Listening to the Old City: Street Cries and Urbanization in Paris, ca. 1860 (original) (raw)
Related papers
The aim of this conference is to explore space through music, approaching the history of the city via the notion of nostalgia. Often described as a form of homesickness, nostalgia is, by definition, the feeling that makes us wish to repossess or reoccupy a space. Such spaces appear to us as both near and distant, tangible and remote, and it seems that attempts at reclaiming them are frequently musical in nature. We know, for instance, that particular compositions have played important roles in helping people to navigate or mitigate a sense of displacement. In these circumstances, affective experiences may be bound up with trauma or joy, as is the case of song during wartime or musical imaginaries among migrants. Under other conditions, we might identify a ‘second-hand nostalgia’ in the guise of a musically-inflected tourism that seeks to reactivate (for pleasure and/or profit) the historical aura of an urban site. What are we to make of the abundance of personal, inter-personal, and propositional episodes that posit music as some kind of a bridge to the urban past?
Aimée Boutin, City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris
Transposition, 2019
City of Noise is doubtlessly a groundbreaking contribution to the study of historical urban soundscapes in modern cities. The book takes significant steps towards understanding the complex relationship between, on one hand, the different sound practices that take place in the city, and, on the other, the economic and cultural struggles in which different urban population groups took part. Boutin thus makes a valuable contribution towards understanding the ways in which sound practice and atti...
Communication dans le cadre du colloque "Paris et Londres 1851-1900 : espaces de transformation"- Maison française d'Oxford, 23 et 24 octobre 2015. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris and London became modern urban spaces convulsed by the most fundamental transformations. As the redevelopment of the cityscape was in constant metamorphosis, they appeared as « monster cities », in which the artist observed the fascinating inhuman grotesquerie. The reader or spectator witnessed a visual display of modern urban life, described through the arts in terms of various subjective distortions, and drawn in bizarre shapes, inherited from the theatre of shadows, or the pantomime. The world was then de-formed, and so was language. Therefore, the music hall becomes an emblem for a kind of metaphysical contortion, or a caricature of life, and its meaning.
According to German sociologist Georg Simmel, the inhabitants of the modern metropolis are characterized by a heightened nervous sensitivity caused by constant visual and acoustic over- stimulation. This sensory overstimulation takes place primarily on the streets of the modern city centers. Around 1900, on the peek of western urbanization, the city center streets were not only crowded by an increasing number of pedestrians, but also by all sorts of vehicles and animals, street vendors and peddlers, coffeehouse and kiosk customers, newspaper sellers and beggars. The article examines the place of street music within this cacophony of the modern city street by looking at Berlin between 1880 and 1914. During this time, street music has been the object of public debate. Whereas some considered it to be noise and wanted to ban it from the street, others defended street music as being a vital part of modern urban culture. Street music was thus located at the intersection of the problem of modern city noise on the one hand and the development of a new urban amusement culture and entertainment industry on the other hand. On a more general level, performing street music and regulating and debating it was part of negotiating public urban space and of appropriating the city. Drawing on recent scholarship both from urban history and from sound studies, the article explores the different ways in which street music occupied and defined public urban space acous- tically and thereby contributed to forming the modern city consciousness in the sense of Georg Simmel. It does so in two steps: In the first part, it takes a closer look at the anti-noise campaigns of the time and at the role street music played within these campaigns. In the second part, it analyzes the relationship between street music and the expanding popular music industry with a special focus on the Gassenhauer and their circulation between music theater stages, dance halls and street corners.
Street Cries and the urban ritornelle
SoundEffects - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience
Street cries, though rarely heard in Northern European cities today, testify to ways in which audible practices shape and structure urban spaces. Paradigmatic for what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call ‘the refrain’, the ritualised and stylised practice of street cries may point at the dynamics of space-making, through which the social and territorial construction of urban space is performed. The article draws on historical material, documenting and describing street cries, particularly in Copenhagen in the years 1929 to 1935. Most notably, the composer Vang Holmboe and the architect Steen Eiler Rasmussen have investigated Danish street cries as a musical and a spatial phenomenon, respectably. Such studies – from their individual perspectives – can be said to explore the aesthetics of urban environments, since street calls are developed and heard specifically in the context of the city. Investigating the different methods employed in the two studies and presenting Deleuze and G...
Organic Urbanisms: The Birth of Modern Paris
Paris has long retained a status in the popular imagination as a revolutionary city, a city in revolt. This indelible reputation has its origins in the French Revolution and bleeds into the late nineteenth-century, across the July Revolution of 1830, the June Rebellion of 1832, the February Revolution of 1848, and the Paris Commune of 1872. Through the twentieth-century, this narrative contends, and indeed into the twenty-first, the people of Paris remained threateningly revolutionary (flaring up in soixante-huit) but were more or less effectively suppressed by a state and city that had learned from, and adapted to, those explicitly revolutionary years of the long nineteenth-century. At the center of this structural adaptation, within both the popular and academic imagination, are the urban transformations enacted under Baron Haussmann, Napoleon III's Prefect of the Seine. Not only are these changes understood as having been enacted in direct response to fears of barricade-building revolutionaries, but they are also thought to have fundamentally changed the landscape of Paris - creating the modern city that we know today. Though the Paris Commune appears to be perhaps the most obvious counter-argument to this anti-revolutionary narrative, occurring, as it did, after Haussmann's tenure had ended, it is difficult and misleading to take this revolution out of the context of the Franco-Prussian War and the resulting siege of Paris. More broadly, however, it seems myopic to frame the pacification of the Parisian population that ushered in the twentieth-century as merely a result of the material reality of a new urban landscape.
The Opera and the Omnibus: Material Culture, Urbanism and Boieldieu's La dame blanche
Cambridge Opera Journal, 2020
In the summer of 1828, the Entreprise générale des Dames Blanches launched a fleet of white omnibuses onto the streets of Paris. These public transportation vehicles were named and fashioned after Boieldieu's opéra comique La dame blanche (1825): their rear doors were decorated with scenes of Scotland, their flanks painted with gesturing opera characters, and their mechanical horns trumpeted fanfares through the streets. The omnibuses offered one of the first mass transportation systems in the world and were an innovation that transformed urban circulation. During their thirty years of circulation, the omnibuses also had a profound effect on the reception history of Boieldieu's opera. When the omnibuses improved the quality of working- and middle-class life, bourgeois Parisians applauded the vehicles’ egalitarian business model, and Boieldieu's opera became unexpectedly entwined in the populist rhetoric surrounding the omnibus. Viewing opera through the lens of the Dames Blanches, Parisians conflated the sounds of opera and street, as demonstrated by Charles Valentin Alkan’s piano piece Les omnibus, Op. 2 (1829), which combines operatic idioms and horn calls. Through these examples and others, this study examines the complex ways that material culture affects the dissemination and reception of a musical work.
"Paris and the Birth of a Modern Fantastic during the Nineteenth Century". CLCWeb, 2019
In her article "Paris and the Birth of a Modern Fantastic during the Nineteenth Century" Patricia Garcia discusses the unprecedented growth of Europe's urban centers during the nineteenth century in relation to the realist novel and takes urban and literary Paris as a paradigm. However, nineteenth-century Paris was also to become the epicenter of another narrative form: the fantastic. Garcia's objective is to explore how the modern city fueled the development of the fantastic by combining the literary and urban angle: how do works of the fantastic write the city? What role does the modern city play in the emergence of the fantastic short story? Her argumentation is divided into two parts: the first explores how literature circulated in space while the second focuses on the representations of Paris in nineteenth-century fantastic fiction to demonstrate that with the acceleration of modernity, the fantastic became an urban form of expression.