Show Summary Details

Page of

Printed from Grove Music Online. Grove is a registered trademark. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).

Subscriber: null; date: 18 February 2025

Laloy, Louislocked

Laloy, Louislocked

  • John Trevitt

(b Gray, Haute-Saône, Feb 18, 1874; d Dôle, March 4, 1944). French musicologist and critic. He was a pupil at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (1893), gaining the agrégé des lettres (1896) and docteur ès lettres (1904); he also studied at the Schola Cantorum with d’Indy, Bordes and others (1899–1905). He contributed as editor-in-chief (‘without title’, as he said later) to Combarieu’s Revue musicale from 1901, and in 1905 founded, with Jean Marnold, the Mercure musical which Ecorcheville later transformed into the Bulletin français de la S.I.M. He was also co-founder of the short-lived Année musicale (1911–13) and an influential music critic of the Grande revue, the Gazette des beaux-arts and (from 1930) the Revue des deux mondes. In 1906–7 he lectured on music history at the Sorbonne while Romain Rolland was on leave. He served as secretary general of the Paris Opéra from 1914 and was professor of music history at the Paris Conservatoire (1936–41).

Laloy was a cultured man whose interests included the music of ancient Greece (discussed in his dissertation) and that of East Asia: he lectured on Chinese music at the Sorbonne from 1921 and wrote the libretto for Roussel’s Padmâvatî. Though his work at the Schola Cantorum led to a book on Rameau, Laloy was a noted defender of contemporary French music and was a close friend of, and mediator between, Ravel and Debussy, with whom he collaborated on some unrealized stage works; he was also the author of the first major work (and the first in the French language) on Debussy.

Writings

  • Aristoxène de Tarente et la musique de l’antiquité (diss., Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, 1904; Paris, 1904/R)
  • ‘Notes sur la musique cambodgienne’, IMusSCR II: Basle 1906, 61–5
  • Rameau (Paris, 1908, 3/1919)
  • Claude Debussy (Paris, 1909, 2/1944; Eng. trans., 1930)
  • The Future of Music (London, 1910)
  • La musique chinoise (Paris, 1910; Eng. trans., 1979)
  • Richard Wagner (Leipzig, 1910) [trans. of G. Adler: Richard Wagner, Leipzig, 1904]
  • La danse à l’Opéra (Paris, 1927)
  • La musique retrouvée, 1902–1927 (Paris, 1928/R)
  • Une heure de musique avec Beethoven (Paris, 1930)
  • Comment écouter la musique (Paris, 1942)

Bibliography

  • M. Dietschy: ‘Louis Laloy (1874–1944)’, Bulletin de la Société des amis de Meudon, 142 (1977), 2276–85
  • A. Hoérée: ‘Lettres d’Albert Roussel à Louis Laloy’, Cahier Albert Roussel, 2 (1979), 72–4
  • A. Flattot-Mouffard: ‘Louis Laloy, musicologue Franc-comtois et Claude Debussy’, Mémoires de la Société d’emulation du Doubs, new ser., 28 (1986), 67–77
Page of
International Musical Society: Congress Report [II-IV, 1906-11]