<i>Bleu-horizon</i> Politics and Music for Radio Listeners: L'Initiation à la musique (1935)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay is about memory and amnesia between the two world wars. What does one choose to remember and why? What does one forget in presenting ‘what an honest man must know’ about music to radio listeners, many with little previous exposure to art music? Is history really just the story of the winners? The collective volume L'Initiation à la musique à l'usage des amateurs de musique et de radio (1935) illustrates how authority is claimed, how writing constructs reality and how canons are made and unmade according to some underlying purpose. My attention was drawn to this book when I found it in a friend's library in Paris, the only music book my friend had in his otherwise extensive library. It belonged to his father, born in 1872. Forty thousand copies were printed, twelve hundred in a luxury edition, each with ten full-page illustrations (six in colour) and elegant medieval/renaissance lithographs. I marvelled that some of the country's finest music historians and critics, representing a wide variety of political orientations, had agreed to collaborate, and on something so clearly intended for the mass public. Yet, when I dipped into it, I was taken aback by what I read. Not only do the contributors here come together in unpredictable ways, given some diametrically opposed opinions and judgements expressed elsewhere, but they manipulate history to bolster national pride. Above all, they use the book to denigrate some reputations and elevate others, although not in ways or for reasons that scholars have heretofore recognised or understood. The result, defying popular resistance, is a new canon of French music – the musical trinity of Fauré/Debussy/Ravel. Bleu-horizon Ideology The book's cover prepares the reader for the political implications underlying the story inside. Its colour, bleu horizon [horizon blue], harks back to the colour to which French military uniforms changed during the First World War. During the first years of the war, these still resembled the bright and showy uniforms of Napoleon's army, which made sitting targets of French soldiers. With bleu horizon as a kind of camouflage, it was hoped that the enemy would confuse French soldiers with the sky-blue horizon.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".