Écoles de Paris – Paris pour École

While art history defines as “École de Paris” an art-historical phenomenon, i.e. a large group of visual artists of non-French origin, many of them of Eastern European and Jewish descent, who worked in the French capital in the first decades of the twentieth century, musicology and musical life in general still find it difficult to recognize as music-historical reality an “Ècole de Paris” with the same complexity and seminal influence. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of its first appearance in the musical context, the 100th anniversary of the world premiere of Strawinsky’s seminal Octet and the 100th anniversary of George Antheil’s arrival in Paris, the present recording takes the opportunity to scrutinize the term “École de Paris” and to define it more clearly against the background of the enormous stylistic diversity of the various groups that came together in Paris of the1920s, their amicable interrelationships and reciprocal influences beyond the epochal break of 1939-45.