marked an aesthetic rupture between Louis XIV's absolutist governance and the Enlightenment ideals of free expression. In musical settings of pantomime, these composers cultivated various forms of freedom theorized in Enlightenment writings: artistic freedom for the composer; freedom as self-governance; interpretive freedom for spectators; freedom of action for performers; and freedom from dance convention.

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