[The project is currently configured as a verbal presentation (‘Music from Beyond the Grave’) and a chapter in a collection of essays (‘Music, Literature and Nonviolent Revolution’)]
‘Music from Beyond the Grave’
The séance – the practice of table-turning – arrived in Paris in early 1853. Within weeks, Parisian salons were swamped with spirits relaying words and images from beyond the grave. One salon, made up by the members of the editorial board of the recently suppressed journal La démocratie pacifique, also enjoyed the transmission of music from the spirit world; the music thus broadcast to the salon was recorded by the critic and romancier Allyre Bureau and published. The music thus transcribed was reported to various musical luminaries – the composer Félicien David and the pianist Émile Prudent – was well as to such well-connected salonnières as Delphine de Girardin. The occult musics and the discourses that surrounded them were embedded in a revolutionary culture that echoed both the Second Republic and its Saint-Simonian precedents.
‘Music, Literature and Nonviolent Revolution’
One of the means for the propagation of the philosophy of Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier was a journal entitled Le phalange from 1836-1843 and La démocratie pacifique from 1843 until it was closed at the beginning of the Second Empire in November 1851. From the beginning, the journals carried not only reviews of current concerts and events on the stage but also more discursive essays on music. Central to this activity from 1838 onwards was the critic Allyre Bureau who contributed two sustained articles a month for the next decade and beyond. Together with texts by colleagues, the journalism in Le phalange and La démocratie pacifique brings music and the nonviolent revolution of Fourieristes into alignment.