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Introduction (pg. 383-385). Art (pg. 385-391). Architecture (pg. 391-393). Opera (pg. 393-395). Ballet (pg. 395-396). Theatre (pg. 397-401). Cinema (pg. 401-405). Music (pg. 405-411). Broadcasting (pg. 411-412).

Arthur Honegger composed his first sound film scores in 1933–34. For Les misérables, Raymond Bernard, who was under contract at Pathé-Natan to direct big-budget theatrical films that would compete with Paramount’s French-language productions, expected Honegger to provide intermittent orchestral underscoring for already filmed sequences that privileged dialogue over music. For Rapt, the musically trained Dimitri Kirsanoff used independent financing to collaborate from the start with Honegger and Arthur Hoérée on what the director called “a hybrid form . . . in which music, image, and dialogue work together.” The innovative electroacoustic and sound editing techniques in the soundtrack for Rapt have, I argue, overshadowed the strikingly reciprocal relationship between the soundtrack’s more conventional instrumental underscoring and the images on screen. Honegger theorized in 1931 that, in sound film, music’s “autonomy” would free it from the burden of mimesis. Instead, the images on screen would teach listeners about music’s abstract “reality.” In practice, however, in Rapt, mimetic music and musicalized sound effects bridge the gap between aesthetic goals of hybridity and practical demands for intelligible dialogue. My analysis of the abduction, washhouse, storm, and dream sequences in Rapt demonstrates that a successful hybrid of sound and image ultimately has the potential not just to use images to pin down music’s elusive “reality,” but also to use music’s mimetic possibilities to influence our reading of ambiguous imagery. It also shows that music does not need to be in itself groundbreaking in order to contribute to groundbreaking innovations in sound film.

For the three forces competing for political authority in France during World War II, music became the site of a cultural battle that reflected the war itself. German occupying authorities promoted German music at the expense of French, while the Vichy administration pursued projects of national renewal through culture. Meanwhile, Resistance networks gradually formed to combat German propaganda while eyeing Vichy’s efforts with suspicion. In The Musical Legacy of Wartime France, Leslie A. Sprout explores how each of these forces influenced the composition, performance, and reception of five well-known works: the secret Resistance songs of Francis Poulenc and those of Arthur Honegger; Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, composed in a German prisoner of war camp; Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem, one of sixty-five pieces commissioned by Vichy between 1940 and 1944; and Igor Stravinsky’s Danses concertantes, which was met at its 1945 Paris premiere with protests that prefigured the aesthetic debates of the early Cold War. Sprout examines not only how these pieces were created and disseminated during and just after the war, but also how and why we still associate these pieces with the stories we tell—in textbooks, program notes, liner notes, historical monographs, and biographies—about music, France, and World War II.

During the thirties, French cinema was mostly accompanied by small symphonic orchestras. Through the theoretical writings on “microgénie” (i.e., quality of a composition well-written for the microphone) and the scores of Arthur Honegger, we will try to define a conception of cinematic orchestral sound of this neoclassical composer and his contemporaries. While studying the number of musicians and the orchestral parts, the microphone positioning, the diversity of orchestral devices, and some musical writing principles, we will distinguish a “French film music sound” from the Hollywood orchestral sound of the same period.

The political agenda of the French Popular Front (1935–38) sought to unite workers and intellectuals in solidarity against the forces of European fascism. Many French composers were quickly implicated in this politicized process, supported by the rapid development of Communist-funded cultural organizations like the Fédération Musicale Populaire and inspired by tremendous interest in the Soviet cultural model. These political circumstances welcomed the techniques of socialist realism in France under the Popular Front, but Soviet aesthetics were creatively appropriated to reflect French musical traditions and political realities.Libérons Thaelmannby Charles Koechlin andJeunesseby Arthur Honegger exemplify this engagement with Communist politics and aesthetics, confirming the musical and political relevance of socialist realism for French composers during the mid-1930s.

The death of this French musicologist on September 8, 2003, is reported.

Why did the Paris Opera stage Arthur Honegger's \"Antigone\" in 1943, sixteen years after rejecting it for being too modernist? Recent theories of modernism reveal how the later production was able to penetrate the cultural \"spaces\" inadvertently created during Vichy's collaboration with Germany. The opera appealed not only to the German- and French-authorized press but also to the public, which viewed it as a work of existential examination, free from political and cultural propaganda.