Eugène Bozza’s Woodwind Chamber Music for the Paris Conservatoire in the 1930s and 1940s: Lyrical Virtuosity, Exoticism, and the Working Composer

Since its creation, Eugène Bozza’s (1905–1991) music has enjoyed generous acclaim among wind musicians in terms of both performance and scholarship. Yet, due to its position within a number of related areas of neglect in musicology, musicologists have afforded it scant attention. Bozza composed a substantial portion of his oeuvre as utilitarian wind chamber music for the Paris Conservatoire. However, musicologists have traditionally been inclined to overlook both wind literature and pragmatic repertoires. This dissertation aims to rectify these oversights. By going to the location of Bozza’s music’s greatest accomplishment, the area of woodwind performance, it will attempt to answer the question of why Bozza’s music has been so successful with performers. To do this, it will consider the repertoire’s most prevalent characteristics, notably, its lyricism, virtuosity, and exoticism. From there, it will argue that the enduring international success among woodwind musicians of Bozza’s woodwind music for the Paris Conservatoire is due to his compositional method, which I describe as featuring lyrical virtuosity and exoticism. I use the term lyrical virtuosity to denote the concept of providing colorful virtuosic passages while being musically expressive and the term exoticism to refer to the Other. To make this argument, Chapter One demonstrates how Bozza’s creation of woodwind music that is both song-like and technically demanding fulfilled two longstanding but frequently overlooked performance ideals of the Paris Conservatoire, lyricism and virtuosity. Chapter Two shows how exoticism was useful in meeting numerous additional ideological and utilitarian requirements associated with composing commissioned works for the institution. Finally, Chapter Three ties these two facets of Bozza’s compositional method together by indicating how exoticism enhanced the lyrical and virtuosic qualities of his woodwind chamber music. Throughout the dissertation, I draw upon my original archival work, including information garnered from interviews conducted with the composer’s daughter, Cécile Bozza Delplace, and with his associates, André Ratte, Thierry Thibault, and Jean-Claude Poinsignon, as well as relevant information derived from manuscripts, articles, reviews, and Bozza’s own orchestration treatise discovered at the composer’s archive at the Bibliothèque de Valenciennes. By discussing lyricism, virtuosity, and exoticism in Bozza’s music for the Conservatoire in this manner, I will present the initial stages of a model for writing about the music of a working composer with respect to the compositional pragmatics of the composer as a self-identified working musician