École(s) de Paris : enquête sur les compositeurs étrangers à Paris dans l'entre-deux-guerres
“School of Paris” (École de Paris) is a term often used to indicate a group of foreign composers who resided in Paris in the years between World War I and II. However, depending on the source, “School of Paris” can have various meanings. In a broader sense, it includes all composers in any era who lived at least part of their lives in Paris. In its strictest sense, it refers to the alleged group of four to six composers who arrived in Paris in the 1920s: Conrad Beck, Tibor Harsányi, Bohuslav Martinů, Marcel Mihalovici, Alexandre Tansman, and Alexander Tcherepnin.  In order to revisit the history of the use of this term, we have reconstructed the complex and contradictory discourse concerning the question: “what is the School of Paris?”. Our “investigation”, which took place through historical documents of the interwar years, as well as historiographical and popularized texts published up to today, led us to the conclusion that the School of Paris is a discursive phenomenon that each performer could manipulate at will, since no factual evidence justifies an unequivocal use of this term in the Parisian musical milieu of the 1920s and 1930s. Most notably, the study of musical programming allowed us to demonstrate that no particular event or gathering of the so-called “members” of the School of Paris ever took place between 1920 and 1940.  Subsequently, we have contextualized this discourse to understand which facts and which prominent rhetoric made it possible. The term used in music is an extension of that which was introduced in the milieu of visual arts in the 1920s, dictated by the dominant tendency in cosmopolitan Paris to make a clear distinction between the French and the non-French. In this light, we have thoroughly examined the different forms of musical nationalism and their role in creating a discourse on the School of Paris as a question of style — a position that asserts the existence of a “School of Paris style”, distinct from that of “French music”.  In addition to the reconstructions of third party and contextualized discourse, we have examined the discourses held by the composers in question. The study of several unpublished documents shows us that these composers were strongly opposed, during the interwar years, to attempts to treat them as a group. Not until after the Second World War do they couple this discourse with the favourable image of a homogeneous and coherent School of Paris, thus contributing to its historiographical fortune.
École de Paris School of Paris French Music Nationalism Cosmopolitanism Migrant Artists Historiography