Conclusions

Abstract

A decentralist history of Lyon’s musical life (Reuchsel, 1903) offers a springboard for rethinking the themes of decentralization, regionalism and deconcentration as they played out in France’s urban centers across the century from the 1830s to the 1930s. Comparison of decentralist and regionalist practice within the visual arts sets in relief the complex problems musicians experienced—from the ephemerality of composer groups to the state’s inability to showcase regional student compositions. Opera presented more opportunity to showcase regional difference, but the spectre of “colonization” remained, and local demands for “authentic” use of local material existed in tension with the vague atmospherics necessary for Parisian acceptance. The Vichy régime’s centralist appropriation of regionalism tainted the musical work of half a century as ruralist reaction of the extreme Right. New paradigms of thought stemming from ecomusicology suggest ways beyond the impasse of Left–Right politics that have dominated recent study.