PhD (General)

Throughout her post-graduate years, Rosemary Yeoland has linked together her love of both music and the French language and has chosen topics of an interdisciplinary nature for her research. Her first class Honours thesis, completed in 1999, pursued an aspect of André Gide’s literary connection to music: Le Rapport entre la musique et l’éveil de la spiritualité et de la sensualité chez André Gide. This was followed by her Master of Arts thesis in 2001, entitled Romain Rolland et l’héroïsme: une perspective musicale. Rosemary continued with a doctoral thesis and was awarded her PhD in French in December 2006 for La Contribution littéraire de Camille Mauclair au domaine musical parisien à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle.

This thesis examines both the musical aesthetic and the literary style used in works on music by Camille Mauclair, (1872-1945), a French writer, poet, essayist and musical critic, who left a considerable legacy in the musical domain. Having received no theoretical training in music, but imbued with Symbolist ideas, this homme-de-lettres utilised a particular literary style when writing on musical subjects. Often present in his work is a musicality, derived from the influence of Richard Wagner’s ideas on the fusion of the arts. Throughout his life, Mauclair had an ardent desire to convey his love of music to the French public and his writings in this domain reveal him to be not only a litterateur but also a pedagogue, historian, biographer and musical critic. The thesis also explores how he adapts his literary style accordingly.