About Sonic Constellations
Sonic Constellations: Circulations of Music, Sound, and Emotion in Interwar France is a digital humanities project focused on making research on music, sound, and trauma in France in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century widely available to scholarly and non-scholarly publics. Sonic Constellations emerges from and will serve as a complement to Jillian Rogers's book, Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars, which was published with Oxford University Press in 2021. In this book Rogers investigates how French musicians affected by World War I’s violent warfare conceptualized music as central to psychological recovery. Through analysis of not only archival sources such as obituaries, concert reviews, and musicians’ personal materials, but also period sources such as French medical texts and the music produced between the wars, Rogers illuminate how during this time music emerged as a bodily technology enabling consolation through soothing sonic vibrations, rhythmic bodily movement, embodied musical memory, and humor.
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As a digital humanities project, Sonic Constellations provides a significant launchpad for researchers and teachers interested in musical, artistic, and emotional life in interwar France. This website will feature bibliographies, discographies, and information regarding relevant archival holdings in various locations throughout and beyond the United States and Europe. Bibliographies and discographies will present those interested in early twentieth-century France, World War I, and trauma studies with a wealth of sources in different media. Meanwhile, by presenting information regarding archival holdings digitally, this site helps scholars who may have limited funding for research-related travel in planning research trips, while also shedding light on the holdings of archives that have often been used only sparingly by music scholars—for instance the archives of the Musée des Arts et Métiers and the Hôpital Salpêtrière. By facilitating engagement with myriad archives, this website engenders richer interdisciplinary work at the intersections of music, sound, science, and the social in and beyond early twentieth-century France.
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