In her monumental new study, Katharine Ellis examines the alternately fruitful and fraught relations between official Parisian musical-administrative bodies and regional music schools, ensembles, production companies, and industries in the hundred years before World War II. She challenges readers to shed the myopic view that “French” means Parisian and invites them to discover the complex backstories behind music-making across the country, both in major cultural centers and in far-flung provincial villages.

Ellis begins by posing a question: Does the French administrative state’s desire to centralize musical activity—through pedagogical directives, funding, visits by inspectors, or the privileging of “civilizing” art music and the disparagement, overt or covert, of “uncivilized” folk music and/or regional idioms—represent a quest for national unity and assimilation or a desire to quash regional difference and diversity? She then voices the hope that the study will spur future musicologists to release the rich musical activity of the French...

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