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‘Distant Reading’ in French Music Criticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2021

Estelle Joubert
Estelle Joubert*
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
*
Email: Estelle.Joubert@dal.ca
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Abstract

This article offers a series of experiments exploring the potential for ‘distant reading’ in French music criticism. ‘Distant reading’, a term first coined by literary theorist Franco Moretti, refers to quantitative approaches that allow for new insights into a large corpus of texts by aggregating data. While the main corpus employed here is the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris (1831–1877), I also use secondary corpora of reviews of Félicien David's Herculanum in 1859, Berlioz's reviews of Gluck and Beethoven in the Journal des débats and reviews that mention Gabriel Fauré in the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America database. My experiments employ a text analysis tool named Voyant, built by Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair, thereby also offering a basic introduction to the range of visualizations employed in distant reading. My experiments focus on areas in which quantitative methods are particularly well suited to generating new knowledge: corpus-wide visualizations and queries, moving beyond traditional text searching, investigations of music critics’ authorial styles and detecting sentiment in reviews, and finally, to geographies of music criticism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 19 , Special Issue 2: French Criticism , August 2022 , pp. 291 - 315
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I gratefully acknowledge Paul G. Doerwald's technical assistance and support, especially in building various corpora and with aspects of data manipulation and management. At the Austrian National Library, the Open Access policies of ANNO (AustriaN Newspapers Online) greatly facilitated the building of my main corpus. Finally, I would like to thank Robin Butterhof in the Newspaper and Current Periodical Room at the Library of Congress for assisting me in navigating the API (application program interface) of their Chronicling America project, which was indispensable for the section on geographies of French criticism in this article.

References

1 This idea was first discussed in Moretti, Franco, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005)Google Scholar and subsequently in his Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013). For an excellent critical introduction and case studies using this methodology, see Distant Readings: Topologies of German Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Matt Erlin and Lynne Tatlock (Rochester: Camden House, 2014).

2 Moretti's methods are cultivated at the Stanford Literary Lab. Recent publications include Moretti, Franco, ed., Canon/Archive: Studies in Quantitative Formalism (New York: n+1 Foundation, 2017)Google Scholar. For one of the first investigations in musicology, see Elizabeth Monzingo and Daniel Shanahan, ‘The Expression of Self and Grief in the Nineteenth Century: An Analysis through Distant Readings’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, online first, 2020, doi:10.1017/S1479409819000697.

3 Michael Scott Cuthbert first used the term ‘distant listening’ in a paper entitled ‘Distant Listening/Digital Musicology: music21 and Compositional Similarity in the Late Middle Ages’, presented at the Heyman Centre, Columbia University on 1 May 2018. The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is an international community effort ‘to define a system for encoding musical documents in a machine-readable structure’. See https://music-encoding.org/.

4 See for instance Jennifer Schuessler, ‘Reading by the Numbers: When Big Data Meets Literature’, in The New York Times, 30 October 2017, and Kathryn Schulz, ‘The Mechanic Muse: What Is Distant Reading?’ in The New York Times, 24 June 2011.

5 Moretti, Distant Reading, 181.

6 For a brief history of the founding and prominence of the journal in nineteenth-century France, see Ralph Locke's article in this issue, ‘How Reliable Are Nineteenth-Century Reviews of Concerts and Operas?: Félicien David's Le Désert and His Grand Opéra Herculanum’. Quantitative methods in text analysis require consistent and reliable text-files. I have assembled my corpus using ANNO (AustriaN Newspapers Online), an open access repository which makes .txt files readily available. See http://anno.onb.ac.at.

7 https://voyant-tools.org/. Rockwell, Geoffrey and Sinclair, Stéfan, Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 For a discussion on ‘knowledge bearing instruments and practices’ see Rockwell and Sinclair, Hermeneutica, 150–52.

9 See Chapter 5: ‘There's a Toy in My Essay: Problems with the Rhetoric of Text Analysis’, in Rockwell and Sinclair, Hermeneutica, 83–104.

10 Burdick, Ann, Drucker, Johanna, Lunenfeld, Peter, Presner, Todd and Schapp, Jeffrey, eds., Digital Humanities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012): 105Google Scholar.

11 I am indebted to Matthew L. Jockers's discussion of new ways of gathering evidence and generating knowledge, as described in his chapter on ‘Evidence’ in his book, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods & Literary History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013): 5–10.

12 A word cloud is an image consisting of words placed in a pseudo-random position whose relative size belies the underlying frequency of that word in the corpus. For a description of ‘Cirrus’ (the word cloud function in Voyant), see https://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/cirrus.

13 Hovering over the word in the interactive visualization reveals the number of times the term occurs in the corpus.

14 Abbate, Carolyn, ‘Music—Drastic or Gnostic?’, Critical Inquiry 30/3 (2004): 505–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Piekut, Benjamin, ‘Actor-Networks in Music History: Clarifications and Critiques’, Twentieth-Century Music 11/2 (2014): 191–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 In the interactive visualization, hovering over the word ‘lights up’ the edges connected to each node, thereby revealing various pathways of connection.

17 Voyant's current ‘links’ function is governed by proximity searches. True network visualization software is supported by a graph database structure, allowing for much more nuanced networks, including directionality in edges, varying types of nodes and so forth. One of the leading graph database platforms and communities is neo4j. For a musicological study on fantasy in this period, see Brittan, Francesca, Music and Fantasy and the Age of Berlioz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 See for example, Davies, James Q., Romantic Anatomies of Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Gallica is the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris’ digital library. See https://gallica.bnf.fr; ANNO is the Austrian National Library's historic journals digital database. See http://anno.onb.ac.at; RIPM (Répertoire international de la presse musicale) is a database of music periodicals. See https://ripm.org/index.php.

20 In the interactive visualization, readers can expand the preceding and following text for each row.

21 Dockers, Macroanalysis, 8.

22 See Locke, ‘How Reliable Are Nineteenth-Century Reviews’.

23 Moretti, Distant Reading, 181. See above at n.5.

24 The Herculanum corpus is comprised of E. Vernes, [Herculanum de David], La France Musicale, 6 March 1859; Léon Escudier, [Herculanum de David], La France Musicale, 13 March 1859; J.L. Heugel, [Herculanum de David], Le Ménestrel, 6 March 1859; Paul Smith, [Herculanum de David] Revue et Gazette Musicale, 13 March 1859; Hector Berlioz, [Herculanum de David], Journal des Débats, 12 March 1859; J. d'Ortigue, [Herculanum de David], Le Ménestrel, 13 March 1859. These reviews may be found on http://bruzanemediabase.com/fre/Documents/Articles-de-presse/(searchText)/herculanum (last accessed 7 March 2020). This website accompanies Gunther Braam, ‘La réception d’Herculanum dans la presse contemporaine’ / ‘The Reception of Herculanum in the Contemporary Press’, in the booklet to Félicien David, Herculanum, with Véronique Gens, Edgaras Montvidas and other vocal soloists, Flemish Radio Choir, Brussels Philharmonic, cond. Hervé Niquet, Ediciones Singulares/Palazzetto Bru Zane (Centre de musique romantique française), no. 10 in their series ‘Opéra français’. I am indebted to Ralph Locke's article in this issue for drawing my attention to this source. For this corpus I added character names to the stopwords list, as well as the composer and work.

25 I am indebted to Ralph Locke for pointing this out to me.

26 Each term is distinguished by a unique colour. The size of the bubble corresponds to the number of times that the term appears at that point in the review.

27 These are available on www.hberlioz.com/feuilletons/debatsindex.htm (last accessed 8 March 2020). I'm indebted to Ralph Locke's ‘How Reliable Are Nineteenth-Century Reviews’ for making me aware of this corpus.

28 See for instance, Dolan, Emily I., The Orchestral Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 See chapter 2, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ in Moretti's Distant Reading, 43–62.

30 See my review of RIPM in this issue. RIPM currently does not offer an API (application program interface) through which to access a corpus of texts. Like other commercially driven databases, RIPM has made it difficult to extract content in a programmatic way, thereby rending bulk analyses such as distant reading impossible.

31 See Heather de Savage, ‘Under the Gallic Spell’: Boston's Embrace of Gabriel Fauré, 1892–1924’ in this issue.

32 See https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/about/ (last accessed 8 March 2020).

33 The term ‘Great Unheard’ is obviously a play on the ‘Great Unread’, frequently cited by Moretti but borrowed, as Amir Khadem has noted, from Margaret Cohen. See Khadem, Amir, ‘Annexing the Unread: a Close Reading of “Distant Reading”’, Neohelicon 39 (2012): 409–21, here 410CrossRefGoogle Scholar. With respect to music, the term ‘Great Unheard’ could be used to refer to historic performances whose fleeting sounds are long gone, and/or musical scores, some of which may not have been performed.

34 The idea is present already in his Distant Reading (pp. 67–71) but forms the title of his more recent collection of pamphlets generated by the Stanford Literary Lab. See Moretti, ed., Canon/Archive.