On nature, music, and meaning in Debussy's writing

Nineteenth Century Music

Volumn 28, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 214-229

  Dayan, Peter ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61449084761     PISSN: 01482076     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2005.28.3.214     Document Type: Review

References (31)

1. This journal 26 (2002), 155-77 (quote, p. 157).
2. Or Elizabeth McCombie, whose book Mallarmé and Debussy: Unheard Music, Unseen Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) is an examination of the parallels between Debussy's aesthetics and Mallarmé's based on an analysis, not of Debussy's words, but of his music, in terms informed by Mallarmé's critical discourse and poetic practice. McCombie provides perhaps the most productive model we have for listening to Debussy in ways structured by interdisciplinary reflection.
3. Lalo's text is quoted in a footnote to Debussy's Correspondance 1884-1918, ed. François Lesure (Paris: Hermann, 1993), p. 207.
4. All references to Debussy's writings are either to this edition or to Monsieur Croche et autres écrits, ed. Lesure (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), henceforth abbreviated Correspondance and Monsieur Croche.
5. The texts in these volumes may generally be found translated into English, either in Debussy Letters, ed. François Lesure and Roger Nichols, trans. Nichols (London: Faber, 1987)
6. or in Debussy on Music, coll. and intro. Lesure, and ed. and trans. Richard Langham Smith (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1977); my notes allow quoted texts to be located in these editions by their date, but the translations given here are mine.
7. Nigel Simeone, "Debussy and Expression," in The Cambridge Companion to Debussy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 108. Simeone gives the date of the review by Lalo as 16 February; this must be a mistake.
8. Correspondance, p. 207 (25 Oct. 1905).
9. I seek here only to elucidate Debussy's beliefs on this matter; but their broader context is certainly fascinating. Lawrence Kramer's Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001) contains a sustained and often brilliant reflection on the subject of how meanings become attached to music, based primarily on examples from a historical period in which Debussy is central; however, Debussy is not one of the composers on whom Kramer's book concentrates. Perhaps this article could be seen as a modest speculation within that gap.
10. Correspondance, p. 264 (25 Feb. 1910).
11. Monsieur Croche, p. 94 (16 Feb. 1903).
12. Vaucanson was a celebrated eighteenth-century maker of automata, including an automatic flautist, and a particularly famous duck with a fully functioning digestive tract. Arthur B. Wenk, in Claude Debussy and the Poets (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), draws attention to the problem of representation in Debussy's music (as well, pp. 69-73, as to the question of Baudelairean correspondences, which I discuss below), but his grasp of Debussy's essential distinctions between imitation, translation, and transposition is so shaky that he can quote the last sentence of this passage affirming that it expresses Debussy's admiration of the Pastoral Symphony (p. 68), whereas in fact it expresses precisely the opposite.
13. See Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, vol. II (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2003), pp. 331 and 144.
14. Correspondance, p. 162 (11 Feb. 1901).
15. Daniel Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
16. Among the critics who have tilled this ground, Lawrence Kramer stands out by virtue of his careful attention to the necessity of maintaining both propositions, and navigating between them. To give just one brief example (from a discussion of song in Schubert and George Eliot): "Meaning ... remains the very nucleus of song. But any understanding of song does need to take account of how and why meaning is so regularly cast off" (Musical Meaning, p. 66).
17. A travers chants (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1862), p. 39.
18. Correspondance, p. 72 (letter to André Poniatowski, Feb. 1893).
19. Monsieur Croche, p. 215 (S. I. M., Dec. 1912).
20. Proust shares this perception. In A la recherche du temps perdu, to attribute meaning to music is to betray it, yet no one can long resist the temptation to do so. For an examination of how this dynamic emerges in the work, see my "On the Meaning of 'Musical' in Proust," in Word and Music Studies: Essays in Honor of Stephen Paul Scher and on Cultural Identity and the Musical Stage, ed. Suzanne M. Lodato, Suzanne Aspden, and Walter Bernhart (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 143-58.
21. Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, II, 67, 258.
22. These are the opening words of Verlaine's famous "Art poétique"; see Paul Verlaine, Œuvres poétiques complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1962), p. 326.
23. Monsieur Croche, pp. 239-40 (S. I. M., 1 Nov. 1913).
24. Monsieur Croche, p. 67 (Musica, Oct. 1902), and pp. 66-67.
25. Monsieur Croche, p. 96 (Gil Blas, 16 Feb. 1903).
26. See quotation from Monsieur Croche, pp. 239-40, above.
27. Monsieur Croche, pp. 269-70 (Le Figaro, 16 May 1902).
28. Correspondance, pp. 38-39 (19 Oct. 1885).
29. See Baudelaire, Petits poèmes en prose (Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1967), p. 32.
30. Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, II, 82.
31. Of course, we have not always needed them; these remarks apply only at a certain point in the aesthetic argument, articulated most forcefully, for me, by Mallarmé and Debussy. If I may allow myself one observation to do with music history, necessarily tentative and general: it seems to me that one of Debussy's innovations, very much analogous to the invention of the prose poem by Baudelaire, is to replace the inadequacy of formal analysis by inadequacy of reference. In an idealized past, composers including Rameau, Mozart, or Beethoven created works within a tradition that led one to expect certain things of the music's form. The artistic force, the horizon or vanishing point of this music, derives from the way in which it escapes from that form while confirming the form's necessity. (An analysis of Rameau's writing would, I suggest, allow one to demonstrate this process operating through his opposition between mathematics and taste.) In Debussy, to some extent, meaning, reference, or program replaces form in the unavoidable expectations it creates and in the way it exceeds those expectations. This creates difficulties in music analysis in the same way that prose poetry creates difficulties in literary analysis.