Maison

A charming approach to cooking, entertaining, and table-setting with all the chicness of Parisians at home. The Parisian dinner party is the ideal of entertaining chic: the style of the host, the quality of the food and wine, and the beauty of the setting. With this creative and invaluable book, Laurent Buttazzoni--renowned French architect, gourmand, and celebrated host of delightful dinner parties in Paris--shares his tried and true elements for Parisian entertaining.Dispelling the myths of expense and complexity that can intimidate hosts, Diner à la Maison is a guide to shopping, cooking, and entertaining the Parisian way. Led by beautiful color photographs made in the author's home, the book covers the fundamental ingredients for the pantry, followed by a guide to pairing 42 menus with it's own décor and table setting. From weekday hits to weekend entertaining, seasonal events, and holiday parties, each menu is accompanied by ideas for a decoration theme. For weeknight gathering, Buttazzoni offers simple seasonal dishes such as Watercress Soup and French Macaroni and Cheese or Rack of Lamb with Pan Juices, Green Tabbouleh, and Lemon Tart. For a more formal dinner party a menu of Belgian Endive Salad with Pears and Blue Cheese, Duck Breast à l'Orange, and Honey Glazed Turnips or Poule au Pot, Poached Vegetables, and a luscious Berry Trifle. With a candid guide to shopping for everything from good-quality groceries to eclectic tableware, as well as creative tips on the details that make any dinner party a success (pop your champagne in the freezer before guests arrive!)--and with an introduction by style icon Sofia Coppola--this book is an essential tool for all those who want to receive family and friends at home.

One of his very few built projects in the Americas, Maison Curutchet is a fascinating representation of Le Corbusier's stylistic transitional period, bridging his late 1920s purism and the maturity of his later work in India. Like Casa Malaparte, this book offers an in-depth analysis of a single building through original documents, drawings, and photographs.

The history of music at the Maison royale de Saint-Louis at Saint-Cyr — the famous convent school founded by Madame de Maintenon and established by Louis XIV in 1686 as a royal foundation — is both rich and intriguing; its large repertory of music was composed expressly for young female voices by important composers working within significant contemporary musical genres: liturgical chant, sacred motets, theatrical music, and cantiques spirituels. While these genres reflect contemporary styles and trends, at the same time the works themselves were made to conform to the sensibilities and abilities of their intended performers. Even as Jean-Baptiste Moreau's music for Jean Racine’s biblical tragedies Esther and Athalie shows a number of similarities to contemporary tragédies lyriques, it departs from that more public genre in its brevity, generally simpler solo writing, and the integral use of the chorus. The musical style of the choral numbers closely parallels that of other choral music in the repertory at Saint-Cyr. The liturgical chant sung in the church was composed by Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers, and is an example of plain-chant musical, a type of new ecclesiastical composition written during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, primarily for female religious communities in France. The large repertory of petits motets (short sacred Latin pieces for solo voice), mostly composed by Nivers and Louis-Nicolas Clérambault, are simpler and more restrained than works by their contemporaries. A close study of the motets reveals much about changes to musical style and performance practices at Saint-Cyr during the eighteenth century. The cantique spirituel, a song with a spiritual text in the vernacular French language, played a significant role in both the education and recreation of the girls at Saint-Cyr. Cantiques composed for the girls vary widely in terms of their style and difficulty, ranging from simple strophic melodies to more sophisticated works in the style of contemporary airs. In all cases, the stylistic features of the music for Saint-Cyr reflect a careful consideration of the needs and capabilities of the young singers of the school, as well as an awareness of the rigorous requirements of Madame de Maintenon, who kept a close watch over the propriety of all things relating to the piety, behavior, and image of her charges.

"The book is concerned with homes, maisons, and case - English, French, and Italian words which refer to a similar idea yet which reveal, together, that the notion of being at home, a la maison, or a case pivots on the axis of material dwelling places as well as the more abstract concept of being at home, or chez soi.".