Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents a selective history of French music and culture, but one with a dynamic difference that should serve to make it a distinctive and valuable addition to existing scholarship. It examines the scope for music–text relations and thus historical interplay afforded by Henry Premieres’ commemorative creation in 1924 of Le Tombeau de Ronsard. The book provides complementary perspectives on Jolivet's written treatment of the musical past; they have balancing structures with a contextual/methodological first half, followed by a thematized reading. It explores 'historical interplay': the nature of relationships in French musical culture operating between one main historical period, broadly the 'long' modernist era 1860–1960, and its various historical others, engaging with topics from the immediate past through to the medieval period and before.