Music and Mystery in Early Twentieth–Century France

French musical culture reached a peak of vibrant activity in the early twentieth century, with dozens of professional composers creating new works on a weekly basis in multiple elite musical venues. Yet today, much of that world is forgotten, known only through the works of “the big three” of French music, Debussy, Fauré, and Ravel. The aesthetic framework of “mystery” affords a heuristic for approaching music beyond this narrow sliver. In this talk, drawn from my forthcoming book, I propose that “mystery” constitutes a network of ideas related to things that, though real, ultimately evade efforts to talk about them. This lecture will include a critical definition of “mystery” as an aesthetic concept, a narrative of early twentieth–century French musical culture and its intellectual milieu, a brief account of the previous academic discourse on the concept of mystery, and demonstrative examples of the musical repertory that can be illuminated through the concept of “mystery.”