Dictionnaire musical des vines de province. (Book Reviews).

Dictionnaire musical des vines de province. By Francois Lesure. (Domaine musicologique.) Paris: Librarie C. I, 1999. [367 p. ISBN 2-252-03284-0. Fr 280.]

Francois Lesure died 25 June 2001 at the age of 78. He was a prolific and respected musicologist, historian, and archivist, who held degrees from the Sorbonne, the Ecole nationale des chartes, and the Ecole pratique des hautes-etudes. Throughout his career Lesure held positions as the director of the music department of the Biblio-theque nationale de France, where he organized major exhibitions devoted to Mozart, Berlioz, Debussy, and Parisian opera; as professor of musicology at the Free University of Brussels; and as the director of studies at the Ecole pratique des hautesetudes. In his scholarship Lesure utilized his skills as an archivist and paleographer in diverse editing projects, such as his bibliographies of sixteenth- and eighteenth-century musical editions, volumes for Repertoire international des sources musicales (RISM), and the complete works of Debussy.

Dictionnaire musical des villes de province is part of a series edited by Lesure and dedicated to diverse aspects of French musical culture ranging from medieval minstrels to Debussy. The dictionary provides overviews of musical life for almost 120 French cities, with the explicit exclusion of Paris. Entries are usually accompanied by a substantial bibliography and range from a few paragraphs to eight pages. The emphasis on provincial cities is extremely valuable since scholarship concerning musical life in the French provinces has been marginalized in comparison to Paris. This pattern in scholarship is related to the apparent gulf in the quality of music making between Paris and the provincial cities of France, one of the issues Lesure addresses in the introduction to the dictionary. Lesure notes that by the seventeenth century the notion of the superiority of musical life in the capital was already well entrenched throughout France, leading to such practices as sending organists to Paris, and particularly to Notre Dame, "to perfect themselves." During the late nineteenth century the concept of "decentralization" appeared in the musical press although little actually changed. While provincial institutions, academies, and competitions were established, musicians still needed to go to Paris to pursue a national reputation. In the dictionary, Lesure draws attention to the richness of musical practices outside of Paris and facilitates further research on these cities, some of which have received minimal scholarly attention.

Reflecting the scope of Lesure's interests, the entries in the dictionary touch upon all historical periods from troubadours to current musical organizations. For this nine-hundred-year span, Lesure focuses upon particular musical institutions, discussed in the introduction. These institutions include the ecclesiastical maitrises attached to cathedrals and collegiate churches for the training of young singers, the academies formed ...