“LET THEM EAT CAKE”: SOFIA COPPOLA’S MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006) AS A MUSICAL VEHICLE OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GENDER AND COLONIAL IDENTITY By Christine Roberts A THESIS Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Musicology – Master of Arts 2023 ABSTRACT With its mixture of period-specific and anachronistic sounds to immerse audiences in Antoinette’s world, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) is a distinctive period biopic. Although criticized for its historical inaccuracy, this unique soundscape offers a vantage point from which to consider music’s effect in historical film. Using Marie Antoinette as a case study, this thesis examines the narrative implications of using pre-existing music in film. Through this examination, important historiographical considerations surrounding eighteenth-century French musical culture, colonialism, and gender begin to materialize. I adopt an intersectional approach to continue building upon eighteenth-century France’s historiographical narrative by paying close attention to voices often marginalized in historical narratives. By exploring Marie Antoinette through this lens, this thesis contributes to the growing body of literature examining the role of music in shaping historical narrative around identity politics in eighteenth-century France. Ultimately, I argue that Marie Antoinette invites us to see and hear how sound, operatic staging, and portraits of musicking simultaneously obscure and challenge colonial and gendered structures. Copyright by CHRISTINE ROBERTS 2023 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It takes a village. My endless gratitude to my family, for your tolerance of my historical rambles and support of my educational endeavors, in which there are a plethora. To my teachers, who gifted me the love of learning. Particular thanks to Marc Embree and Jane Bunnell for being my adopted musical parents. I would not be the person I am without you. To my vocal and musicology colleagues, your passion for learning inspires me unceasingly. I am endlessly thankful to my thesis committee: Dr. Kevin Bartig, Dr. Elden Little, and Dr. Ken Prouty. Your enthusiasm for my work and encouragement have been steadfast throughout the thesis process. To Catherine Goode, for your attentive grammatical eye and friendship, and Dr. Jonathan Gómez, whose friendship and zoom writing sessions have been beacons in stressful times. Thank you to my cats, Dobby and Muffin, who slept beside me in various positions throughout the writing process. You helped me push through endless hours at the computer, asking for nothing more than light ear scratches (and occasionally treats). To my friends, and to my book club, I cherish our companionship in the brightest and darkest of times. To my students, your enthusiasm, joy, and dedication have been a daily source of inspiration, and I am grateful for the opportunity to teach and learn from you. To my found family, the Campbell-Snyder-Westendorf Clan, whose support, laughs, and board game marathons are the highlights of my life. To my husband, Chris Glassman, I cannot imagine what my life looked like before you. Your love, support, and bravery inspire me to be a better scholar and most importantly, human. I’m overwhelmingly grateful that you are my partner. Finally, to my advisor Dr. Marcie Ray. Your encouragement, meticulous edits, and suggestions have been essential in the competition of this document. Additionally, you have changed my life’s path, and for that there are no words to sufficiently express my thanks. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1 THE MUSICAL CRESCENDO OF COLONIALISM IN SOFIA COPPOLA’S MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006) ................................................................................................................ 6 CHAPTER 2 “KINGS OF THE HONG KONG GARDEN”: NEW WAVE, RAMEAU, AND NON-EUROPEAN IDENTITY IN SOFIA COPPOLA’S MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006) ........ 34 CHAPTER 3 MADWOMAN AND MILKMAID: OPERATIC SCENES IN MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006) AS SITES OF IDENTITY FORMATION................................................... 52 CODA ......................................................................................................................................................... 68 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................................... 70 v INTRODUCTION Bursting onto the scene with lavish costumes, color-saturated visuals, and an accompanying musical apparatus considered one of “the twenty soundtracks that defined the 2000s,” Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) broke new ground in period films.1 Using a unique vantage point, Coppola used a multitude of period-specific and anachronistic sounds to bring a twenty-first-century audience into Marie Antoinette’s world. When asked about her musical choices in the directorial process, Coppola revealed, “I like to listen to music when I’m writing. I think it always ends up informing the way the movie feels, the atmosphere…it evokes a feeling you’re looking for.” 2 Although well-known film critic Roger Ebert claims that Marie Antoinette “is not informative and detailed about the actual politics of the period,” and the San Francisco Chronicle panned the movie for “lacking in wit or real significance,” a comprehensive analysis of both musical and visual cues encourages a more nuanced reading of the film.3 A popular genre since the inception of film, historical biopics continue to run rampant in the twenty-first century in television, film, and media. Six of the nine Oscar nominations for Best Picture in 2020 were historical films.4 Furthermore, over the past three decades, at least one 1 “The Twenty Soundtracks That Defined the 2000s,” Empire, May 19, 2013, https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/decade-defining-soundtracks-00s/. The movie was also voted as one of the fifty best movie soundtracks of the past fifty years by The Ringer. See “The 50 Best Movie Soundtracks of the Past 50 Years,” The Ringer, December 9, 2021, https://www.theringer.com/movies/2021/12/9/22824332/best-movie- soundtracks-ranking. 2 Geri Cole, host, “Sofia Coppola, “On the Rocks”.” OnWriting: A Podcast of the WGA East (podcast), December 11, 2020, accessed March 21, 2022, https://www.wgaeast.org/onwriting/sofia-coppola-on-the-rocks/. 3 Roger Ebert, “Marie Antoinette Movie Review (2006): Roger Ebert,” Roger Ebert, October 19, 2006, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/marie-antoinette-2006 and Mick LaSalle, “Rock 'n' Roll Queen Just Wants a Little Fun before the Revolution,” SFGATE (San Francisco Chronicle, January 11, 2012), https://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Rock-n-roll-queen-just-wants-a-little-fun-2467887.php. For in-depth discussions of this criticism, see Anne Cohen, “Why Marie Antoinette Is Really Mean Girls, ‘Versailles Edition,’” Refinery29, July 10, 2018, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/07/203957/marie-antoinette-review-mean-girls- kirsten-dunst and Broey Deschanel, “Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Pretty.” YouTube video, 21:48. September 1, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65lUqc_fCig. 4 “The 92nd Academy Awards: 2020,” Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, accessed July 19, 2022, https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/2020. 1 historical film has made the Best Picture category.5 Although not a Best Picture nominee, Marie Antoinette won a golden statue for Best Costume Design and is still arguably one of the most recognizable historical films of the past several decades.6 As a result of their prevalence and popularity, period films have become effective in shaping understanding of the past. Emphasizing this influence, researchers in a 2018 study on film’s impact on historical knowledge concluded that “much of what people today (and not only the young) think they ‘know’ about the past they have ‘learned’ from audio/visual media.”7 Although films do not meet the standards of historical accuracy, digital mediums and fictionalized spaces are proving to be accessible means to explore the past. Furthermore, they offer valuable insight into present investments by critically examining the cultural and socio-economic circumstances contexts that shape specific historical narratives. Recent scholarship has begun to explore the beneficial nature of historical film as a historiography. In Cinema & Counter-History, Marcia Landy describes how historical spaces in media challenge us to escape “history through expanding our thinking on what constitutes historical thought.”8 By moving past strict linear narratives, we can consider history in terms of “affect, invention, memory, art, reflection, and action.”9 Robert Rosenstone affirms that historical film impacts our understanding of the past by giving audience members “a sense that we can never really know the past, but can only continually play with it, reconfigure, and try to make meaning out of the 5 “Best Picture Oscar Nominees by Year (Academy Awards),” IMDb (IMDb.com, February 1, 1969), https://www.imdb.com/list/ls009487211/. 6 The film earned a modest $60 million worldwide and the soundtrack peaked at 97 in the Billboard Top 200. “Marie Antoinette,” IMDb (IMDb.com), accessed July 15, 2022, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0422720/awards/, “Marie Antoinette,” Box Office Mojo, accessed August 18, 2022, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl1499694593 and “Billboard 200 - November 11th, 2006,” Billboard, accessed August 18, 2022, https://www.billboard.com/charts/billboard-200/2006-11-11/. 7 Scott Alan Metzger et al., “Film Media in History Teaching and Learning,” in The Wiley International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), 595. As quoted in William Peters, “Film in History Education: A Review of the Literature,” The Social Studies 111, no. 6 (2020): 275-295, https://doi.org/10.1080/00377996.2020.1757598. 8 Marcia Landy, Cinema & Counter-History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), x. 9 Landy, Cinema & Counter-History, xi. 2 traces it has left behind.”10 Alison Landsberg, a scholar of memory studies, builds upon these arguments by considering what she calls affective encounters during film: Because the moments of affective encounter occur within the context of specific historical conditions, the way the viewer processes those encounters is inevitably shaped by those conditions—by what was possible and impossible in that historical moment. Even when the viewer does not identify with one of the characters, his or her body is activated, brought into proximity to the conditions of possibility at that moment. It is in precisely this conjuncture that film can produce real and useful knowledge about the past. The viewer is in his or her own body, his or her own space, but the body and its experience have been altered by its engagement within the diegesis, which in the case of a historical film is structed by the political, economic, social, and cultural conditions that governed the life of a person or community in the past.11 Under these circumstances, viewing Marie Antoinette through a series of affective encounters allows audiences and scholars to view the film as a contemplation of eighteenth-century identity formation. Scholarship has begun to take advantage of the vast production of historical content to reflect on the relationships between past and present. For instance, remarking on film’s profound impact on Marie Antoinette’s image in society at large, cultural historian Lynn Hunt expressed that, The film came at a moment when there was a transition in the view of Marie from an overloaded symbol of everything wrong with the aristocracy to more of a tragic figure. She’s a very different kind of character than she was even two decades ago. There’s an incredibly more sympathetic view of her among historians, and the film helped push that ideology forward.12 As I illustrate in this thesis, Hunt’s view of the movie is continually affirmed by its soundscape. My thesis joins a growing body of scholarly literature within the past decade that examines the narrative implications of pre-existing music in film. As musicologist Jonathan Godsall depicts in Reeled In, pre-existing music offers the ability to engage with music in cinema as more than 10 Robert Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (London: Pearson Longman, 2006), 163-164. As quoted in Jerome De Groot, Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions (London: Routledge, 2015), 4. Affirming the historical importance of Sofia Coppola’s film, Marie Antoinette is featured on the cover of the third edition of Rosenstone’s History on Film/Film on History. See Robert Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History, Third ed. (London: Routledge, 2017). 11 Alison Landsberg, Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 37. 12 Keaton Bell, “'It Was Like Hosting the Ultimate Party': An Oral History of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette,” Vogue, October 29, 2021, https://www.vogue.com/article/oral-history-of-marie-antoinette-15th-anniversary. 3 just “film music” and to break the fourth wall of interpretation.13 Rather, audiences can feel proximity to the past through music. In Meaning and Interpretation of Music in Cinema, David Neumeyer implies that music can expand pre-conceived notions of historical narrative. 14 Indeed, we can see that the film’s musical landscape frames the narrative surrounding Marie Antoinette. It raises important historiographical questions about eighteenth-century French musical culture, colonialism, and prescribed gender roles. I use an intersectional approach to build upon eighteenth-century France’s historiographical narrative by paying close attention to voices often marginalized by historical narrative.15 In Chapter One, I illuminate how Marie Antoinette points to France’s colonial ties and sugar production in the eighteenth century through subtle musical cues. By doing so, music becomes a hermeneutic window in which marginalized voices punctuate the narrative. Using Timothy D. Taylor’s “Peopling the Stage,” I stress in Chapter Two how Jean-Phillipe Rameau’s Les Indes galantes and New Wave music invokes stereotypes of non-European identities that point to eighteenth- century colonial endeavors and their legacies into the present.16 Moving away from colonial encounters, I turn next to questions of gender. Chapter Three unravels four staged musical events in the movie to investigate the public’s perception of Marie Antoinette with respect to more conventional gender roles in opera. Cumulatively, these three chapters undertake a critical project that reveals stereotypes of marginalized voices in history, demonstrating how they have been historically deployed and consequently influenced historiography. 13 Jonathan Godsall, Reeled In: Pre-Existing Music in Narrative Film (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2020). 14 David P. Neumeyer and James Buhler, Meaning and Interpretation of Music in Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 15 For the coining of intersectional and intersectionality, the concurrency of classifications that compound into overlapping oppression, see Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, 139-168. 16 Timothy D. Taylor, “Peopling the Stage: Opera, Otherness, and New Musical Representations in the Eighteenth Century,” Cultural Critique, no. 36 (1997): 55-88, https://doi.org/10.2307/1354500. 4 Overall, this thesis uses Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) as a case study of identity politics in eighteenth-century France. Given Marie Antoinette’s continued notoriety in popular culture, her portrayal in the movie exemplifies how music affects preconceived notions of identity formation. Building on recent scholarly endeavors that are reshaping the musical historiography of eighteenth-century France, I argue that Marie Antoinette invites us to see and hear how sound, operatic staging, and portraits of musicking simultaneously obscure and challenge colonial and gendered structures. 5 CHAPTER 1 THE MUSICAL CRESCENDO OF COLONIALISM IN SOFIA COPPOLA’S MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006) Introduction “Let them eat cake” is a phrase that is arguably as infamous in popular culture as the figure linked to it: Marie Antoinette. Considered apocryphal, the phrase remains in steady use. Recent examples include Kylie Jenner’s 2020 Harper’s Bazaar cover entitled, “Kylie Jenner Is Having Her Cake and Eating It Too,” which features pictures of the media mogul dressed as Antoinette, surrounded by pink cakes.17 The phrase first appeared in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1770), where he recounts that he heard a “great princess” in a bake shop utter it.18 Yet, at the time of his writing, Antoinette was still a child and had not yet been crowned the Queen of France.19 Rather, it became linked to her nearly fifty years later as part of a campaign to underscore how uncaring she was regarding the plights of those less fortunate.20 Her critics portrayed her as a woman lusting for opulence, seemingly fed on the depravity of those most wretched, and ultimately responsible for the fall of the French monarchy. Historians as early as 1843 debunked this correlation as nothing more than fictitious rumors.21 Originally, the phrase was: “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,” or “Let them eat brioche,” a puffy golden French bread known for its concentration of flour and egg. In the eighteenth century, bread was an important staple. Historian Linda Civitello details that bread “was a source of 17 Christine Lennon, “Kylie Jenner Is Having Her Cake and Eating It Too,” Harper's BAZAAR, February 4, 2020, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/celebrity/a30680231/kylie-jenner-interview-2020/. 18 See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen, Reprint (New York: Penguin Books, 1953), 215-60. 19 Marie Antoinette became Queen of France in 1774 after the death of King Louis XV in the same year. 20 For a time, historians speculated that this quotation was directly linked to Antoinette by revolutionaries. However, given that it first appears in print nearly fifty years later, this is fictitious. Additionally, biographer Antonia Fraser affirms that it is unlikely that Antoinette would make this remark as she was kind towards her subjects despite her opulent way of living. For a discussion of the improbability of Marie Antoinette uttering this phrase, see Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 135. 21 John M. Cunningham, “Did Marie-Antoinette Really Say ‘Let Them Eat Cake’?,” Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., March 3, 2016), https://www.britannica.com/story/did-marie-antoinette-really-say-let-them-eat-cake. 6 nutrition, providing most of the daily calories, but it also represented health and well-being, the French Identity, and the French religion, Catholicism.”22 On average, a French worker in the eighteenth century spent approximately half of his wages on bread.23 If the translation in English had read as “brioche” and thus, “bread,” instead of cake, Antoinette would not be considered so reprehensible; she would only be promoting the dietary staple of France. While several French cakes use brioche as a base, the phrase has come to mean an additional disregard for nutritional sustenance, especially because the sugar content is much higher for cake. The subtle shift of the meaning towards a sugary baked good offers a hermeneutic window into Marie Antoinette’s broader historiography.24 Recorded history only establishes sugar as a dietary staple in the last few centuries. First introduced to Europe in 1319 as a luxury good, sugar was common household item by the eighteenth century, regardless of social status.25 This shift from delicacy to a common household staple is concurrent with two primary cultural shifts: European colonial expansion and the founding of plantations in tropical climates. Anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz writes that, A single source of satisfaction —sucrose extracted from the sugar cane—for what appears to be a widespread, perhaps even universal, human liking for sweetness became established in European taste preferences at a time when European power, military might, and economic initiative were transforming the world. That source linked Europe and many colonial areas from the fifteenth century onward, the passage of centuries only underlining its importance even while politics changed. And, conversely, what the metropolises produced the colonies consumed.26 22 Linda Civitello, Cuisine and Culture: A History of Food and People, Third ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2011), 204. 23 This would abruptly change when failed grain crops skyrocketed bread prices to astronomical proportions in 1788 and 1789, setting the stage for eve of the French Revolution. See Lisa Bramen, “When Food Changed History: The French Revolution,” Smithsonian Magazine (Smithsonian Institution, July 14, 2010), https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts- culture/when-food-changed-history-the-french-revolution-93598442/. 24 Musicologist Lawrence Kramer uses the term “hermeneutic window” to describe intersections both inside and outside music where cultural association can occur. See Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice: 1800-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1-20. 25 Civitello, Cuisine and Culture, 131-32. 26 Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power (New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1985), xxv. 7 Thriving at the expense of enslaved workers forced to work grueling hours, these plantations began to shape the world's economic infrastructure, with France at the helm. Indeed, sugar played a significant role in the shaping of the modern world. By the time Antoinette was crowned Queen of France, France’s sugar empire represented fifteen percent of the monarchy’s wealth.27 Embracing the famous association between Antoinette, cake, and excess, auteur Sofia Coppola begins her film Marie Antoinette (2006) by surrounding the queen with copious amount of pink and decadent sweets. Moreover, this reference to “Let them eat cake” is a thread in the film, linking several episodes. Coppola incorporates cake into the dialogue as characters gossip about the Queen, implying that “she looks like a little piece of cake.” Later in the film, during a shopping montage, Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” alludes to the ties between sugary confections and excessive spending. By strategically incorporating these references, Coppola draws attention to the cultural significance of this phrase while simultaneously exploring the broader decadence and excess of the French monarchy. While “Let them eat cake” continues to impact our understanding of the period, I aim to show that this phrase holds much more than we have previously perceived. In this chapter, I consider how the movie’s soundscape connects Marie Antoinette to the colonial empire of the Ancien Régime. As journalist Howard W. French argues in Born in Blackness, illuminating these nuanced junctures of power is just one example of recent efforts to rectify “a centuries-long process of diminishment, trivialization, and erasure of Africans and other people of African descent from the story of the modern world.”28 Even in a film focused exclusively on powerful white figures, connections to the broader Francophone world cannot be ignored. 27 Howard W. French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021), 353-54. 28 French, Born in Blackness, 3. 8 Accusations of whitewashing have plagued several of Sofia Coppola’s films. As pop culture writer Kristen Lopez concludes, “Her films are incredibly white and privileged, leading to valid critiques of her work being inaccessible and aimed at white feminism.”29 Until her most recent film, On the Rocks (2020), starring Rashida Jones and Bill Murray, most prominent actors in her films were white. With the release in 2017 of The Beguiled, a movie set in during the American Civil War which also starred Marie Antoinette actress Kirsten Dunst, movie critics were quick to point out the complete removal of Mattie: an enslaved Black woman included in the original film.30 When discussing the controversy, Coppola stated that “I did not want to perpetuate an objectionable stereotype…Moreover, I felt that to treat slavery as a side-plot would be insulting.”31 Yet, even narratives narrowly concerned with white characters cannot escape traces of globalized networks from the era of colonialism and beyond. In Marie Antoinette, Coppola cast only two men of color and with non-speaking roles. While it is a haunting reminder that race relations in the Francophone world continue to be elided, they inspire us to investigate the history enabling the presence of men of color at the French court. The film’s musical elements likewise point indirectly to the colonial structure of the Old Regime. Although not explicitly acknowledged in the film, this layer of musical elements invites critical questions about assimilation and resistance through lyrics that depict sugar consumption, the featuring of New Wave’s Burundi Beat, and the uncredited appearance of Joseph Bologne, the famous eighteenth-century Black Francophone composer. Rather than quietly assimilated into the 29 Kristen Lopez, “Why Sofia Coppola's 'On The Rocks' Could Change Her Directing Game,” Forbes, January 17, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristenlopez/2019/01/17/sofia-coppola-directing/?sh=7d6db0c37b5b. 30 Devon Ivie, “Sofia Coppola Says Not Including an African-American Character in The Beguiled ‘Comes From Respect,’” Vulture, July 15, 2017, https://www.vulture.com/2017/07/sofia-coppola-addresses-beguiled-african- american-backlash.html. 31 Devon Ivie, “Sofia Coppola Says Not Including an African-American Character in The Beguiled ‘Comes From Respect.’” 9 texture of the story, these elements assert themselves and invite resistance against their erasure from historiography. Examining musical elements that cannot be assimilated, Megan L. Lavengood coins the term “novelty layer” as an expansion of theorist Allan Moore’s work.32 Moore analyzed pop music into four distinct layers: “the explicit beat layer, the functional bass layer, the melodic layer, and the harmonic filler layer.”33 Lavengood points to an additional “novelty” layer that “compromises instruments whose timbral characteristics are more resistant to blending with the rest of the ensemble.”34 Moreover, Lavengood’s addition to Moore’s theoretical framework accounts for the frequent usage of world instruments and global sound in the 1980s. Indeed, this fifth novel layer stands out in such a way that a new analytical structure is needed to understand how its presence affects the sonic parameters of different songs that use these global acoustics. While Adam and the Ant’s novelty layer in “Kings of the Wild Frontier” is a starting point for this analysis, I show that several aspects of this film likewise offer unassimilable elements that invite us to think about eighteenth-century globalized networks. Danielle Skeehan’s acoustic analysis of the documentation of the Atlantic slave trade offers another useful scaffold.35 By re-examining these archives, the sounds of African captives that are recorded transform into a vehicle that “continues to punctuate the narrative.”36 As she argues, these records (slave trade’s systematic documentation) often serve as evidence for the suppression and eradication of African voices, cultures, and resistance. However…anything but silent spaces… (instead) an avenue through which to understand the lived experience of those who did not leave behind their own records… resisted processes of dehumanization.37 32 Lavengood uses the term novelty to express the quality of being new and original. 33 Megan L. Lavengood, “The Cultural Significance of Timbre Analysis: A Case Study in 1980s Pop Music, Texture, and Narrative,” Music Theory Online 26, no.3 (2020), https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.26.3.3. 34 Lavengood, “The Cultural Significance of Timbre Analysis.” 35 Danielle Skeehan, “Black Atlantic Acoustemologies and the Maritime Archive,” in Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity, ed. Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne G. Cusick (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021), 107-33. 36 Skeehan, “Black Atlantic Acoustemologies and the Maritime Archive,” 108. 37 Skeehan, “Black Atlantic Acoustemologies and the Maritime Archive,” 109. 10 I use Skeehan’s lens to attend to “punctuations” in Coppola’s film. As Coppola herself has been accused of suppressing African voices and cultures through whitewashing, I show in this chapter that musical traces in the film, likely unintentionally, point to these missing elements. Indeed, although sonic indications of colonialism and Black voices are never explicitly acknowledged in the film, their presences serve as resistance to total historical erasure. This chapter joins a growing body of literature seeking that uses music, performance, and the theatre as vehicles to explore colonial relations and diversify the traditional historiography of Western music. In the 2021 collection Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity, the authors challenge the “colonial fantasy” and “cultural supremacy” of European sound in an era where “an unprecedented number of people, objects, and ideas moved around the globe.”38 By challenging expectations and thus conventional historiography, the authors carve out space for marginalized voices in musical production and consumption. Published in 2021, Jeffrey M. Leichman and Karine Bénac-Giroux’s edited collection Colonialism and slavery in performance: Theatre and the eighteenth-century French Caribbean argues that, by viewing performances as microcosms of their historical moments in the eighteenth century, we can view the “conceptualization of theatre as a crucial site for the articulation of national identity in the context of early modern empires.” 39 Another example, From Plantation to Paradise? Cultural Politics and Musical Theatre in French Slave Colonies, 1764-1789, contributes to French colonial historiography by analyzing enslaved and freed Black theatrical actors in three French colonies: Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue.40 The author illuminates how involuntary bondage in French colonies financed musical production and the 38 Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne G. Cusick, eds., Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021), 2-3. 39 Karine Bénac-Giroux and Jeffrey M. Leichman, “Colonialism and Slavery in Performance: Theatre and the Eighteenth-Century French Caribbean,” in Colonialism and Slavery in Performance: Theatre and the Eighteenth-Century French Caribbean, ed. Jeffrey M. Leichman and Karine Bénac-Giroux (Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press, 2021), 5. 40 David Powers, From Plantation to Paradise? Cultural Politics and Musical Theatre in French Slave Colonies, 1764-1789 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014). 11 wealth of the monarchy. These recent works offer space to analyze French colonial dynamics and musical evidence in tandem. Likewise, in this chapter, I connect the film’s visual and sonic cues to France’s early modern colonial history, examining the New Wave musical rhythm referred to as Burundi Beat in Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not In It” and Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy,” as well as the uncredited appearance of an actor portraying Black composer Joseph Bologne to examine the portrayal and influence of marginalized voices. By attending to these specific musical elements, we find that the soundscape of Marie Antoinette portrays the complex power dynamics that shaped France’s history and its empire. It can remind us that African enslavement and foreign “conquest” were pivotal to the story of France's accumulation of power during the eighteenth century. The Colonial Empire of France41 Almost three-hundred years before Marie Antoinette was born and became Queen of France, Europe made first recorded contact with the Americas in 1492. In a world where nations were in a constant battle over economic, geographic, and religious dominance, the possibility of additional land intensified these divisions. As American historian Jill Lepore notes, “For centuries, the kings and queens of Europe had found over how to divvy up North America, as if the land were a cake to be carved.”42 France, like Spain, Britain, and other powerful monarchies in Europe, viewed Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” as an opportunity for expansion of territory and monetary wealth.43 41 Using empire to describe French colonialism before the nineteenth century is a recent historiographic consideration. It was not until 1770, the same year that Antoinette and Louis-Auguste were married, that France was officially called an empire, negatively at that, in any official writing. At the time, France considered its locations outside of its hexagonal mainland as “unsorted collection(s) of people and possibilities.” Kenneth J. Banks argues that the unification of language, law, and usage of the marines are just a few considerations that qualify France as an empiric nation. See Kenneth J. Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713-1763 (Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014), 3-13. 42 Jill Lepore, These Truths A History of the United States (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018), 65. 43 Although France continued to expand its colonial outposts past the eighteenth century, this chapter solely focuses on colonies through the reign of Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI. 12 On the heels of other European nations, France moved swiftly to gain territory abroad. In the first half of the sixteenth century, explorers Jacques Cartier and Giovanni da Verrazano claimed land in North America for the French empire.44 By 1605, Sieur de Monts and Pierre de Gua founded the first permanent settlement in modern-day Nova Scotia, Port Royal. Several new settlements quickly followed, including Quebec in 1608.45 France began a robust fur trade with the area’s Indigenous nations, the Wendat confederacy, quickly establishing the economic advantages of the Americas.46 Although the number of French citizens who migrated across the ocean to settle in what we now consider Canada was relatively small (less than three-hundred) between the founding of Port Royal and the founding of Montreal in 1640, these settlements became the backbone of what is considered New France.47 While New France was developing on the North American continent, France began its Caribbean expansion into the West Indies. In 1624, a Norman nobleman landed on what is now Saint Christopher Island.48 Upon returning to France, the nobleman secured funds from the cardinal under conditions that religious conversion of Natives, settler placement, and crown control was guaranteed.49 France had “settled” Guadeloupe and Martinique within the next twenty years. Additionally, plantation farming began on “neighboring Dominica, Saint Barthélemy, Sainte Croix, Saint Martin, Granada, and Tobago.”50 Sugar, underpinned by involuntary bondage of the slave trade, emerged as France’s most profitable export on these islands.51 44 Lisa J. M. Poirier, Religion, Gender, and Kinship in Colonial New France (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016), 2. 45 E. R. Adair, “France and the Beginnings of New France,” The Canadian Historical Review 25, no. 3 (September 1944): 246-78. muse.jhu.edu/article/624394. 46 Poirier’s monograph describes the lived experiences of the French and Wendat confederacy during this time. Including establishing a fur trade, France adamantly attempted to convert the Indigenous population to Roman Catholicism. See Poirier, Religion, Gender, and Kinship in Colonial New France. 47 Adair, “France and the Beginnings of New France.” 48 Saint Christopher Island at the time was already considered “claimed” by the British. Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea, 17. 49 In the first year, it is estimated that 532 French settlers were sent to the Caribbean. Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea, 18. 50 Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea, 18. 51 Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea, 18. 13 In 1699, France slowly began expanding across the North American continent and named the territory around the Mississippi River Louisiana after their sovereign monarch, King Louis XIV. By the mid-eighteenth century, New France's population in Canada and Louisiana paled in comparison to the population of the thirteen British colonies. While the thirteen British colonies had an estimated population of 1.5 million, Louisiana was home to only 10,000 French settlers, and Canada had approximately 60,000, making up just 4.6% of the total population of British territorial holds.52 France’s foothold on mainland North America was short-lived, as France and Britain’s fight for territorial dominance eventually led to the French and Indian war. Escalating globally, countries began to side with either France or Britain in what is now called the Seven Years’ War. With France ultimately defeated on the North American mainland in 1763, France gave up all its territories on the continent: Canada and land east of the Mississippi to the British and land to the west to Spain. 53 Merely eight years old, Antoinette would be placed upon a throne that was still reeling from the ramifications of this global war. No longer possessing territories on the North American mainland, France quickly shifted its attention to its territorial holdings in the Caribbean and the ability to obtain high yields of profit through sugar plantations. The Power of Sweetness54 Expanding French territory by removing Indigenous natives from their lands, France grew economically by capitalizing on sugar cane, a crop originated in New Guinea that was not feasibly grown in Europe. Since European countries are not tropical, colonial expansion into tropical territories catapulted sugar plantations, as sugar cane is a tropical plant that was extremely labor 52 Lepore, These Truths, 69. 53 Lepore, These Truths, 79-80. 54 See Mintz, Sweetness and Power. 14 intensive and required nearly year-round labor. Describing the labor-intensive process of cultivating and harvesting sugar cane in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue, historian C. L. R. James remarked The sugar plantations demanded an exacting and ceaseless labour. The tropical earth is baked hard by the sun. Round every “carry” of land intended for cane it was necessary to dig a large ditch to ensure circulation of air. Young canes required attentions for the first three or four months and grew to maturity in 14 or 18 months. Cane could be planted and would grow at any time of the year, and the reaping of one crop was the signal for the immediate digging of ditches and the planting of another. Once cut they had to be rushed to the mill lest the juice became acid by fermentation. The extraction of the juice and manufacture of the raw sugar went on for three weeks a month, 16 or 18 hours a day, for seven or eight months in the year.55 Indeed, this strenuous process would quickly spread throughout the world’s tropical colonial holdings, worked by enslaved people forced onto ships from Africa. Global powers, including France, were quick to utilize their new tropical holdings to begin producing sugar plantations at an alarming rate. The first documented sugar plantations appeared in the early sixteenth century, as Portugal began to send enslaved Native Americans to Brazil to produce sugar.56 After France began to populate islands in the Caribbean during the middle of the seventeenth century, sugar plantations soon followed. By the eighteenth century, the combination of forced labor and cash crops in France’s Caribbean plantations produced high volumes of profits. Where there were 35 recorded at the century’s end, by 1739, Saint Domingue “was already the world’s wealthiest slave colony, with the number of sugar mills reaching 450.”57 This mass sugar production eventually granted France economic dominance during the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the century, Britain was the foremost sugar producer, but by 1740, the high production volume in Saint-Domingue placed France on the top of the economic 55 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, Vintage Books ed. (New York City, NY: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1989), 10. 56 French, Born in Blackness, 168. 57 Originally an output of Spain, France acquired Saint Domingue in 1697. Before the production of sugar, Europeans on the colonial supported themselves through the fur trade and occasional piracy. French, Born in Blackness, 353. 15 ladder for sugar and eventually coffee.58 At this time, sugar production in the colony was so massive that Bordeaux was processing over 10,000 tons of raw sugar, making it a prime location for trade throughout Europe.59 As Howard W. French remarks regarding this period of wealth, It has been estimated that between 1716 and 1787, a period that covers France’s greatest boom years in the eighteenth century, fully 15 percent of its economic growth derived from its Caribbean empire. No fewer than a million of the French king’s subjects depended directly on the colonial trade for their livelihoods. Saint Domingue alone generated as much trade as the entire United States.60 The ability to sustain such massive amounts of production relied entirely on the enslavement of people from Africa. France and the West African Slave Trade Although France prided itself on its fourteenth-century Freedom Principle, which outlawed involuntary bondage, the birth of the French colonial empire in the seventeenth century and the Code Noir, established in 1684, legalized indefinite slavery of Africans in the colonies.61 As Sue Peabody argues, these complex colonial relationships negate the long-held belief that “There are No Slaves in France,”62 as no slaves were allowed on the hexagonal mainland but these rules did not apply to the many colonies that France had established outside of its European borders by Marie Antoinette’s reign.63 France did not have any slave colonies before 1640. By the middle of the seventeenth century, France began to follow suit with other European powers with the creation of slave ports. 64 58 Pernille Røge, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa: C. 1750-1802 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 6. 59 Kehinde Andrews, The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World (New York: Bold Type Books, 2021), 72. 60 French, Born in Blackness, 353-354. 61 Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 67-79. 62 Sue Peabody, “There are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 63 There are a few legal loopholes that allowed for slaves in France that are discussed in Peabody, “There are No Slaves in France.” 64 Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (New York: Verso, 1988), 5. 16 By 1666, Nantes became a French trade port, and more ports were quickly established in West Africa.65 France began the purchase and trafficking of Black bodies from this area en masse, many originating from the Kongo region.66 In 1770, over a century later, France would rank in the top three nations in the world for their enslaved population.67 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, France had several colonial locations, but the slave trade in Saint-Domingue was one of, if not the highest, location of African importation on record in the eighteenth century. Howard W. French observes that “the French thirst for new wealth from sugar, indigo, cotton, and coffee was such that in the decade prior to the uprising (Haitian Revolution) the volume of slaves brought to Saint Domingue tripled compared with the level of the previous decade.”68 In 1759, a majority of the staggering 1,587 ships that docked in Saint-Domingue were used for the importation of Africans, resulting in some 864,000 Africans being documented as imported into the French colony during this century.69 By the 1780s, the total population of Saint-Domingue was estimated to be 452,000, with approximately 392,000 being enslaved with two-thirds being born in Africa.70 This is in stark contrast to the population of nonwhites in Metropolitan France, where only 3000 out of over 25 million citizens were nonwhite. 71 These statistics immediately precede the Haitian Revolution, revolts between 1791 and 1804 that granted the enslaved population their freedom. However, the attempt to control Africans would continue. As Robin Mitchell describes in Vénus Noire, by the end 65 Andrews, The New Age of Empire, 71. 66 French, Born in Blackness, 355. 67 Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 5. 68 French, Born in Blackness, 354. 69 Andrews, The New Age of Empire, 71-72 and Doris Y. Kadish, “Introduction,” in Slavery in the Caribbean Francophone World: Distant Voices, Forgotten Acts, Forged Identities (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 2. 70 Kadish, “Introduction,” 4-5. 71 Robin Mitchell, Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2020), 16. 17 of the nineteenth century, “France had not only expanded its hold on northern Africa but controlled more territory in West Africa than any other European power.”72 Outside of the French colonial microcosm and its demand for free labor, Black people continued to be exploited particularly as emblems of luxury. For example, the “eighteenth-century French nobility delighted in keeping black children as the equivalent of house pets.” 73 Furthermore, it became a cultural practice for officials and planters to gift Black children to higher-ranked citizens, including Marie Antoinette. In 1787, approximately thirteen years into her Queendom, she was gifted Jean-Almicar, a Black boy no older than six from Senegal, the westernmost point of Africa. There is no record of what happened to Jean-Almicar, like millions of people victim to involuntary bondage. 74 Focusing of the visual and musical evidence present in Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, I will use the remainder of the chapter to depict how even accounts centering white figures cannot be told without the almost invisible presence of other, marginalized voices. 72 Mitchell, Vénus Noire, 69. 73 Mitchell, Vénus Noire, 29. 74 Mitchell, Vénus Noire, 29. 18 Visual Indication of Foreign Conquest Figure 1.1 King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette’s brother, Emperor Joseph II, discuss marriage bed strategies while marveling at an elephant in the Versailles Menagerie © Sony Pictures/courtesy Screenmusings (1106).75 Throughout the film, several visual clues allude to France and its foreign ties. For instance, Joseph II and Louis XVI discuss the French king’s failure to consummate his marriage as they gaze at an elephant in the Versailles menagerie. The menagerie itself, which was one of the first architectural structures of Versailles, allowed for royalty to show off foreign animals to visitors as a sign of conquest and power. As the elephant coyly offers its trunk between the lacquered bars of the menagerie, Joseph II marvels, “Magnificent. We have a female elephant in our Austrian menagerie.” The presence of an elephant was both a physical and symbolic indicator of France’s ties to colonialism, as elephants are not native European animals;76 elephants’ natural habitat is both Asia and Africa. While the scene is more explicitly about Louis’s duty to produce an heir, the appearance 75 Screenmusings, accessed April 20, 2022, https://screenmusings.org/movie/dvd/Marie-Antoinette/pages/Marie- Antoinette-1106.htm. 76 Louise E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 19 of an elephant in Marie Antoinette is a reminder of foreign conquest. What it hides is that France exploited both human and animal bodies of the African continent.77 Eighteenth-Century Wunderkammern Where King Louis XVI used a menagerie as an example of his authoritarian control, French elites often exerted power through natural history cabinets, often referred to as "collections de diverses curiosités" or Wunderkammern.78 Thought of as precursors to modern-day museums, these cabinets provided spaces to display various artifacts, artworks, and natural objects in aesthetically pleasing manners to demonstrate wealth and dominance to visitors. Moreso, cabinets gave the elite control over miniature, constructed versions of the world. Although these cabinets were not exclusive to France, their importance in society was widespread. Approximately 450 of these cabinets existed in Paris during the eighteenth century, with even more spaced throughout the French countryside. In these collections, wares were evaluated based on their worth, splendor, and rarity. 79 As Rachel Poliquin expresses, “To collect is not to mirror the world but to remake it, and cabinets of wonder did not create mundane, ordinary worlds but worlds filled with fantastic creatures and infinite possibility.”80 Furthermore, “curiosities were collected because they acted as portals through which Europeans could experience and, in a sense, possess exotic lands, different societies, and outlandish creatures without traveling.”81 As Bettina Dietz and Thomas Nutz argue, 77 Given Louis’s predilection for keys and the enormous padlock upon the menagerie, Joseph kindly uses a lock and key metaphor to offer some sex education to his brother-in-law. 78 Rachel Poliquin, The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 57-66 and Bettina Dietz and Thomas Nutz, “Collections Curieuses: The Aesthetics of Curiosity and Elite Lifestyle in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” Eighteenth-Century Life 29, no. 3 (January 2005): 44-75, https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-29-3-44. 79 While most collections existed as a symbol of status and prestige, some collections were literal manifestations of conquest. One documented collection proudly displayed wares from an expedition to Senegal, a western African colony whose "ownership" was traded between French and British hands before being promised to France in the 1783 Treaty of Versailles.79 Another example, arguably one of the most renowned, belonged to Sir Hans Sloane. His collection spanned eleven large rooms and attracted visitors from across Europe to marvel at the vast array that included thousands of whole and fragmented animals from (but not limited to) New Guinea, China, and Buenos Aires. 79 Sloane is just one example of a collector who had a passion for “exotic” goods. See Dietz and Nutz, “Collections Curieuses,” 48. 80 Poliquin, The Breathless Zoo, 16. 81 Poliquin, The Breathless Zoo, 18. 20 the Wunderkammer “proves to have been a distinctive prestige-generating practice that presupposed the possession of a considerable fortune…(and) presented themselves…in an elaborate performance of style, within the framework of a competitive social spectacle.”82 Though France was steadfast in its assurance that “there are no slaves in France,” during the eighteenth century, cabinets and menageries represent broader practices of extracting and exploiting resources.83 These practices of collecting and displaying curiosities provide a helpful context for understanding the film. Just as Wunderkammer showcased the collection of exotic goods and, thus, exotic lands for Western audiences, the film employs a similar approach by collecting musical examples from other countries and deploying them in Western music for Western audiences. Visual and Sonic Pairings of Colonialism Figure 1.2 The opening scene inserted into the credits featuring Marie Antoinette accompanied by “Natural’s Not In It” © Sony Pictures/courtesy Screenmusings (0003).84 82 Dietz and Nutz, “Collections Curieuses,” 46. 83 This phrase has been disproven in recent scholarship as rampant manumission lawsuits did equate to the absence of slavery. See Peabody, "There Are No Slaves in France”. 84 Screenmusings, accessed February 27, 2023, https://screenmusings.org/movie/dvd/Marie-Antoinette/pages/Marie- Antoinette-0003.htm. 21 While Wunderkammern were examples of the French elite’s ties to colonialism and extraction of resources, Marie Antoinette emphasizes France’s colonial connections in the eighteenth century, particularly in the procuring of sugar, through music pared with sugar confections. This is particularly evident in the movie’s opening scene, where Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not In It” plays, and the utilization of Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” during a shopping montage later in the film. The incorporation of these songs, through their lyrics, highlights the role that sugar played in the economic structure of France, particularly the lavish lifestyle of Marie Antoinette. The opening credits, featuring bold pink text against a black background, are broken up by a short scene that enforces the origins of sugar, as copious amounts of pink and decadent sweets surround Antoinette.85 Using Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not In It,” the scene seems to invite audiences to think of the infamous phrase associated with the Queen. The color pink in this scene is intentional as pink was a color of luxury in the eighteenth-century French court and symbolized power and wealth.86 As a maid attends her, she lounges, casually dipping her finger into a cake and licking off the icing. But then, she turns to nod at the camera. With this gesture, Coppola invites the audience to maintain a critical distance from Marie Antoinette’s conventional historiography. Anna Backman Rogers writes that, “Within thirty minutes, the viewer already understands that this is a film that will deal in the politics of propaganda and consumerism from a contemporary perspective.”87 The modern music reminds us that we are in the present, looking at the past, and not to give ourselves to the narrative as if it is unfolding as it really happened. 85 Given that Sofia Coppola wrote the movie as an adolescent coming of age, the specific colors here allude to the abundance of black and pink among young women during the early 2000s. Additionally, as Anna Backman Rogers implies, the font indicates the Sex Pistols’ album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, and tabloid newspapers. Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 128. 86 Tegan Huskinson, “Pink! A Very Rococo Colour,” Art UK (Public Catalogue Foundation, May 9, 2022), https://artuk.org/discover/stories/pink-a-very-rococo-colour. 87 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 128. 22 Gang of Four’s lyrics provides a link to the social and political turmoil that characterized late-eighteenth century France; it highlights the struggles for power and social reform that inspired revolutions while simultaneously foreshadowing the rapid decline of Antoinette's luxurious lifestyle.88 Additionally, Gang of Four’s band name references “the four notorious Chinese Communist Party officials accused of treasonous crimes during the Cultural Revolution.” 89 Rooted in principles of British Marxism, the band’s lyrics emphasize the contradictory relationships between social classes in capitalism. Specifically, the lyrics of “Natural’s Not In It” play upon these economic and class dynamics. Indeed, the band’s broader output speaks to themes relevant to Marie Antoinette. In an article for The Washington Post, Andy Beta explains how Gang of Four’s “lyrics and imagery critique colonialism, capitalism and consumerism.”90 Playing for approximately a minute and a half, the lyrics from the opening sequence are: The problem of leisure What to do for pleasure Ideal love, a new purchase A market of the senses The problem of leisure What to do for pleasure91 Coercion of the senses We are not so gullible Our great expectations A future for the good 88 While the film shows thousands of angry French citizens protesting at the palace, and the final shot shows a still frame of the royal bedroom in the aftermath of destruction caused by the angry mob, it ends before the most gruesome phase of the French Revolution unfolds. In the final scenes, both Marie and Louis are seen leaving Versailles by carriage, uncertain of what lies ahead. 89 Led by Mao Zedong and his political leaders, the Cultural Revolution sought to purge any capitalist ideology from Chinese society to preserve communism. Andy Beta, “Gang of Four Changed the Way Punk Sounded and What It Could Say. A New Box Set Reveals the Peak of Their Power.,” The Washington Post, March 12, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/gang-of-four-box-set-77-81/2021/03/11/70055d80-7d1f- 11eb-a976-c028a4215c78_story.html and Richard Curt Kraus, The Cultural Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 90 Kevin J. H. Dettmar, Entertainment! (New York: Bloomsburg Publishing, 2014), 24 and Beta, “Gang of Four Changed the Way Punk Sounded and What It Could Say.” 91 This line denotes lyrics that are featuring during the short scene of Antoinette on the chaise inserted into the credits. 23 Fornication makes you happy No escape from society Natural is not in it Your relations are of power We all have good intentions But all with strings attached92 While Anna Backman Rogers contends that this scene serves to set the film’s intention and “engage(s) directly with its generic legacy through culturally codified images,” I would like to expand on this idea by suggesting the unification of lyrics and imagery illustrate “relations (are) of power” with “good intentions but all with strings attached.” 93 Through this reading, the strings attached were the complicity in empire-building, exploitation of resources, and the enslavement of Africans. This scene illuminates a dichotomy where the luxurious life of Marie Antoinette is supported through France’s ties to the slave trade through its colonial economy. Pairing “Natural’s Not In It” with past luxury emphasizes the long-standing legacy of systems of tyranny. With lyrics that critique capitalism and consumerism, this opening scene challenges audience members to examine the cost of overabundance and opulence and, furthermore, the lasting impacts of colonialism on both contemporary and historical narratives. In another scene, Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” also underscores Antoinette’s spending. When a member of the monarchy births a son, Antoinette privately weeps as the pressure of producing an heir overwhelms her. Seeking comfort and solace, the scene shifts to Antoinette indulging in retail therapy with her friends. While shown a plethora of fabrics, shoes, and hairstyles, they feast on sweets, drink, and even gamble.94 In Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure, Rogers proclaims that this scene critiques postfeminism. In A Critical Companion to Sofia Coppola, Naaman 92 Given that some lyrics are omitted, these lyrics were explicitly cut and chosen for use in the movie. 93 Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola, 128-29. 94 This scene is famous for including of a pair of purple Converse sneakers hidden among the historically replicated shoes, nodding to the anachronistic nature of the film. 24 Wood and Christopher Booth expand on Rogers’s argument by stating this “reckless spending” is “her attempt to create an alternative identity, in part through elements of high and low fashion.”95 Conversely, I think that the visual juxtaposition of wealth and sweets paired with a song whose lyrics indulge in the desire for sugar provides a lens to examine the colonial conquests of France and the means for Antoinette’s excessive spending. Indeed, the musical soundscape and Coppola’s visual perception invite these interpretations while simultaneously reflecting a collecting tendency found in early modern Wunderkammer. New Wave and Burundi Beat Figure 1.3 Author’s Notation of Burundi Beat in “Kings of the Wild Frontier” by Adam and the Ants. The unique rhythmic structure of several of the soundtrack’s anachronistic songs illuminate France’s colonial past. Coppola aimed to curate a soundtrack featuring music from her adolescence, eventually leaning into tracks from New Wave artists, a post-punk movement that was significant in the late 1970s and 1980s for its dance-like rhythms and more mainstream punk sound. This sound was deemed more suitable for radio consumption as “punk’s raw sound…was perceived in the United States as too confrontational for mainstream radio.”96 British musician Mike Steiphenson interplayed accompaniment onto “a performance by 25 drummers in a commune called Bukirasazi (located in East Africa), recorded in 1967 by French anthropologists and released on a compilation of Burundi music the following year” which resulted in 95 Naaman K. Wood and Christopher Booth, A Critical Companion to Sofia Coppola (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022), 112. 96 Theo Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?: Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 27. 25 the song “Burundi Black.”97 The track popularized what would be coined the Burundi Beat, a rhythm that became an essential framework of New Wave music. Similar to the involuntary bondage that fueled France’s immense profiting from sugar, Mike Stephenson never compensated the Bukirasazi drummers. Arguing for the musical ties between Burundi Beat and colonialism, musicologist Sophie Brady claims that the Burundi Beat in New Wave is: a newer, postcolonial form of exoticism and appropriation through which European and North American musicians and audiences tried to distance themselves from their colonial past by embracing African culture, while ultimately continuing to extract and consume musical material from former colonies. Ultimately, like most nonwestern music co-opted by western audiences, the adept integration of African music into mid-century European experimentalism reveals more about the entrainment of a colonial habitus within the “postcolonial” global north than it does about African musical life.98 In this vein, the usage of Burundi Beat in Marie Antoinette directly correlates France’s colonial ties in the eighteenth century and onwards. New Wave bands including Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow, two artists featured in the film, began using the sound to produce a more “exotic” and “tribal” sound.99 As music critic Robert Palmer argues, this beat became “the driving force and most distinctive ingredient in much of Adam Ant’s music and has been equally valuable to other British rockers.”100 Although the Republic of Burundi was never a French “conquest,” it was heavily affected by European imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.101 A holding of the 97 Alex Benson, “Burundi Beat: The Ants, Annabella and Appropriation,” Medium (Loop & Replay, September 30, 2019), https://medium.com/loopandreplay/burundi-beat-the-ants-annabella-and-appropriation-258a804a2176. 98 Sophie Brady, “Experimenting with Exoticism: Ocora Records and the Postcolonial Avant-Garde,” (paper presented at the American Musicological Society, Online, November 11, 2021), https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:41012/datastreams/CONTENT/content 99 Music manager Malcolm McLaren, who formed Adam and the Ants with lead singer Adam Ant, eventually kicked Adam to the curb. Stealing all of the Ants except for Adam, McLaren formed Bow Wow Wow with fourteen-year-old Annabella Lwin at the helm. 100 Robert Palmer, “The Pop Life; Latest British Invasion: 'The New Tribalism',” The New York Times, November 25, 1981, sec. C, p. 13. 101 Jack Palmer, Entanglements of Modernity, Colonialism and Genocide Burundi and Rwanda in Historical-Sociological Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2018). 26 German East Africa Company, Germany eventually ceded Burundi to Belgium at the end of the Great War. Additionally, Burundi did not gain its independence from Belgium until July 1, 1962. This was only five years before the ethnographic recording that would eventually morph into the Burundi Beat. Three distinct scenes in the film prominently feature Burundi Beat, illuminating the ties between French colonialism and Marie Antoinette’s soundscape. The first scene featuring this rhythm is the shopping montage with Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy.” By using Burundi Beat in its rhythmic foundation and pairing it with economic and sweet indicators, the ties between colonialism and the scene become clearer. The second scene, features another song by Bow Wow Wow, “Aphrodisiac.” It sounds as Antoinette and her friends are attending a masked ball, emphasizing the cost of luxury and extravagance on display. Additionally, this is the track that plays at the first meeting between Antoinette and her eventual lover, Count Axel Fersen. The third song that uses this beat in the film is “Kings of the Wild Frontier” by Adam and the Ants. While the next chapter will explore how the lyrical content of the song evokes stereotypes of Indigenous identity, another population directly impacted by France’s colonial ventures, it is worth noting that this song’s most recognizable feature is its use of Burundi Beat. “Kings of the Wild Frontier” Burundi Beat is featured in not one, but two songs where Antoinette engages in an extramarital affair, tying the thread between colonialism, the exotic, and conquest desire. As Marie Antoinette grows unsettled in her marriage, she eventually meets another man, Count Axel Fersen. At a masked ball where the pair first meet, Bow Wow Wow’s “Aphrodisiac” plays in the background, a song rhythmically structured with Burundi Beat, distant as if heard diegetically by the party-goers. Later in the film, the pair eventually consummate their relationship in two back-to-back scenes that feature “Kings of the Wild Frontier,” another song structured around Burundi Beat. In 27 these two short scenes, Antoinette’s body is presented as the wild frontier. At the same time, Count Fersen is positioned as its “king” as both sexual encounters (one unclothed while the other clothed) culminate with Fersen’s body on top of Antoinette’s, a frontier dominated by its king. As an Austrian outsider in a French monarchy, the body of Marie Antoinette in these scenes becomes another foreign conquest. Furthermore, “Kings of the Wild Frontier” is an example of Lavengood’s novelty layer as not one, but two drum sets evoke the Burundi Beat. Indeed, the Burundi Beat not only exemplifies world musicality, but the second drum set adds a novelty layer with its timbral characteristics, which occasionally both mirror and imitate world sounds. This relationship between New Wave and African drumbeats provides a microcosm of tension marked by ambivalence; “Kings of the Wild Frontier” is caught between several cultural hierarchies and resists conforming to just one. As I will illuminate in the second chapter, this song also appropriates and stereotypes Indigenous American identity. It exemplifies the continual legacy of colonialism and Eurocentrism on artistic expression. By evoking musical othering, “Kings of the Wild Frontier” as well as the two other songs that utilize Burundi Beat, “I Want Candy” and “Aphrodisiac,” these anachronistic songs reveal the resistance that is embedded within them. With this African rhythmic pattern at the forefront, we can begin to attune to the unassimilable sonic elements in these songs to consider the historical power dynamics they inspire us to consider. As Lavengood relays, particularly in “Kings of the Wild Frontier,” this fifth novel layer stands out in such a way a new analytical structure is needed to understand how its presence affects the sonic parameters of the song. Like Skeehan’s analysis of the slave trade archives and the exotic curiosities in Wunderkammer, Burundi Beat presents a sonic marker of Africa, consumed and exploited by both Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow. While the movie may not directly address France’s ties to Africa in the eighteenth century, sonic elements, including the Burundi Beat, continue to show reminds us that colonialism supported the opulence of 28 Marie Antoinette’s court and subsequently shapes her historiography in terms of foreignness and desire. Indeed, Burundi Beat underscores the “exotic” nature of Antoinette and Fersen’s affair. Scenes pairing Fersen and Burundi Beat paint him as a dominating, passionate, and more virile sexual partner in comparison to the inadequate King Louis XVI.102 Indeed, having both the scene where they meet and the scene where they consummate their relationship featuring Burundi Beat demonstrates a way white masculinity has appropriated idealizations of Black male sexuality to shore up Fersen’s virility when compared to the king’s “inadequacy.” As an Austrian “other,” Marie Antoinette becomes a stand-in for “virgin lands” and, troublingly, desiring conquest by the more virile Count Fersen. While the usage of Burundi Beat sonically underlines Black identity, the film also employs visual cues of Black identity through the presence of non-speaking Black actors. 102 Musically, rock’n’roll was one way that white men bolstered their masculinity through the performance of Black music. See Leerom Medovoi, “Mapping the Rebel Image: Postmodernism and the Masculinist Politics of Rock in the U.S.A,” Cultural Critique, no. 20 (1991): pp. 153-188, https://doi.org/10.2307/1354226. 29 Joseph Bologne and Non-Speaking Erasure “If you take to the stage, you will be erased.”– Chevalier103 Figure 1.4 The wedding of Marie Antoinette and Louis-Auguste featuring one of the two nonwhite background actors in the film © Sony Pictures/courtesy Screenmusings (0194).104 Wearing flashy purple regalia while the rest of the actors wear muted colors, the first of two nonwhite background actors appears in the background of the wedding between Marie Antoinette and Louise-Auguste. The film is known for its dazzling costumes and won the Oscar for costuming in 2007. Nevertheless, this actor is costumed so boldly against his peers, distinguishing him from his contemporaries. He not only appears taller than his contemporaries, but also is central to the shot. Moreover, the color purple has a longstanding association with luxury and regality.105 Although unnamed, his short yet notable appearance highlights another “punctuation” in a broader white- centric narrative. At the same time, the focus on this Black actor could potentially stress the negative implications—namely, the emerging racist assumption that Black people cannot be assimilated into 103 “CHEVALIER Trailer (2023),” YouTube video, November 7, 2022, 2:34, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWKUQpUvJB8 104 Screenmusings, accessed February 27, 2023 https://screenmusings.org/movie/dvd/Marie-Antoinette/pages/Marie- Antoinette-0194.htm. 105 Charlene Elliott, “Purple Pasts: Color Codification in the Ancient World,” Law & Social Inquiry 33, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 173–94, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-4469.2008.00097.x. 30 white culture. The next Black character in the film provides clearer contextual clues for thinking about Black presence at the French court. Figure 1.5 The Queen has a piano lesson with her tutor who is presumed to be Joseph Bologne, the Chavalier de Saint-Georges © Sony Pictures/courtesy Screenmusings (1065).106 The second non-speaking nonwhite character may be Joseph Bologne, the Chavalier de Saint-Georges. Although the movie credits give no indication of his appearance in the film, this is the most plausible possibility. His brief appearance is as follows: Antoinette plays a trill on the harpsichord while Bologne nods. Immediately interrupted by the news of her brother’s arrival, Antoinette thanks him before running to greet her sibling. Bologne quickly gets up, bows, and the camera cuts away to the sibling’s reunion. For a movie profoundly centered on music, it is interesting that a figure so enmeshed in the musical world of the Old Regime would be placed in the film as an acknowledgment yet only granted a few unspeaking and uncredited seconds. Born in 1745 on Guadeloupe, a French colonial outpost in the Caribbean, Bologne was the son of a wealthy white plantation owner and Nanon, an enslaved woman from the Senegalese region 106 Screenmusings, accessed February 20, 2023, https://screenmusings.org/movie/dvd/Marie-Antoinette/pages/Marie- Antoinette-1065.htm. 31 of Africa. Moving to France before the age of ten, his father wasted no time in establishing as many elite educational opportunities in France for his young son as possible. 107 These included both music lessons and fencing, two activities Bologne would flourish in.108 A prolific composer and violinist, he would become a promising figure in the Parisian music circle, though at times facing barriers because of his race. He was both soloist and eventual conductor of Les Concerts des Amateurs, a highly regarded orchestra until finances resulted in the orchestra’s dissolution. Afterwards, he became director of Le Concert Olympique. This orchestra would perform several concerts that Antoinette attended, including the premiere of Haydn’s Paris Symphonies in 1786. At one point, he was in consideration for the music director position at the Paris Opéra, but eventually withdrew his application after several of the company’s singers stated they would refuse to sing under a mixed- race director. Although many of his compositions would be lost during the French Revolution, historians have called him the “Black Mozart,” as a (racist) testament to his compositional abilities. As the producer and writer of the musical production The Chevalier Bill Barclay joked, “Chevalier was unfairly called the ‘Black Mozart,’ it should really be in many cases Mozart who should be called the ‘White Chevalier’.”109 In recent efforts to rectify the lack of diversity in the Western musical canon and to uplift those once silenced in the narrative of classical music, the life and works of Joseph Bologne are beginning to gain deserving traction.110 Once such effort is the upcoming theatrical release of Chevalier, a biopic set for release on April 21, 2023. Directed by Stephen Williams, Chevalier is, 107 Mullins, Lisa. “Exploring The Life Of Chevalier De Saint-Georges, The 'Black Mozart'.” WBUR. WBUR, August 19, 2019. https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/08/19/black-mozart-chevalier-de-saint-georges. 108 Gabriel Banat, “Saint-Georges [Saint-George], Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de,” Grove Music Online, ed. Dean Roote, accessed 1 March, 2023, https://doi-org.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.24316. 109 Maddy Shaw Roberts, “The Life of ‘Black Mozart’, 18th-Century Composer Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier De Saint- Georges,” Classic FM (Classic FM, July 1, 2020), https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/chevalier-de-saint- georges-joseph-boulogne-black-mozart/. 110 Bologne is neither a footnote nor mentioned in Oxford’s History of Western Music. See Richard Taruskin, Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: The Oxford History of Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 32 inspired by the incredible true story of composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint- Georges. The illegitimate son of an African slave and a French plantation owner, Bologne (Kelvin Harrison Jr. in a tour de force performance) rises to improbable heights in French society as a celebrated violinist-composer and fencer, complete with an ill-fated love affair and a falling out with Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton) and her court.111 This film aims to illuminate one of the most promising Western musical figures of Marie Antoinette’s lifetime.112 Although unnamed in the film, his inclusion in Marie Antoinette highlights a tension between obscurity and presence in the historiography of the eighteenth-century French court and its colonial ties to the broader Francophone world. Conclusion In this chapter, I have used the cultural legitimacy of “Let them eat cake” and its appearance in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette as a springboard for consideration of sugar, and thus, France’s colonial empire in the eighteenth-century. While this history is never explicitly acknowledged, the lyrics alluding to sugar consumption, usage of Burundi Beat, and appearance of an unnamed actor who is most likely Joseph Bologne exemplify this history. Where France claimed that there were “no slaves in France,” they still were primary contributors to the massive growth of the Atlantic Slave Trade, leading to substantial economic power from their colonial outputs in the Caribbean and beyond. Where Danielle Skeehan challenges historians to re-assess archives for ways in which marginalized voices punctuate the narrative, examining Marie Antoinette through this vantage points allots for an opportunity to reassess historiographical narratives. By looking past the main actors and assessing details often assigned to footnotes and margins, new narratives begin to emerge that challenge those centering traditional realms of power. 111 “Chevalier,” Searchlight Pictures, accessed March 2, 2023, https://www.searchlightpictures.com/chevalier/. 112 “Chevalier,” Rotten Tomatoes, accessed March 2, 2023, https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/chevalier_2022. 33 CHAPTER 2 “KINGS OF THE HONG KONG GARDEN”: NEW WAVE, RAMEAU, AND NON- EUROPEAN MUSICAL IDENTITY IN SOFIA COPPOLA’S MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006) Introduction Although hundreds of years apart, New Wave singers Adam Ant and Siouxsie Sioux and French operatic performers in Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Indes galantes share a common thread: they are artists who “embody” a foreign Other as part of their performance. Using Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) usage of these elements as a foundation, I trace the historical thread that connects these artists and their musical strategies to offer a deeper analysis of the film’s musical appropriation and the cultural work it performs. In his formative monograph Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, Indigenous scholar Dylan Robinson, a xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah) scholar, characterizes the desire to understand how Westerners have engaged with Indigenous identity through hungry listening.113 By seeking to know Indigenous people through their music, settlers transform Indigenous knowledge and culture into another natural resource to gain ownership over. Like the extraction of sugar exemplified in Chapter One, hungry listening becomes a listening positionality that places Indigenous culture as another minable resource.114 I explore this extractive and exploitative approach to music in the historical and musical examples that follow. In the eighteenth century, France interacted with numerous non-European cultures, including Asian and Indigenous American communities. France's exchanges were highly influenced by its imperialist and colonial ambitions and shaped by ideas about their own cultural superiority.115 113 Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). 114 This consideration of hungry listening is informed by Hu’s usage of hungry listening in “Chinese Ears, Delicate or Dull?” See Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening and Zhuqing (Lester) Hu, “Chinese Ears, Delicate or Dull? Toward a Decolonial Comparativism,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 74, no. 3 (2021): 501-569. 115 On example of this reframing, On Savage Shores, released in January of 2023, reframes Eurocentric narratives and Indigenous contact. As author Caroline Dodds Pennock emphasizes, it is not the “Old” World that influenced the 34 Reinforcing existing ideas of difference between European citizens and the rest of the world, composers sought to flesh out musical representations of Other as “savage, primitive, or monstrous.”116 Portraying the foreign Other on stage was not a new phenomenon exclusive to Rameau. The first recorded instance in France of the “foreign Other” in performance occurred at a dance at the Duchesse de Berry’s wedding party in 1393.117 A century and a half later in 1550, fifty Tupinambú people, natives of Brazil’s eastern coast, were kidnapped and brought to France. As musicologist Ralph P. Locke accentuates, they “danced and enacted battles from their home territory before King Henri II and Queen Catherine de’ Medici.”118 After this event, scholars note little documentation of musical exoticism until the beginning of the seventeenth century, where the libretto for the Ballet of the Princes of China described how the fictional princes escaped China’s tyranny by using love to propel them to the safe haven of France.119 In Ellen R. Welch’s “Dancing the Nation: Performing France in the Seventeenth-Century Ballets des nations,” Welch depicts a ballet subgenre she labels the ballet of nations in France that grew in popularity during the reign of Louis XIII (1610-1643) which “assert(ed) cultural superiority” by utilizing “grotesque stereotypes” of foreign nations versus the “superior, graceful French national character.”120 By the reign of King Louis XIV, court composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), wrote no less than thirteen compositions centered “New” but rather “Europe was the ‘savage shore’, a land of incomprehensible inequality and poverty that defined pre- invasion values and logics, where resources were hoarded, children ruled great kingdoms, and common people were meant meekly to accept injustices without dissent.” In this revised framework, reciprocity between cultures is established, as Indigenous people who were forced to travel to Europe significantly impacted their culture, as much as Europeans influenced theirs. Pennock, On Savage Shores, XIV. 116 Olivia A. Bloechl, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 10. 117 Miriam K. Whaples, “Early Exoticism Revisited,” in The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathan Bellman (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 3-25. 118 Ralph P. Locke, Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 88. 119 Whaples, “Early Exoticism Revisited,” 6. 120 Ellen R. Welch, “Dancing the Nation: Performing France in the Seventeenth-Century Ballets Des Nations,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2013): 5-6, https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2013.0018. 35 around so-called “savages.”121 Indeed, performers constantly fashioned European perceptions of the Other to make sense of the global chess board in which France was a leading player.122 This phenomenon can also be observed through the public personas of New Wave musicians Adam Ant and Siouxsie Sue. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, they appropriated Indigenous identity to fight against the mainstream, side with the underdog, and rebel against the normative, despite having no direct ancestral or communal ties to Indigenous people. Both artists changed their names and morphed their dress to conform to their adopted Indigenous identities. Born Susan Janet Ballion, Siouxsie found respite from her traumatic childhood in the voracious consumption of cinema and music. Falling in love with Westerns, Siouxsie changed her name from Susan to Siouxsie as an homage to the Native Americans depicted in these movies. In an interview, Siouxsie proclaimed, “I just loved Indians! I’d always hated cowboys, even though we were told that the Indians were the baddies. They were too easily the scapegoat, and were always being attacked, and yet they looked so much better, so much sexier.”123 Leader sing Adam Ant, born Stuart Leslie Goddard, took a similar approach to Siouxsie when deciding to portray himself as an Indigenous person; he identified with cultural portrayals of Indigenous “sexual liberation and noble heroism.”124 Indeed, these patterns are similar to the eighteenth-century theatrical stage, where singers and composers appropriated Indigenous identity. The sexualization of Indigenous Americans is not a singularity limited to Adam Ant and Siouxsie Sue. From the earliest documented colonial encounters, sexual violence was a means to 121 “Savage” refers to any reference that includes “savage” or “Indian” in the libretto. Bloechl, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music, 154. 122 Stephen Greenblatt provides a detailed analysis of how individuals in the arts constructed their identities and represented social hierarchies through self-fashioning. See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). 123 Richard T. Rodríguez, A Kiss across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 30. 124 Members of the American Indian Community House (AICH) in New York City wrote to CBS as a call to action to refrain Ant from continuing to paint a war stripe as part of his concert attire. After meeting with AICH, Ant convinced them to drop their complaints with his sufficient knowledge of their ancestry. See Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave, 198. 36 control and subjugate Indigenous Americans.125 By the late sixteenth-century, images of the New World became ubiquitous, portrayed as a sexualized and exotic female.126 Rayna Green’s article “The Pocahontas Perplex” highlights advertisements and paintings that sexualized Indigenous American women throughout the past several hundred years.127 This sexualization of Indigenous women would continue through the eighteenth century to today.128 Examining Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) through the framework of appropriation unveils how several musical details in the film negatively emphasize non-Western identities. For example, Siouxsie and the Banshees’s “Hong Kong Garden” and Adam and the Ants’ “Kings of the Wild Frontier” deploy stereotypes and exemplify cultural appropriation through the lead singers’ fictional Indigenous identity. The musical appropriation, however, is not just a modern phenomenon. The film also features Jean-Philippe Rameau’s “1er Menuet pour les guerriers et les Amazones” (“The First Minuet for the Warriors and the Amazons”) from his Les Indes galantes during the first dance at the wedding of Marie Antoinette and Louis-Auguste. It illuminates a long thread from the past to the present in which artists use non-European identities to perform their own cultural work. Musicologist Olivia A. Bloechl provides useful context to understand how musical cues emphasize the portrayal of non-Western identities. As Bloechl argues, “a past marked 125 Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015), 32-33. 126 Rayna Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture,” The Massachusetts Review 6, no. 4 (1975): 698-714, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25088595. 127 Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex.” Abaki Beck, “Rendered Invisible: Pocahontas Is Not a Sex Symbol,” Bitch Media, November 20, 2017, 128 In the twenty-first century, “Lusty Indian” and “Sexy Indian Princess” are regrettable staples of local costume stores. As another example, within the last few years, musical icon Nicki Minaj posted an Instagram photo captioned “Hoecahontas.” In that post, her Winter 2017 “Break the Internet” Paper Magazine cover, which presented three images of her in sexually explicit positions, became a cartoon version featuring Pocahontas in the same positions. Although the caption of the image was eventually removed after backlash, its existence cements the continual sexualization and appropriation of Indigenous identity. Abaki Beck, “Rendered Invisible: Pocahontas Is Not a Sex Symbol,” Bitch Media, November 20, 2017, https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/nicki-minaj-pocahontas-is-not-a-sex-symbol. For more examples, including how this stereotyping is exemplified in No Doubt’s music video “Looking Hot,” see Sophie Croisy, “Fighting Colonial Violence in ‘Indian Country’: Deconstructing Racist Sexual Stereotypes of Native American Women in American Popular Culture and History,” Angles, no. 5 (January 2017), https://doi.org/10.4000/angles.1313. 37 by foreign imperial conquest of European polities and an early modern present marked by external colonization fundamentally shaped the conditions in which European music was performed, conceptualized, heard, and composed.”129 Whether intentionally or unintentionally, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Adam and the Ants, and Siouxsie and the Banshees engage with this complex history in their music. In Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart, Ralph P. Locke notes several distinct trends that evoked exoticism and non-European identities in music from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.130 What started as an exotic locale for composers soon turned into explicit and concrete (regardless of accuracy) cultural reference in plots, costumes, lyrics, and staging by the late seventeenth century. By the eighteenth-century, particularly in Paris and Vienna, many of these references became coded with distinctive musical devices.131 Writing on this history, Timothy D. Taylor contends that composers at the time were not mimicking actual foreign sounds. Instead, they were already stretching harmonic and melodic conventions to create a universal sound of difference As a result, Indigenous American and Asian identities become fungible in this framework; there was no need to differentiate between them. They were created largely to draw boundaries around what European identity was and was not. Indeed, “The Other, whether noble or common, is appropriated, represented, used, and then expunged, having served its purpose, but also having left its mark.”132 Using Taylor’s theoretical framework, the three musical examples examined in this chapter exhibit how the invention of the musical Other becomes a means to perpetuate a history of cultural extraction. As historian Caroline Dodds Pennock puts it, “in the French mind, they were a blank 129 Bloechl, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music, xv. 130 Locke, Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart, 6-7. 131 Locke, Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart, 6-7. 132 Timothy D. Taylor, “Peopling the Stage.” 38 slate on which to sketch the contours of European expectation and influence.”133 Likewise, whether New Wave songs or Baroque opera, Coppola’s selected repertoire illuminates a larger trend of European(-American) musical self-fashioning. This view, however, does not take reciprocity into consideration; it sees European contact as flowing only one way. Aiming to separate the fungible Other into sovereign culture entities, I conclude the chapter by examining texts that indeed consider a mutual reciprocity. Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Indes galantes Following their lavish royal wedding, the movie shifts to a decadent party celebrating the married couple. Akin to modern-day wedding receptions and tradition, patrons shift as the couple moves to the center of the room for their first dance. Soon, music fills the room as “1er Menuet pour les guerriers et les Amazones” from Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Indes galantes (1736) plays. The dance comes from the fourth entrée of the opera, “Les Sauvages.” Considered the “queen of dances” and an elegant court dance that dominated royal court life and soared in popularity between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth century, the minuet was a staple in aristocratic circles.134 Unlike many ballroom dances during the period, the minuet was a couple’s dance, and they were highly prevalent in France during the reign of Louis XIV. From a historical vantage point, the couple could have danced to a minuet for their first dance as a married couple. In the eighteenth century, guests of honors opened formal balls with minuets. 135 Although the minuet is itself not generically unusual, the opera in which the minuet originates telescopes the scene outward to the Americas. 133 Caroline Dodds Pennock, On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023), 211. 134 Christopher Hogwood, “In Defense of the Minuet and Trio,” Early Music 30, no. 2 (May 2002): 247, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/30.2.236 and Meredith Ellis Little, “Minuet,” Grove Music Online, ed. Dean Roote, accessed 5 March, 2023, https://doi-org.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.18751. 135 Moira Goff, “Dance in History,” Dance in History (blog), January 25, 2016, https://danceinhistory.com/2016/01/25/the-minuet-versus-the-waltz/ and Marilyn Coleman and Lawrence H. Ganong, eds., The Social History of the American Family: An Encyclopedia (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2014), 1483. 39 In the prologue to Les Indes galantes, the goddess Hébé tries to bring love to all her followers, while Bellona, the goddess of war, tries to encourage young people to strive for military victory instead. Eventually, Cupid himself arrives, and they decide to “take the pleasures to distant climes, when Europe abandons them.” Thus, Cupid abandons Europe for the Indies, and each entrée follows a differing group of lovers in a foreign locale: Turkey, Peru, Persia, and North America. Added in 1736 a year after the opera’s premiere, “Les Sauvages,” the entrée centered on North America, “arguably became the most popular entrée of that opéra-ballet; it was remounted in 1743, 1751, and 1761 as part of the whole, then it was played at Versailles in 1765, along with the Prologue and “Les Incas de Pérou,” and returned to Paris in 1773, where it stood alone.” 136 In the entrée, a Spaniard named Don Alvar and a Frenchman named Damon both romantically pursue Zima, a North American Indigenous woman. She ultimately rejects both in favor of another North American Native, Adario. The opera concludes with the French, Spanish, and Indigenous Natives coming together to celebrate in a peace pipe ceremony. The minuet from this entrée, "1er Menuet pour les guerriers et les Amazones”, is quite traditional as it is an elegant dance in triple time. Additionally, it consists of both a minuet and trio section in an ABA pattern. It begins in D Major, which according to Rameau signaled “songs of mirth & rejoicing, grandeur & magnificence.”137 Indeed, in the framework of Rameau’s opera plot, this minuet is emblematic of the joining together of the two Indigenous romantic leads. Furthermore, it indicates their innate nobility as a minuet is “the dance that represents the pinnacle of the French noble style.”138 136 Joellen A. Meglin, “Sauvages, Sex Roles, and Semiotics: Representations of Native Americans in the French Ballet, 1736–1837, Part One: The Eighteenth Century,” Dance Chronicle 23, no. 2 (2000): 102, https://doi.org/10.1080/01472520008569379l. 137 Taylor, “Peopling the Stage,” 72. 138 Joellen A. Meglin, “Sauvages, Sex Roles, and Semiotics,” 113. 40 Although nothing is unconventional in the minuet’s form nor its phrasing or melody, it is important to stress both the significance of the simplistic nature of the composition and its employment of minor keys. In his theoretical treatise, Démonstration du principe de l'harmonie (1750), Rameau characterizes the minor mode as both exoticizing and feminine.139 As Olivia Bloechl elaborates, the minor mode's femininity is "controlled, and, thus, contained by the masculinized major."140 In the B section of this minuet Rameau harmonically moves to both D minor and briefly G minor. In addition, Bloechl observes that this section is full of “stylized primitivism.”141 Unlike the typical French compositional style, which often showcased additional flourishes and ornamentation, the B section features regular phrases, static harmonic progressions, and mostly uniform rhythms to shape a portrait of Indigenous American primitivity. 142 In reference to minor keys, the use of G Minor is significant as it is so dominantly featured in Les Indes galantes, Bloechl provides a table of all numbers in Les Indes galantes that utilize G minor.143 Furthermore, Rameau considered minor mode “soft and weak,”144 often representing exoticism as it “was associated often enough with extraordinary or marginal subjects that its exotic connotations in the rondeau and the later opera-ballet entrée seem likely.”145 This is a theme that I will be returning to, as Adam and the Ants’s “Kings of the Wild Frontier” uses a minor keys to evoke primitivity and exoticism. While the B section offers diegetic accompaniment to the scene, the camera pans to onlookers gossiping about Marie Antoinette, positioning Marie Antoinette as foreign (indeed, Austrian) interloper. As discontent with the monarchy and Antoinette herself flourished before the culmination of the revolution, her identity as an Austrian woman would become a prominent point 139 Jean-Phillipe Rameau, Démonstration du principe de l'harmonie, 1750. 140 Bloechl, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music, 199. 141 Bloechl, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music, 199. 142 Bloechl, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music, 161. 143 Bloechl, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music, 201. 144 Charles Dill, “Rameau Reading Lully: Meaning and System in Rameau's Recitative Tradition,” Cambridge Opera Journal 6, no. 1 (1994): 7, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954586700004109. 145 Bloechl, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music, 199. 41 of contention. Justification for her beheading included that she was “the she-wolf and tigress of Austria” and that she wished to “bathe in the blood of the French.”146 In Greek mythology, Amazon women were warriors known for their strength and autonomy, often situated as a threat to male-dominated civilizations. Historian Joan DeJean shows that the Amazon became synonymous for seventeenth-century French women, who were a threat to State security and political homewreckers.147 This imagery would continue to evolve at the turn of the seventeenth century to a representation of women not only as a threat to the French state but also to the family. To connect Amazons and Antoinette in this scene to highlight the new Queen’s perceived danger to absolutist order, both on a political and familial level. Consequently, the minuet becomes a sonic insignia of a gendered and racialized Other. Adam and the Ants’ “Kings of the Wild Frontier” Figure 2.1 Album cover for Adam and the Ants second album, “Kings of the Wild Frontier.” The “war stripe,” eighteenth century jacket regalia, and feathers evoking Indigenous American identity are clearly visible © Peter Ashworth. 146 Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 112-113. 147 Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 10. 42 Whereas Rameau’s "1er Menuet pour les guerriers et les Amazones” is a musical example of Indigenous American Othering in the eighteenth century, Adam and the Ants’ “Kings of the Wild Frontier” provides one portrait of appropriated Indigenous American identity in the 1980s. This song, in F minor, appears in two back-to-back scenes where Marie Antoinette consummates her affair with Count Axel von Fersen, a Swedish officer historically known for his close relationship with the Queen. Lead singer Adam Ant claimed that the lyrics represent the struggles of Native Americans, especially the Apache (who inspired Adam’s famous “war stripe” painted across his nose).148 The lyrics point explicitly to stereotypes of Indigenous American identity. Referenced below are the lyrics in the song without repeats. In the movie, we hear only the first line and first stanza: A new Royal Family, a wild nobility, we are the family I feel beneath the white There is a redskin suffering From centuries of taming No method in our madness Just pride about our manner Antpeople are the warriors Antmusic is the banner! And even when you're healthy And your colour schemes delight Down below those dandy clothes You're just a shade too white Shade too white! The song presents a tension between bland civility of white culture on the outside and a primitive “Indigenous” identity struggling underneath. The fear in the early modern period was the opposite. As historian Sara Mezler depicts, there was a genuine fear in the early modern period among the French that people would go to colonies in North America and “all become Sauvages of the 148 Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?, 197. 43 country.”149 The desire instead was to “civilize” the natives, but it is not this assimilation that Ant rejects, but his own acculturation into bourgeois mores. Instead, Ant uses the “wild frontier” to project the eroticism and violence repressed from white culture. The notion of a frontier itself represents not the sovereign lands of Natives, but terrain onto which white cultures manifested their destinies. During the early modern period, the Native American embodied the extreme limit of what could be considered civilization; thus, a frontier becomes a marker between the known “civilized” European society, and unknown and “wild” Indigenous population. Under this reflection, “Kings of the Wild Frontier” becomes an exemplification of the European colonial mindset.150 Within the context of portraying Indigenous populations as unknown and “wild,” the slur “Redskin,” referring to Indigenous identity, repeats throughout the song. As exemplified in the lyrics, language as a tool to suppress Indigenous identity is a centuries old tactic of cultural erasure. As Joellen A. Meglie writes regarding Indigenous American representation in ballet, “by the time Native American characters appeared in the Romantic ballet, however, they had become “redskins” (peaux rouges), grotesque and caricatured, as sauvagerie shifted its emphasis from cultural to racial difference and became increasingly unrefined.”151 Indeed, this slur continues to perpetuate modern narratives.152 Moving away from harmful stereotypes including “redskin” “is not just a question of 149 Sara E. Melzer, Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 117. 150 Moreover, it is indicative of a sort of manifest destiny, as it presents the idea of conquering the “wild frontier.” 151Joellen A. Meglin, “Sauvages, Sex Roles, and Semiotics: Representations of Native Americans in the French Ballet, 1736–1837, Part One: The Eighteenth Century,” Dance Chronicle 23, no. 2 (2000): 88, https://doi.org/10.1080/01472520008569379. 152 Only as recently as 2020 did the American professional football team representing the broader Washington metropolis change their name from Washington Redskins to the Washington Commanders. One of the most egregious musical examples is Disney children’s classic Peter Pan, which features “What Makes the Red Man Red,” a song who doubles down on this offensive representation by defending it via children’s song. Whether by sports team or song, the usage of the term “redskin” is a commonality perpetuated in popular narratives. See Emma Bowman, “For Many Native Americans, the Washington Commanders' New Name Offers Some Closure,” NPR (NPR, February 6, 2022), https://www.npr.org/2022/02/06/1078571919/washington-commanders-name-change-native-americans and Sarah Laskow, “The Racist History of Peter Pan’s Indian Tribe,” Smithsonian Magazine (Smithsonian Magazine, December 2, 2014), https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/racist-history-peter-pan-indian-tribe-180953500/. 44 respect, but also an intentional push against colonial attempts to erase Indigenous identities, and to obliterate their languages and beliefs, through deliberate cultural genocide.”153 Theo Cateforis, who wrote the pivotal musicological text on the New Wave era Are We Not New Wave?, argues that Adam Ant appears to be stating that he is a “”savage warrior” fighting against the constraints of “white civilization.”154 When asked about the meaning of the song, Adam Ant remarked “Kings of the Wild Frontier” is really a mark on all sorts of colors and societies where you feel held back.” The lyrics “I feel beneath the white, there is a redskin suffering from centuries of taming”---it’s not just the color of your skin; it’s the class you’re born into.155 Ant’s uses a stereotyped Indigenous identity act as a strategy to resist conformity to European class structures and social norms. This approach transforms the early modern approach. As described in Sara Melzer’s Colonizer or Colonized, where European positioned themselves as the pinnacle of civilization, Native Americans were then emplotted as a primitive version of Europeans.156 However, Adam Ant’s usage of Indigenous American identity is much more akin to Montesquieu in his Lettres persanes (1721), where non-European identity is used to critique European identity.157 However, it is his privilege to resist conformity by appropriating Indigenous American identity, as it gives Adam Ant a socially sanctioned alibi through which to defy conformity. Leaning on enduring beliefs of Indigenous Americans as non-conformist only underscores the advantages of deploying this identity as a temporary mask that can be readily worn and easily discarded. This notion has a historical precedent, as the first recorded musical exoticism in 1393 occurred where six 153 Pennock, On Savage Shores, XIII. 154 Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?, 197. 155 Lori Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein, Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s (New York: Abrams Image, 2014), 19. 156 Sara E. Melzer, Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 157 Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes, 1721. 45 members of Duchesse de Berry’s wedding party (including King Charles VI of France) howled and inappropriately motioned wearing linen clothes and shaggy hair akin to “savages.” 158 The other attending guests were so terrified that they lit the costumes on fire, resulting in the deaths of four of the party members, the King only being saved at the last minute. Indeed, these performances, both on and off the stage, are long-standing and can result in a chance of endangerment, but ultimately hold the greatest risk for those who actually occupy these identities because of the essentialist ways in which violence and danger become associated with Indigenous identity. This embodiment continues in the music video for “Kings of the Wild Frontier,” as the music video offers an additional layer for how Ant appropriates Indigenous American identity. Adam Ant dons the white stripe across his nose, emulating an Apache war stripe. Brightly colored feathers are also attached to his regalia, evoking traditional war bonnets worn by Great Plains nations including the Lakota and Cheyenne.159 Additionally, Adam Ant’s outfit was also inspired by the New Romantic fashion trend, a 1970s aesthetic that took inspiration from various historical figures, including eighteenth-century French Incroyables and seventeenth-century buccaneers. The French Incroyables were men in the late-eighteenth century who embodied freedom and change with eccentric dress amidst the somber reality of the French Revolution. Buccaneers were French, British, and Dutch free sailors that preyed on Spanish ships and settlements in the Caribbean during the seventeenth-century.160 Bow Wow Wow, whose “I Want Candy” and “Aphrodisiac” have been discussed, was also associated with this fashion trend. Thus, both Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow perform complex negotiations between the past and the present, rebellion and conformity through the exploitation of a non-European identity. 158 Whaples, “Early Exoticism Revisited,” 5. 159 Leo Killsback, “CROWNS OF HONOR: SACRED LAWS OF EAGLE-FEATHER WAR BONNETS AND REPATRIATING THE ICON OF THE GREAT PLAINS,” Great Plains Quarterly 33, no. 1 (2013): 1-23, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23534356. 160 Colloquially, also known as pirates. 46 Siouxsie and the Banshee’s “Hong Kong Garden” Audio-visual reminders of exoticism continue throughout the movie in anachronistic New Wave music. As Marie Antoinette attends a masquerade ball in all black with friends, two accompanying New Wave songs respectively allude to cultural othering: Bow Wow Wow’s “Aphrodisiac” and Siouxsie and the Banshee’s “Hong Kong Garden.” As referenced in Chapter One, Bow Wow Wow’s “Aphrodisiac,” where Marie Antoinette first meets Count Axel von Fersen, evokes African colonial ties as it prominently features the Burundi Beat. The second song, “Hong Kong Garden,” conjures cultural appropriation through its lyrics that use common stereotypes of Chinese people and culture: Harmful elements in the air Symbols clashing everywhere Reaps the fields of rice and reeds While the population feeds Junk floats on polluted water An old custom to sell your daughter Would you like number twenty-three? Leave your yens on the counter please Ho-oh, ho-oh-oh-oh Hong Kong Garden Ho-oh, ho-oh-oh-oh Hong Kong Garden Oh oh, oh oh Tourists swarm to see your face Confucius has a puzzling grace Disoriented you enter in Unleashing scent of wild jasmine Slanted eyes meet a new sunrise A race of bodies small in size Chicken Chow Mein and Chop Suey Hong Kong Garden takeaway La la la, la la la la la 47 Ho-oh, ho-oh-oh-oh Hong Kong Garden Ho-oh, ho-oh-oh-oh Although muffled by the percussion orchestration of the song, the lyrics fetishize Asian culture by evoking several stereotypes. Not exclusive to “Hong Kong Garden,” stereotypes of Asian identity were abundant in both popular and classical music in the twentieth century. As Judy Tsou describes in her formative work “Gendering Race: Stereotypes of Chinese Americans in Popular Sheet Music,” she collected over 300 popular songs that existed at the turn of the century and evoked racialized themes of Asian identity.161 Common themes that appeared in these songs were demasculinization, exoticism, and dehumanization. Released in 1978, the lyrics of “Hong Kong Garden” shows hallmarks of these common tropes.162 The lyrics are more explicit in their stereotypes. Like the songs Tsou examines, “Hong Kong Garden” points to “slanted eyes” and “bodies small in size,” to promulgate notions that Asians are weak, feeble, and slight. While title is indicative of an Asian restaurant, the lyrics dehumanize the population since humans eat, animals “feed.” 163 Additionally, “Tourists swarm to see your face” acknowledges that bodily difference becomes a spectacle for white foreigners. “Confucius has a puzzling grace” and “Unleashing scent of wild jasmine” further mystify and exoticize Chinese culture.164 Four lines refer to Chinese takeaway, inferring Chinese food as cheap and that Chinese immigrants are poor. The line “leave your yens on the counter please” furthers this idea of only subsisting on commercial transactions. 161 Most popular is undeniably “Chinatown, My Chinatown,” which was recorded over two dozen times between 1928 and 1941. Judy Tsou, “Gendering Race: Stereotypes of Chinese Americans in Popular Sheet Music,” Repercussions 6, no. 2 (1997): 25-62. 162 Musically, the song evokes Lavengood’s novelty layer, discussed in Chapter One. It uses the xylophone, an instrument whose “timbral characteristics are more resistant to blending with the rest of the ensemble,” and it mimics the chorus’s melody throughout the song. See Lavengood, “The Cultural Significance of Timbre Analysis.” 163 As of March 2023, Asian restaurants named Hong Kong Garden exist in locations including but not limited to London, New Jersey, Texas, California, and Pennsylvania. 164 I will return to jasmine and its association with tea later in the chapter. 48 “Harmful elements in the air” and “Junk floats on polluted water” infers a generalization of Asian countries being dirty and polluted. “Rice” and “Reeds” are reductive while “an old custom to sell your daughter” propagates that Asian culture is founded on the trading and selling of women, a result of wars in Asia where white soldiers trafficked in women. Indeed, these lyrics are deeply troubling in their exoticism, perpetuation in troubling stereotypes, and generally reductionism of a culture, those enforcing the singular musical “Othering” of all non-Europeans as one entity that occurred in eighteenth-century France.165 Conclusion Figure 2.2 Marie-Antoinette shows her brother, Emperor Joseph II, tea gifted by the emperor of China © Sony Pictures/courtesy Screenmusings (1085).166 In a small scene in the movie, a gift by the Emperor of China official highlights the intercultural exchange between China and France during the eighteenth century and illustrates that 165 Identifying a further thread of Europeans shaping Asian identity in the eighteenth century, Puccini’s Turandot, tbe epic set in China following Prince Calif’s quest to win Princess Turandot’s hand in marriage, is based on eighteenth-century Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi’s play of the same name. See David Nicholson, “Gozzi's ‘Turandot’: A Tragicomic Fairy Tale,” Theatre Journal 31, no. 4 (1979): 467-478, https://doi.org/10.2307/3219419. 166 Screenmusings, accessed February 10, 2023, https://screenmusings.org/movie/dvd/Marie-Antoinette/pages/Marie- Antoinette-1085.htm. 49 the French aristocracy did not understand Chinese culture exclusively as primitive or exotic. Rather, the gift of tea exemplified a height of sophistication. Towards the mid-point of the film, Marie Antoinette’s brother, Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, pays a visit to Versailles. Entering the room while she is having a piano lesson with Joseph Bologne, as described in the first chapter, the two siblings joyously greet each other and quickly sit to share tea in each other’s company. As a maid brings out teacups, Antoinette enthusiastically proclaims, “The emperor of China sent me this tea. Isn’t it divine? It’s jasmine.” Shown in Figure 1.2, the hot water poured over the bulb causes it to uncurl into its floral shape. In this moment, the small display of Asian tea in French ceramic pottery exemplifies a mutual reciprocity of culture goods.167 Known in modern times as Jasmine Flowering Tea, this centuries-long delicacy continues to be a staple of tea aficionados. Moreover, this tea is representative of a cultural sophistication not apparent in other formations of Asian identity throughout the film. Indeed, recent scholarship, including the work of musicologists Qingfan Jiang and Zhuqing Lester Hu explore the intricate cultural exchanges between Asia and France that shaped musical thought during the period, recentering notions of cultural supremacy in eighteenth-century France. In her “In Search of the ‘Oriental Origin’: Rameau, Rousseau, and Chinese Music in Eighteenth- Century France,” Jiang underscores how Rameau and Rousseau studied music from China to formulate their thoughts on the origins of European musical thought. Hu’s “Chinese Ears, Delicate or Dull? Toward a Decolonial Comparativism,” examines performances of French music, including the piano solo version of Rameau’s Les sauvauges, by French missionaries in Beijing to underscore listening and consumption happening in both Europe and the Qing dynasties. These recent works illustrate the growing recognition of cultural exchanges as complex and reciprocal. 167 Henri Frantz, French Pottery and Porcelain (London: George Newnes Limited, 1907). 50 The musical examples discussed in used in Marie Antoinette show how Asian and Indigenous identity becomes both a means both to obscure and illuminate how and why appropriation shapes Eurocentric historiographic narratives. Inspired by this recent scholarship, this chapter challenges these stories to show the globalized networks that make them possible. 51 CHAPTER 3 MADWOMAN AND MILKMAID: OPERATIC SCENES IN MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006) AS SITES OF IDENTITY FORMATION Introduction With more moments saturated with soundtrack than without, under music’s spell, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) is an enthralling historical biopic. Marie Antoinette is almost a cinema-length music video. As discussed in the previous two chapters, contrasting musical genres interweave the movie’s stunning visuals, offering a lush and diverse listening experience. Despite the sheer amount of musical accompaniment, it is possible to miss the predominance of on-screen performance itself. Indeed, this musical focus aligns with Antoinette’s life as she, on all accounts, delighted in performing. Highlighting her predilection for music, this chapter focuses on scenes in Marie Antoinette where the queen is either observing or is responsible for the diegetic performances. As discussed in the first chapter, a few seconds depict Antoinette at the piano with Joseph Bologne. Later in the film, Antoinette sings in a staged performance dressed as a milkmaid.168 Both scenes offer clues about Antoinette’s musical life at Versailles. As musicologist Julia Doe notes, “the expense accounts of the royal household show, for example, that Marie Antoinette received regular instruction in singing and in harp, and that she sponsored informal concerts for her associates several times each week.”169 Undeniably, Antoinette’s love for performing extended past her own ambitions as she was a fervent arts patron, as well. In addition to scenes featuring Antoinette’s musical skills, the film depicts countless performances including, but not limited to, operatic scenes with full orchestras, string quartets, and 168 Although not formally acknowledged, a harp is seen after at Antoinette’s piano lesson, implying her study of both instruments. 169 Julia Doe, “Marie Antoinette et la Musique: Habsburg Patronage and French Operatic Culture,” Studies in Eighteenth- Century Culture 46 (2017): 83, https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2017.0009. 52 even solo musicians who bring the diegetic music resounding to life. Whether from Antoinette or operatic performers, the film shows not one but three scenes that are centric on singing on the stage. Moreover, additional material on the film’s DVD provides a fourth deleted singing performance. The vast number of performances in the movie underlines the importance of music during Antoinette’s lifetime to express social commentary and metaphors of social and political power. Whereas some composers fashioned music to critique political and social issues, royal patrons, including Antoinette, could select repertoire to obtain different ends. Antoinette's music patronage and royal status allowed her to exert influence that otherwise would not be possible as a foreign queen in a society that held disparaging views of women. In the film, the featured performances, including the four centering singing, reflect music's prominence in France's broader cultural landscape in the eighteenth century. Moreover, they offer a historical glimpse of the period's gendered power dynamics. Examining these staged musical scenes indicates that their function in the film is more than mere entertainment. Marcia Citron argues that visits to the opera on film have long paralleled plots, foreshadowed events, supplied climactic resolutions, and “provide(d) the transformative moment for the female lead.”170 Carefully woven into the film’s narrative arc, the four staged singing productions offer a subtle but present motif reflecting its main protagonist. Additionally, this musical thread is not just a plot point. Historically, Antoinette found great pleasure in picking performance repertoire. As Julie Doe expands, “after the death of Louis XV, especially, she often submitted suggestions for programming—or requested that the music on offer 170 Marcia J. Citron, “The Operatics of Detachment: Tosca in the James Bond Film Quantum of Solace,” 19th-Century Music 34, no. 3 (2011): 316-40, https://doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2011.34.3.316, 316 and 317. 53 be adjusted to suit her current inclinations.”171 Supported by the work of Citron and Doe, an arc linking fictionalized operatic vignettes, history, and historiography begins to take shape. In this chapter, I examine how the staged musical scenes in the film parallel contemporary gender roles and portray the ruthless court of public opinion regarding Marie Antoinette. In the eighteenth century, French society believed that women were scheming and illogical creatures who needed to be stripped from authority and isolated in marriage “in order (to be) dominate(d).”172 As a foreign queen with the highest female authority in France, Marie Antoinette became the scapegoat for the moral shortcomings of women and the country’s crumbling infrastructure. By exploring different scenes featuring staged performances in the film, this chapter will show how the film repositions Marie Antoinette as a madwoman, dairy queen, and sentimental heroine. Finally, a deleted scene at the opera house illustrates an attempt at affirming her sovereignty as Queen and Austrian. Antoinette as Madwoman and Outsider The first operatic performance in the film features “Aux langueurs d’Apollon” from Jean- Philippe Rameau’s Platée (1745), linking Antoinette to conceptions of madness. It is a tale of a coquette, which loosely follows the convention that, “a rich or beautiful nonnoble woman manipulates a nobleman into marrying her in a tale of money, sex, greed, and social ambition.”173 The aria appears in the opera’s second act at a celebration held by the gods honoring Jupiter. Stealing Apollo’s lyre, Folie sings a mocking account of the story of Daphne and Apollo in a musical 171 Julia Doe, “Marie Antoinette et la Musique: Habsburg Patronage and French Operatic Culture,” Studies in Eighteenth- Century Culture 46 (2017): 84, https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2017.0009. 172 Karen M. Offen, The Woman Question in France, 1400-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 23-45 and Marcie Ray, Coquettes, Wives, and Widows: Gender Politics in French Baroque Opera and Theater (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2020), 3. 173 The opera premiered at the wedding of Louis, the eldest son of Louis XV, and Marie Thérèse Raphaëlle of Spain. Ray, Coquettes, Wives, and Widows, 14. 54 parody of virtuosic Italian opera arias.174 As “a performance within the operatic spectacle itself,” as I will illuminate, this scene explicates the idea that the public caricatured Marie Antoinette as both “mad” and an outsider.”175 By examining “Aux langueurs d’Apollon,” I make parallels between Folie’s character and Antoinette’s. Folie’s name means folly, or madness. In Platée, she represents the ludicrous and illogical. In this scene, she mocks Apollo, who is associated with reason. Through her song’s fast and melismatic vocal line, Folie’s opera persona becomes the representation of illogic, a foil to Apollo.176 The unique vocal landscape of this aria adds to the perception of Antoinette as an outsider. Specifically, the melismas and vocal “distortions” of this aria were understood to be Italianate. The French preferred the words to the illogic of music. It was a “culture that conceived of its language as inseparable from its identity and whose pleasures in the theatre were predicated on the assumption that lessons were to be drawn from the words.”177 Many French musical loyalists believed Italian music, unlike French music, championed “sound over sense” and “performance over substance.”178 Indeed, the character Folie (“madness”) sings the aria in the opera, drawing explicit connections between Italian culture, female excess, and unreason. This link between Antoinette, female excess, and Italian culture would later become fodder for one of the many slanderous pamphlets about her. Lynn Hunt shows that “attacks on the queen’s morality had begun as early as 1774 (just four years after her arrival in France)” with multitudes of pornographic pamphlets aimed at her supposed escapades as “the menace of the feminine and the 174 In the myth, Apollo falls for Daphne. A nymph who has sworn to protect her chastity, Daphne begs to be saved and is turned into a laurel tree. 175 Downing A. Thomas, “Rameau's Platée Returns: A Case of Double Identity in the Querelle Des Bouffons,” Cambridge Opera Journal 18, no. 1 (2006): 1-19, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954586706002084, 15. 176 Considered “the Queen of People’s Hearts,” Princess Diana is regarded as Marie Antoinette’s foil in popular culture. See Julia Teti, “Before Meghan & Diana, There Was Marie Antoinette: A Deep Dive on Sofia Coppola’s Biopic 15 Years Later,” SheKnows, October 20, 2021, https://www.sheknows.com/feature/meghan-markle-princess-diana-marie- antoinette-media-2496717/. 177 Thomas, “Rameau's Platée Returns,” 14. 178 Thomas, “Rameau's Platée Returns,” 15. 55 effeminizing to republican notions of manhood and virility.”179 In one particular pamphlet, Antoinette is explicitly linked to Italian musical idioms. As Julia Doe writes, In Les Fantoccini français (1789), Marie Antoinette’s insidious foreign identity is underscored not in her direct relation to her Habsburg roots, but through allusion to her association with the Comédie-Italienne. In the context of this interméde, the character “Maria-Antoina” comes across as distinctly Italian, reimagined as the leading lady of a commedia dell’arte troupe.”180 Like Folie’s Italianate style, associations between Antoinette and Italian heritage were attempts to prove that she was both insidious and an outsider. The movie’s cinematography offers a visual connection between Folie and Antoinette through subtle similarities in attire. At the opera house watching a staging of Rameau’s Platée, Antoinette stands out from her contemporaries by wearing a bright pink gown. In the center of the stage, Folie sits on a swing, similarly adorned in pink. Additionally, both wear flowers in their hair, although Follie’s floral adornments are significantly more extravagant than Antoinette’s. Moreover, the staging is a nod to Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s “frivolous” painting L’Escarpolette, also known as The Happy Accidents of the Swing.181 At the conclusion of Folie’s melismatic aria, Antoinette stands up enthusiastically and claps, instructing all audience members to join in jubilant celebration. Although clapping was not customary, the public soon relents and joins in by smiling at Antoinette and clapping with increased rigor. However, Antoinette’s declining esteem becomes apparent later in the film as the public refuses to follow her lead to clap at a performance of Rameau’s Castor et Pallox later in the film. The public’s initial enthusiasm to join with Antoinette reflects a connection between Folie and 179 Lynn Hunt, “The Many Bodies of Marie-Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution,” in Marie Antoinette: Writing on the Body of a Queen, ed. Dena Goodman (New York: Routledge, 2003), 117-38. 180 Doe, “Marie Antoinette et la Musique,” 90. 181 For more information about the painting at the Center for Public Art History, see Dr. Ashley Bruckbauer, “Jean- Honoré Fragonard, The Swing,” Smarthistory, February 26, 2021, https://smarthistory.org/jean-honore-fragonard-the- swing/. 56 Antoinette as both are acting in ways that challenge the established order.182 However, outside of Platée’s context, clapping becomes a “senseless” and “foreign” act. Indeed, by the end of the film, the French public are making a clear statement that they no longer wish to associate with the proclivities of a foreign madwoman. In the next section, I show Antoinette’s attempt to portray more idealized visions of femininity through an eighteenth-century remedy to cure madness would provide an additional site of identity construction: milk. Marie Antoinette as Shepherdess and Milkmaid Whereas in the first operatic performance Marie Antoinette functioned as spectator, in the less formal second performance she captivates an audience of French nobility with her own composition “C’est mon ami.” The song features the narrator, a shepherdess, who laments the loss of her friend, who was a shepherd. She hopes that if anyone spots him, they will bring him back to her. With its simple phrasing and tune, Antoinette’s composition reflects broader pastoral trends and distinct, but not mutually exclusive roles prescribed to women: the shepherdess and the milkmaid (or dairy queen). The shepherdess and the milkmaid were both embodiments of a return to nature, an idealization of rural life, and innocence. The only differentiation between them is as their names suggest, shepherdesses were linked to sheep herding while milkmaids were linked to cows. Attempting to escape court life and seek liberation, elite women began to embody these roles to redefine domesticity and integrity in their own terms. While the public assumed she was trying to retreat from her royal responsibilities, “she was instead attempting to express her…queenship, in a novel way.”183 182 Themes of recklessness punctuate the scene through gossip between Antoinette and her female friends. During Folie’s aria, Antoinette is introduced to the Duchess of Polignac after she enters the opera box. While there, Polignac, played by Rose Byrne, gossips about the weight gain and sexual proclivities of other nobles, reproducing the tone of Folie’s gossipy adaptation of Daphne and Apollo’s story. 183 Meredith Martin, Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine De’ Medici to Marie Antoinette (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 160-61. 57 Antoinette expressed these pastoral roles both on and off the performance stage. Embodying pastoral themes, hamlets, a trend made fashionable by French elites, were constructions modeled upon rustic villages and filled with multitudes of buildings and cottages.184 Moreover, these hamlets were astonishingly popular as their inclusion in gardens become essential for French elites. Indeed, Antoinette presided over the construction of her Hameau de la Reine, a hamlet on the ground of Versailles, in the early 1780s.185 In her hamlet, Antoinette was afforded the opportunity to dress in peasant clothing with her friends and role play the life of a rural farmer. Indeed, the imagery of her beloved Hameau is referenced in her song’s brief staging. In her staged performance of “C’est mon ami” in the film, Antoinette wears a bonnet while ironing and sweeping the floor, embodying both shepherdess and dairy queen.186 Performing in front of a rustic looking cottage, this scene reflects both the hamlet and pleasure dairy Antoinette frequented off stage. Moreover, scenes before this show Antoinette and her friends at the Hameau and the pleasure dairy, with Antoinette insisting, “You must try the milk.” One of the most notorious buildings in the hamlet, and for women of French nobility, was the pleasure dairy. Pleasure dairies were predominantly accompanied by an actual functional dairy. Where the actual dairies made the milk products, they were sent to the pleasure dairy, a re- construction of an actual dairy, to be admired. By utilizing pleasure dairies and thus embodied the characteristics of a “dairy queen,” women were able to “profess feminine virtue and domesticity while also retaining a self-affirming sense of artful leisure, cultural sophistication, and theatrical display.”187 184 Martin, Dairy Queens, 24. 185 Martin, Dairy Queens, 24. 186 Although the song’s exact historical staging is unsure, Antoinette was an enthusiastic amateur performer. Therefore, Antoinette performing this song for others while at Versailles is almost guaranteed. See Fraser, Marie Antoinette, 210-211. 187 Martin, Dairy Queens, 166. 58 Pleasure dairies were not an aberration during Marie Antoinette’s royal tenure. Rather, they have been used historically to legitimize the role of foreign-born queens into the monarchies they marry into. The creation of the first pleasure dairy in the sixteenth century is attributed to Catherine De’ Medici, an Italian noblewoman who was Queen of France from 1547 to 1559 after marrying King Henri II. Indeed, because De’ Medici “was foreign born and recently widowed, [she] needed a building that signified her rootedness in French soil and her divine right to govern it.” 188 By using pleasure dairies, both De’ Medici and Antoinette sought to prove their “vital contribution to the state as the monarchy’s fertile, feminine provider and helpmate.”189 After Catherine De’ Medici’s first dairy, their popularity steadily increased. By the late eighteenth century, at least twenty pleasure dairies existed “on the grounds of royal palaces, country estates, and Parisian pleasure gardens.”190 Novelties of queenship, examples were found all throughout Europe well into the late nineteenth century.191 Indeed, Britain had their fair share of pleasure dairies called “ornamental dairies” as queens commissioned them to symbolize their nurturing and fertile bodies. Marie Antoinette performing on stage as a shepherdess and dairy queen is thus historical. Indeed, Antoinette starred as the milkmaid Perrette in her performance group’s revival of Les deux chasseurs on June 6th, 1783.192 This performance solidifies that pastoral themes have a historical precedent. In Les deux chasseurs, two hunters who are tracking a bear run into Perrette, a milkmaid hoping to trade milk for eggs that will turn into chickens which she can then swap for a farm’s worth of animals. At the opera’s end, neither milkmaid nor the hunters succeed in their endeavors, 188 Martin, Dairy Queens, 7. 189 Martin, Dairy Queens, 162. 190 Martin, Dairy Queens, 164. 191 Martin, Dairy Queens, 5. 192 Julia Doe, “Two Hunters, a Milkmaid and the French ‘Revolutionary’ Canon,” Eighteenth Century Music 15, no. 2 (2018): 177-205, https://doi.org/10.1017/s1478570618000040. 59 with the moral being “all involved have learned not to count their chickens before they hatch, and, more generally, to refrain from making light of life’s misfortunes.”193 Antoinette tries on another idealized portrait of femininity--the sentimental heroine--with the same vigor as her embodiment of the milkmaid, the next section proves that her attempts were unfortunately less successful. Antoinette and the Sentimental Heroine The last operatic performance in the film is Princess Telaira’s lament of the death of her beloved Castor in “Tristes apprêts, pales flambeaux” from Rameau’s Castor et Pollux. Arriving towards the film’s end, Princess Telaira is a stand-in for Antoinette and her effort to become the sentimental heroine. This character was an operatic archetype who “occupies only the space imagined for her by the other characters,” endures “persecution without active resistance.” 194 Furthermore, sentimental heroines combat tormenting tribulations. While grieving their unbearable trauma, they earn sympathy and approval from the audience.195 However, in scenes featuring Telaira’s aria we see that Antoinette’s attempts to rehabilitate her reputation are futile. Although Antoinette grieves the death of her child, the French public, represented by the theatrical audience, express minimal sympathy towards her plights. “Tristes apprêts, pales flambeaux,” appearing in the first act of Castor et Pollux, immediately establishes Princess Telaira as a sentimental heroine. The opera centers around two brothers, the mortal Castor and the immortal Pollux. Slain in battle before the opera’s beginning, the opera opens with Castor’s funeral rites. Telaira, the daughter of the sun, is shattered over the loss of her beloved. With a simple and somber melody, she abdicates sunlight, as she “no longer wishes for a blessing 193 The perception of Antoinette making light of others’ misfortunes would be one facet of her ultimate demise. Doe, “Two Hunters, a Milkmaid and the French ‘Revolutionary’ Canon,” 180. 194 Mary Kathleen Hunter, The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 84-92. 195 Oak Joo Yap, “Female Characters in Seraglio Genre: Changing Social Milieu and Public Space for Woman during the Eighteenth Century,” Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai Musica 64, no. 2 (December 2019): 13-30, doi:10.24193/subbmusica.2019.2.01. 60 that Castor has lost.” Telaira’s grief is profound, and the audience is invited to join her sorrow, thus forging a connection between her and the sentimental heroine. A crucial aspect of the sentimental heroine is the act of mourning, which warrants an examination within the context of Castor et Pollux’s operatic genre, the tragédie en musique. As musicologist Olivia Bloechl argues, mourning in this genre was “fundamentally collective…French opera envisioned it as a dialogical process between individual protagonists and a community represented by the chorus and dance corps.”196 Specifically, Bloechl discusses how these processes were enacted through operatic choruses. The opera’s first act begins with Castor’s funeral, accompanied by the people of Sparta who form a chorus lamenting his demise. Telaira’s aria follows shortly after, thereby connecting the grief between Princess Telaira and mourners in a collective process. Telaira’s lament weaves itself non-diegetically into a few short scenes before the operatic performance, solidifying a connection between the unsurmountable loss indicative of the sentimental heroine and Marie Antoinette. In the first scene, Antoinette gives birth to a son. Her husband proclaims gleefully, “Madame, you have fulfilled your wishes and those of France. You are the mother of a Dauphin. May I present, the Dauphin of France.” Shortly after, a man parades the baby around in a cradle above the heads of an animated crowd. Jumping ahead in time, Antoinette poses for a painting in nature with her now toddler son and daughter. These three scenes solidify that these jubilant memories of her children will not last. Moving away from the countryside painting, Telaira’s mournful plea is eventually presented diegetically at the opera house, situated within scenes of paintings, demonstrating identity formation that is happening both sonically and visually. As Richard Leppert maintains, “out of all of the visual 196 Olivia Bloechl, “Choral Lament and the Politics of Public Mourning in the Tragédie En Musique,” The Opera Quarterly 27, no. 4 (January 2011): 341, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/kbs001. 61 discursive media of the eighteenth century [painting] was easily the most important.”197 The scene following the nature portrait is a wall featuring a painting of Marie Antoinette dressed in blue. Slogans such as “Beware of Deficit,” “Queen of Debt!,” and “Spending France Into Ruin!” flash on the screen, implying that regardless of any grief or sadness Antoinette might experience, her transgressions are unforgiveable. Unlike the sentimental heroine, the public offers her no sympathy; instead she is cast as the villain. The scene transitions to the opera house, where Telaira stands alone on stage, wearing all blue and thus linking her to Antoinette’s blue portrait. In the staging, Telaira is surrounded by clouds, a testament to her renouncing daylight. As the operatic heroine reaches to touch her face in an attempt to quell her tears, the camera pans to Antoinette, wearing all black and visibly moved by the performance. The camera shifts back to the end of the lament, where Antoinette begins to clap at its conclusion. As no one joins in, she looks around as the French public glares in disgust; she realizes that she is no longer adored. Where at the first operatic performance the audience joined in Marie Antoinette’s enthusiastic applause, her attempts at clapping for Castor et Pollux is ignored. By clapping, Antoinette exhibits her sympathy with a sentimental heroine and tries to fashion a connection between them, but it does not resonate for the audience. Indeed, her emotional sensibility is no longer of importance to the nation.198 The aria resumes, this time non-diegetically. A painting featuring three children is replaced with a painting featuring two, alluding to the death of an infant and acting as an homage to the famous empty cradle in Marie-Antoinette and her Children (1787).199 A funeral follows, presumably for 197 Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993), 70. 198 For a reflection on tears in the operatic theatre during this period, see James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 53-70. 199 See Mary D. Sheriff, “The Cradle Is Empty: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Marie-Antoinette, and the Problem of Intention,” in Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. Melissa Hyde and Jennifer Dawn Milam (London: Routledge, 2003), 164-87. 62 the deceased child. As the child’s body is carted away in a casket, Antoinette goes to grab her son, clinging to the child she has left. After, Antoinette wanders the halls and garden of Versailles in her black mourning attire, drained of energy and utterly alone. The aria concludes with Antoinette in bed, holding her daughter, cherishing what she loves most. In the subsequent scene, an advisor informs the King and Queen that an angry mob has stormed the Bastilles, solidifying their fate. Throughout these scenes, Marie Antoinette is unable to become a sentimental heroine. Although Antoinette mourns, the French people, who are akin to Castor et Pollux’s chorus, do not join her grief; it is not the collective grief of tragédie en musique. Her applause at the conclusion of the aria shows both her own resonance with the subject matter and support of its message. Yet, when no one joins her, it becomes evident that although the public may recognize the grief portrayed on stage and thus, Antoinette’s tragedy, they are unmoved. In the final section, a deleted scene exemplifies how the French people do not sympathize with her emotional pleas because they do not perceive her as French. Antoinette as Austrian One operatic scene featuring "J'ai perdu mon Eurydice,” from Gluck’s Orpheé et Eurydice, is cut from Marie Antoinette. Although in French, it is the only Germanic opera featured in the film. Marie Antoinette, a former pupil of Gluck, championed his music in France. Given the long- standing association between French opera and politics, being a proponent of Gluck's work proved problematic as it asserted her Austrian lineage while reinforcing her position as a French outsider. 200 Furthermore, considering this is the only operatic scene that clearly connects Antoinette to her Austrian homeland, its removal denies her a chance to show her contribution to music history 200 Charlotte Ginot-Slacik, “How Gluck Revolutionised Opera,” Opéra national de Paris, August 3, 2021, https://www.operadeparis.fr/en/magazine/how-gluck-revolutionised-opera. 63 through her patronage and advocacy of Gluck’s compositions. By disposing of this scene, the film focuses more on her social and political reputation than her contributions to French culture. The French adaptation used in the film was Gluck’s attempt to appease French audiences. Originally written in Italian, the opera premiered in 1762 for the name-day of Emperor Francis I, father of Marie Antoinette, to great praise.201 A decade later, the opera was rewritten as Orphée et Eurydice at the Académie Royale de Musique in 1774. With French distaste for castrato roles, the composer rewrote the role of Orpheus as a haute-contre, the French tenor voice preferred in heroic roles. Moreover, Gluck altered the orchestration, including additional instruments and vocals, to make the opera “larger, longer, and grander.”202 The libretto was also expanded and rewritten in French by the poet Moline. Using this version, Orphée et Eurydice exemplifies Antoinette’s efforts to bridge French sensibility and her Austrian identity. However, removing this scene undermines the complexities of Antoinette’s identity and relationship to French culture. Text that plays before the deleted scene on the Marie Antoinette DVD provides commentary from Sofia Coppola regarding its removal: This opera scene came after Marie Antoinette has become Queen and thinks everyone just loves her and she’s sharing some German opera with the people of France. (For opera buffs, the singer on stage in Susan Graham performing “J’ai Perdu Mon Eurydice” from the Gluck opera Orphée te Eurydice). We took this scene out because it felt like one opera too many and losing it made the other two opera scenes stronger and contract more, her first opera where the people in the city are so taken with her and applaud her and then the last one where they’ve turned on her, and she sees for the first time that they don’t adore her. By removing this scene, Coppola affirms that the movie’s other operatic scenes exemplify Antoinette’s position in France. An analysis of this scene proves that the inclusion of "J'ai perdu 201 The opera’s recognition continues today, as it is considered one of Gluck’s most notable works. In my studies as an opera singer, I can affirm not only the popularity of the opera but the popularity of this particular aria as I have heard the Italian version of this aria “Che faro senza Euridice” more times than I can count. Jeremy Hayes, “Orfeo ed Euridice,” Grove Music Online, ed. Deane Root, accessed 2 March, 2023, https://doi- org.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.O008226 202 Hayes, “Orfeo ed Euridice.” 64 mon Eurydice" adds additional depth to this analysis as the scene punctuates the French nobility’s hesitance to accept Germanic opera in French society. The deleted scene begins away from the opera house, as Louis XVI is seated with several of his advisors at a table. He looks hopelessly bored as they discuss documents around him, presumably regarding political affairs. Finding momentary pleasure in mundane objects, he grabs a scroll on the table and holds it up to his eye, peering through as if examining a telescope. In these few seconds, the end of the B section of the aria resounds, “déchire mon coeur!” Where the complete line translates to “What torment tears at my heart,” this torment is two-fold. Not only is Orfée speaking of his overwhelming grief, but we also catch a brief glimpse of Louis looking trapped in his royal duty: a small foreshadowing of his eventual removal from his position and death akin to Orfée’s doomed lover Eurydice.203 After a few seconds, the camera changes to the scene of the opera. In the opera, Orfeo’s love, Eurydice, tragically dies from a snake bite. Traveling to the Underworld to save her, Orfeo is forbidden to look at her or explain his actions. Although Orfeo has diligently followed instructions, he disobeys them when Eurydice mistakes his silence and indifference for infidelity. Breaking his vows, Eurydice dies again, and Orfeo, sung in the film by renowned mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, sings "J'ai perdu mon Eurydice" in grief and despair. Featuring Orfeo on stage for a few seconds, the camera pans to King Louis XVI looking through binoculars. Where Antoinette looks utterly moved, the binoculars resemble the scroll in the previous scene, linking Louis XVI’s ambivalence. The commentary by French spectators during opera resounds asserts the French’s displeasure with Antoinette and her Austrian music. At the height of the aria, the scene turns toward two noblemen in a different opera box. While watching the performance and looking displeased, the first man turns to the second, speaking low and slowly, and states, “Oh, to be tortured by this 203 Eurydice perishes from a snake bite, while Louis XVI dies by guillotine. 65 German opera for their entire reign.” As long as she is in power, listeners must endure music that asserts her Austrian heritage. The second man responds, “I’d rather listen to a hundred howling monkeys,” and briefly turns to glare in the direction of Antoinette and her royal party. Not only do these men reject Antoinette’s musical tastes, but this distaste also underscores a growing disparity in Antoinette’s authority as Queen. Through the guise of this commentary, this scene stresses Antoinette’s difficulty establishing her cultural identity in France and deep resistance from French nobility. This underlying resistance becomes more evident after the orchestra plays its final chord. In the audience, muffled applause begins, a sonic sign of approval of the Austrian Gluck. Pleased to hear someone other than herself start the clapping, Antoinette smiles and joins. A few audience members shout, “God Save the Queen!,” further linking the performance to her culture identity. However, the clapping is not as robust nor enthusiastic as in the first operatic scene, and the audience members’ commentary during the performance alludes to this enthusiasm being superficial from several spectators. This tepid response suggests that Antoinette’s contributions to French culture are not universally welcome. At the conclusion of the operatic performance, the scene shifts to Antoinette’s mother, Maria Theresa, and reaffirms worries regarding Antoinette conforming to French identity. Wearing all black and standing at a window, she reads a letter from her son and Antoinette’s brother, Joseph II. 204 Worried about Marie Antoinette and her position in the French monarchy, the letter reads, “However brilliant the queen’s position at the moment, she will never consolidate until she produces an heir to the state. She needs the qualities of motherhood to be regarded as French, by this petulant and frivolous nation which will otherwise resent her influence.” Although Marie 204 Maria Theresa was sole Empress of the Hapsburg empire for forty years until her death in 1780 while Joseph II was Holy Roman Emperor from 1765 and became ruler of the Hapsburg empire after his mother’s demise until his death in 1790. 66 Antoinette would produce heirs, the public would not consider her motherhood as a positive trait. In her formative text regarding family dynamics in France during the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt affirms that where “the nation, Paris, and the Revolution were all good mothers; Marie Antoinette was the bad mother.”205 Hunt refers to the scandalous and pornographic pamphlets that defamed the queen by claiming that she had broken the sacred vows of marriage and betrayed her children. Taking this claim further, arguments at her trial included accusations of incest with her eight-year- old son, Louis-Charles Capet.206 Indeed, such framing vilified Antoinette’s ability to contribute to the nation justified Marie Antoinette’s beheading and her ultimate denunciation by French society. Conclusion In opera, characters are often vilified under the pretense of what they represent in the narrative arc. To determine where our sympathy lies, we often make use of preconceived notions based off voice type, musical rhetoric, and the ways broader ideas about identity become distilled in operatic characters. In opera, many of these stereotypes are misogynist. In this chapter, I have argued that the staged personas that Coppola employs highlight eighteenth-century gender roles and the ruthless public opinions regarding Marie Antoinette. As Jude Doyle writes, Marie Antoinette is one of many women throughout a long line of history whose “narrative (was)…stolen, and weaponized” to signpost “what ‘wrong’ is, which boundaries we’re currently placing on femininity, (and) which stories we’ll allow women to have.”207 Indeed, Marie Antoinette has been presented as a caricature and vilified through history. It is my hope that scholarship continues to move beyond caricature to view Marie Antoinette in the many nuanced facets of her life, both musical and otherwise. 205 Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, 99. 206 Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, 93. 207 Sady [Jude] Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2017), xii and xx. 67 CODA Gifted by a youth crush, the Marie Antoinette soundtrack became one of my prized possessions in high school. In my Black Nissan Versa, my commutes to school became ritualistic as it was the only album I would listen to. I imagined a world where I was as cool as the sophisticated queen that Coppola crafted on screen. Like the young queen, I, too, was shaping my own identity. Now, as a musicologist over a decade later, re-visiting these songs has transformed from an inward self-reflection of self to outward consideration of the ways this movie indicates identity formation of others. My favorite song on the soundtrack is The Strokes’s “What Ever Happened?” With a striking ostinato guitar rhythm, lead singer Julian Casablancas weaves narratives of a past relationship and fears of becoming a band that falls into oblivion. Appearing for approximately forty-five seconds in the movie, the song punctuates brief scenes where Antoinette is overcome with butterflies and fantasizes about Count Fersen. While the lyrics in the film’s context exemplify her affair and fears of its conclusion, the lyrics also reflect untold stories and past narratives, often of those stereotypes or silenced by the historical narrative. In its opening, the song’s lyrics serve as a reflection of erasure: I wanna be forgotten And I don’t wanna be reminded Where being “forgotten” imbues historiographical narratives that leave out individual stories and struggles of voices often marginalized, “I don’t wanna be reminded” incurs a desire to not be defined by the past and instead move towards a future in which these narratives are fleshed out and re-defined. In these three chapters, I have ruminated on the ties between pre-existing music and historical biopic to re-examine Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. Through its unique soundscape, this analysis has shed light on how marginalized voices punctuate narratives about eighteenth-century France. 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