ABSTRACT
Both as an academic and as a popular pursuit, history held a privileged position in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France. Whether history mattered never seemed to be a modem French question, certainly not for Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, or Jean-François Lyotard. History is a contested field in scholarship, especially in recent years with the debates around new historicism, post colonialism, and postmodernism. Yet it is a discipline that needs addressing when engaging with so historically charged a phenomenon as modernism in France, given the complex intertwinings of theory and history in the debates of modernism and postmodernism. Telling the story of music in French modernity thus poses some exciting challenges to today's music historians. This chapter addresses three of them: the challenges of history, of musical modernism in general, and of Paris in particular.
