This edited volume presents a selected history of French music and culture, but one with a dynamic difference. Eschewing a traditional chronological account, it explores the nature of relationships in French musical culture between one historical period and another, probing the emergent interplay, intertextualities and scope for subsequent reinterpretation across time and place. It engages with notions of cultural meaning, especially those pertaining to French identity, both national and individual. Each of the book's five main parts sets out a specific cultural network or temporal interplay, which may result variously in synthesis, disjunction, or historical misreading.

Introduction: revisiting French musical history (Deborah Mawer) PART I French music and culture, 1860-1930 1 Patrimoine in French music: layers and crosscurrents from the Romantics to the 1920s (Katharine Ellis) 2 'Le Paradis deux fois perdu': Debussy, Watteau and the fête galante (Richard Langham Smith) 3 Saint-Saëns, d'Indy and the Rameau OEuvres complètes: new light on the Zoroastre editorial project (1914) (Graham Sadler) 4 Adventures in gastromusicology: Satie, La Sirène and Trois petites pièces montées (1919) (Caroline Potter) 5 Le Tombeau de Ronsard in La Revue musicale (1924): memory and historical interplay (Helen Julia Minors) PART II French music and culture, 1930-1960 6 Beyond neoclassicism: symphonic form, catharsis and political commentary in Barraine's Deuxième symphonie (1938) (Laura Hamer) 7 Tristan und Isolde in occupied Paris, 1941: a convenient solution to France's Wagner problem? (Rachel Orzech) 8 Historical French music in French feature films of the Occupation years (Isabel De Berrié) 9 Jolivet's Rameau: theory, practice and temporal interplay (Deborah Mawer) 10 Jolivet's Beethoven: supplementarity, topicality and alterity (Jun Zubillaga-Pow) 11 Commission and omission: the canon according to Messiaen (Christopher Dingle)