Music: Dissonance and Silence

French music confronted representing sounds beyond traditional harmony. Composers who experienced bombardment heard differently. Those who didn't struggled to respond appropriately to catastrophe.

Maurice Ravel, serving as ambulance driver, composed little during war but returned transformed. "Le Tombeau de Couperin," dedicated to friends killed in action, mourned through restraint rather than bombast. Each movement honored specific dead, transforming baroque forms into memorial music. His postwar works showed new darkness—the playful composer had witnessed too much.

Claude Debussy, dying during war's final year, composed increasingly austere music. His late sonatas stripped away impressionist decoration, seeking essential expression. "Music must be humble before such suffering," he wrote. "Grand gestures insult the dead. Only silence or simplest sounds approach truth."

Arthur Honegger's "Pacific 231" captured locomotive's rhythm, but listeners heard artillery bombardment. Mechanical rhythms, industrial sounds, and structured chaos entered concert halls. Darius Milhaud incorporated jazz learned from American soldiers, finding in syncopation and improvisation languages for disrupted time.

Erik Satie, too old to serve, created music of deliberate simplicity opposing wartime grandiloquence. His "Socrate," premiered in 1918, used minimal means for maximum expression. "After such noise," he explained, "we need whispers." His influence shaped postwar French music toward clarity and restraint.

Popular music evolved dramatically. Soldiers' songs, created in trenches, mixed gallows humor with genuine emotion. "La Chanson de Craonne," banned for defeatism, expressed mutiny through melody. Music halls, providing escape for soldiers on leave, developed new forms. American jazz, arriving with doughboys, revolutionized French popular music. Josephine Baker's 1925 arrival symbolized jazz age born from war's ashes.

The war created new sonic environment—sirens, bombardments, machine guns—that composers incorporated. Edgard Varèse, gassed while serving, created music using sirens and percussion, abandoning traditional instruments for industrial sounds. "The war taught us earth's music," he declared. "Not bird songs but explosive percussion."