The Second Empire (1852-1870) -The French imperialist regime of Napoléon III, nephew of Napoléon Bonaparte I. During his reign Paris boundaries were expanded and the city underwent massive renovations that included, among many things, the improvements to sanitation, transportation and commerce.
The Third Republic (1870–1940)- As a result of the Franco Prussian war, Napoleon III was overthrown. The Second Empire was replaced by the Third Republic which governed France until it was overrun by Nazi Germany in 1940.
Ambient Music - A musical genre that encompasses a broad spectrum of styles. The primary element of ambient music is timbre which is used to create atmosphere. The term was first presented by Brian Eno and defined in the liner notes of his album Music for Airports as “an atmosphere or surrounding influence, a tint [that] must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular: it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”[1]
La Belle Époque -(1890-1913) A period named in hindsight as a golden age in contrast to the devastation of World War I. La Belle Époque coincides with the artistic movement called Art Nouveau and the proliferation of Cabaret and Music Hall entertainments in Paris.
Blague – to mock
Blague is a certain taste which is peculiar to Parisians and still more to Parisians of our generation, to disparage, to mock, to render ludicrous everything that hommes, and above all prud’hommes are in the habit of respecting and caring for; but this raillery is characterizes by the fact that he who takes it up does so more in play, for a love of paradox, than in conviction: he mocks himself with his own banter, ‘il blague‘. [2]
Bohemian Café - A drinking establishment.
“The Bohemian café emerged in the 1840′s as a symptom of major economic dislocation in the art world, caused by the breakdown of the patronage system and the hostility of the traditional aristocratic salons to modernist aesthetic practice…[The Bohemian Café was frequented by] artists and writers excluded form the cozy confines of official culture”[3]
Cabaret Artistique – An evolution of the bohemian café that began in 1881 with the opening of Le Chat Noir in Montmartre, Paris. The Cabaret included performances of poetry, song and fumiste pranks and was embraced by artists, writers and musicians with common modernist and avant-garde aesthetics. Soon many Cabarets proliferated and the Montmartre district was transformed into a social hotspot that attracted international attention. [4]
Café à décor – Traditionally a Bohemian café transformed into a art gallery for the display of Modernist work [5]
Café-Concert or Caf’ Conc’ French entertainment that featured popular song quickly evolved during the 2nd Empire with Napoleon III’s edict of 1867 which allowed café singers to appear in costume. “With the rise of Cabaret in the late 1880′s and the construction of large scale music halls with elaborate stagings, the influence of the Cafe-Concert spread well beyond its early small-scale format.”[6]
La Chanson à Café-Concert -Popular songs from the Caf’ Conc’ and Music Hall establishments that thrived during La Belle Époque. Satie composed these types of songs for Paulette Darty, a star of the Music Hall renowned for her valse chantée, songs in the Viennese Waltz style.
La Chanson à Montmartre - Songs of the Chansonniers, singer-songwriters of Montmartre’s Artistic Cabarets. The Chansonniers became the main attraction at the early Chat Noir Cabaret with their satirical songs that included parodies of children’s songs, folk songs and opera arias.
Le Chat Noir - The first Artistic Cabaret founded by Rodolphe Salis in 1881 and originally located on the boulevard Rochechouart in Montmartre.
Entr’Acte - A French word meaning between the acts of a theatrical production. A piece of music originally written for a performance during an intermission was often titled Entr’acte.
Flâneur - to stroll around idly or aimlessly. Flâneur is one who walks through the streets of Paris in aimless amusement. Satie was most definitely a flâneur.
Fumisme – “Fumisme referred to the subversive, carnivalesque aspects of Bohemia and involved practical jokes, unusual pranks, and elaborate provocations, directed primarily against the authorities and the establishment.”[7]
Furniture Music- A precursor to Muzak, the term was coined by Erik Satie in 1917 for five short works in three sets. This background music was to be performed live but was not intended for deliberate listening.
Humoristic Works for Piano- In 1912 Satie began working on collections of solo piano pieces that reveal the blague spirit of the earlier Montmartre Cabarets. He gave many of these miniatures strange titles and incorporated absurd musical instructions or narratives. The last of these works, Sonatine Bureaucratique (1917), pokes fun at the famous Clementi Sonatina Op. 36 no.1 suffered by both piano students and their teachers. Satie’s narration within the score presents the mundane musings of an office bureaucrat. “A nearby piano plays Clementi. How sad it is.”
Mélodie -French Art Song from the mid 19th century to the present
Non-lexical vocables - Syllables with no direct meaning. An example from classical music is tra-la-la
Ombres chinoises – Chinese shadows, shadow puppet figures used in shadow theatre, a term “also used by French commentators to refer to the dark, flat silhouetted figures employed so frequently by artists of this period”[8]
SACEM- A society established in 1851 to protect the rights of authors, composers and editors of music. Ernest Bourget was the first composer to legally gain the rights to payment for his works which were performed at the famous Café-Concert, Les Ambassadeurs in 1847. Today SACEM is a massive organization that, among many other things, manages the rights to intellectual property of its members. See SACEM
Succès de Scandal- Success from Scandal. The most notorious example is the premier of the Diagalev ballet The Rite of Spring from 1913. The audience was so unsettled by Stravinsky’s dissonant and rhythmically brutal composition, that they broke into a riot. In 1917, the Cocteau/Satie collaboration for another Diagalev ballet equally offended the Parisian audience. Satie’s mix of high art with the low culture of the Circus, Cabaret and Café-Concert in the now famous ballet Parade shocked listeners into an uprising and guaranteed Satie’s position as one of the great modernist composers of the early 20th century.
Théâtre d’ombres- Shadow Theatre. Intense light blocked by cut out figures of tin or cardboard produced the shadows for theatrical extravaganzas at the early Montmartre Cabarets. The first cabaret shadow plays were presented at the Chat Noir and soon evolved into sophisticated productions that eventually usurped the chanson as the main attraction. The Chanson became the entertainment during the Entr’actes within these shadow theatre productions.