ABSTRACT
The musical sense is a hybrid one, constantly hijacked by interventions of exogenous instances—other senses, ideas, environments, objects. Since Antoine Hennion's seminal work on musical passion, French research on musical experience has changed perspectives, nuancing traditional reception theory by emphasizing not only the activity of the receiver but also the performativity of the act of listening. France was one of the first countries in the world to revel in the wonders of Afro-American rhythms, with the cakewalk craze in the early twentieth century, followed by the invasion of "jazz-bands" on 1920s Parisian music-hall stages and the national dissemination of New Orleans jazz with the Hot Clubs de France movement in the 1930s and so forth. In France, the jazz world is the location of one of the iconic links between myths pertaining both to the United States and racial representations.
