After Debussy: Music, Language, and the Margins of Philosophy [Illustrated] 0190066822, 9780190066826

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After Debussy

After Debussy Music, Language, and the Margins of Philosophy J U L IA N J O H N S O N

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Johnson, Julian, author. Title: After Debussy : music, language, and the margins of philosophy / Julian Johnson. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2019020716 | ISBN 9780190066826 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190066857 (online) | ISBN 9780190066833 (updf) | ISBN 9780190066840 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Debussy, Claude, 1862–1918—Criticism and interpretation. | Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. | Music and language. Classification: LCC ML410. D28 J64 2029 | DDC 780.92—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020716 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

For Julia ( . . . danseuse, fée, sirène, musicienne du silence) With my love and thanks.

List of figures 0.1 Auguste Rodin, La cathédrale (1908)

xx

1.1 Stéphane Mallarmé, Un coup de dés (1897), pp. 7–​8

42

2.2 Édouard Manet, Le citron (1880)

77

5.1 Claude Monet, Régates à Argenteuil (1872)

148

5.2 Claude Monet, Sur les bords de Seine à Bennecourt (1868)

149

5.3 Henri Matisse, La fenêtre ouverte à Collioure (1905)

157

5.4 Claude Monet, Femme à l’ombrelle tournée vers la gauche (1886) 159 6.1 Claude Monet, Les nymphéas –​Les nuages (1914–​26), detail

187

6.2 Claude Debussy, La mer, front cover (Paris: Durand, 1905)

187

6.3 Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1832)

188

7.1 Pierre Bonnard, Nu au mirroir (la Toilette) (1931), detail

213

7.2 Paul Cézanne, Quatre baigneuses (1888–​90)

216

8.1 Loïe Fuller, photographed by Frederick Glasier (1902)

232

10.1 Vincent van Gogh, Almond Blossom (1890)

299

List of music examples 1.1 Debussy, Sirènes, bb. 1–​4

32

1.2 Debussy, La mer, ‘Dialogue du vent et de la mer’, bb. 56–​59

37

1.3 Fauré, ‘La mer est infinie’, L’horizon chimérique, Op.118, no.1, bb. 1–​7

46

2.1 Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande Act 3.i, bb. 1–​17

54

2.2 Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act 2.ii, bb. 70–​77

60

2.3 Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act 1.iii, bb. 88–​96

62

2.4 Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act 3.i, ‘Je les tiens dans les mains’, bb. 107–​17

63

2.5 Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act 4.iv, ‘Tu ne sais pas pourquoi’, bb. 86–​99

65

2.6 Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande Act 1.ii, bb. 147–​60

70

2.7 Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande Act 1.ii, bb. 27–​46

72

2.8 Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande Act 4.ii, bb. 152–​58

75

3.1 Debussy, ‘Soupir’, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, bb. 1–​12

88

3.2 Debussy, ‘Soupir’, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, bb. 13–​15

89

3.3 Debussy, ‘Soupir’, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, bb. 23–​31

91

3.4 Debussy, ‘Éventail’, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, bb. 1–​3

96

3.5 Debussy, ‘Éventail’, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, bb. 25–​31

97

3.6 Boulez, Le marteau sans maître, Movement 9, ‘Bel édifice et les pressentiments’, Double, bb. 157–​67

103

3.7 Boulez, Pli selon pli, ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui’, bb. 64-​70

105

3.8 Boulez, Pli selon pli, ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui’, bb. 71-​77

106

3.9 Debussy, ‘Placet futile’, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, bb. 19–​28

109

4.1 (a) Debussy, ‘En sourdine’ (1882), bb. 1–​10; (b) Debussy ‘En sourdine’ (1892), Fêtes galantes I, bb. 1–​9

132

4.2 Debussy, ‘En sourdine’ (1892), Fêtes galantes I, bb. 29–​43

132

4.3 Debussy, ‘Clair de lune’ (1892), Fêtes galantes I, bb. 17–​32

135

4.4 Debussy, ‘Colloque sentimental’, Fêtes galantes II, bb. 33–​39

137

5.1 Debussy, Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faune, bb. 1–​6

164

6.1 Debussy, ‘Nuages’, Nocturnes, bb. 1–​9

172

xii  List of music examples 6.2 Fauré, ‘Exaucement’, Le jardin clos, bb. 1–​9

180

6.3 Debussy, ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’, La mer, bb. 1–​5

190

6.4 Debussy, ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’, La mer, bb. 76–​81

191

6.5 Debussy, ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’, La mer, bb. 82–​90

192

6.6 Debussy, ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’, La mer, bb. 121–​25

192

6.7 Debussy, ‘Jeux de vagues’, La mer, bb. 1–​4

193

6.8 (a) Debussy, ‘Dialogue du vent et de la mer’, La mer, bb. 157–​60; (b)  Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act 4.iv, bb. 93–​94

194

7.1 Debussy, Douze Études, No.1, ‘Pour les cinq doigts’, bb. 1–​15

202

7.2 Debussy, Douze Études, No.8, Pour les agréments, bb. 1–​6

209

7.3 Debussy, Douze Études, No.11, Pour les arpèges composés, bb. 1–​6

210

7.4 Debussy, ‘Brouillards’, Préludes, Livre II, no.1, bb. 1–​6

212

7.5 (a) Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act 3.i, bb. 114–​17; (b) Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act 3.i, bb. 157-​61

224

8.1 Debussy, ‘Le vent dans la plaine’, Préludes, Livre I, no.3, bb. 1–​6

239

8.2 Debussy, ‘Les collines d’Anacapri’, Préludes, Livre I, no.5, bb. 80–​96

240

8.3 Debussy, ‘Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest’, Préludes, Livre I, no.7, bb. 35–​42

242

8.4 Debussy, ‘La sérénade interrompue’, Préludes, Livre I, no.9, bb. 90–​112

245

8.5 Debussy, ‘La cathédrale engloutie’, Préludes, Livre I, no.10, bb. 72–​89

246

Guide to discussion of individual works Pierre Boulez Dialogue de l’ombre double

168-​169

Le marteau sans maître

102-​104,  105f

Pli selon pli

44, 101–​102, 104–​109, 107f, 108f

Répons

52, 109, 169

Third Piano Sonata

53, 196-​197

Claude Debussy Apparition

121–​123

Douze Études

203–​212,  214f

Estampes

179–​180

Fêtes Galantes

130–​137

Ibéria274 Images pour piano 

179–​180, 219–​220

Jeux

125, 262–​263

La damoiselle élue 

124–​124

L’isle joyeuse  La mer 

38 39, 49–​50, 126, 188–​198, 261–​262, 271, 281

Nocturnes  Pelléas et Mélisande 

33–​35, 50, 173, 188 55–​308, 137–​139, 143–​144, 162, 195–​196

Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faune  Préludes pour Piano  Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé 

115, ​125, 165–​166 143, 237 87–110, 122–​123

Henri Dutilleux Tout un monde lointain 

227, 273

Gabriel Fauré La chanson d’Ève 

184–​186,  291

Le jardin clos 

181–​184

xiv  Guide to discussion of individual works L’horizon chimérique  Mirages 

47–​48, 272 154–​156,  272

Gérard Grisey Les chants de l’amour  Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil  Vortex temporum 

36 165 165, 169, 181

Georg Friedrich Haas Concerto Grosso No. 1 

174

Jonathan Harvey Advaya 

147, 227

Birdconcerto and Pianosong 

164

Death of Light/​Light of Death 

164

From Silence  Mortuous plango, vivos voco  Speakings 

164, 191 169 40

György Ligeti Lux aeterna 

36

Olivier Messiaen Éclairs sur l’au-​delà 

164

Poèmes pour Mi 

35

Quatour pour la fin du temps 

35

Turangalîla-​Symphonie  Vingts regards sur l’enfant Jesus 

35, 184 50

Tristan Murail Au-​delà du mur du son 

164

Bois flotté 

163

Estuaire 

163

Gondwana  Le partage des eaux 

163, 273 147, 163, 281

L’esprit des dunes 

163

L es miroirs étendus 

163

Guide to discussion of individual works  xv Les septs paroles du Christ  Reflections/​Reflets  Sillages 

36, 95 163 147, 198

Maurice Ravel Bolero  Daphnis et Chloé  Gaspard de la nuit  Jeux d’eau  L’enfant et les sortilèges  Miroirs  Shéhérazade 

224 167, 191 144, 265, 266 153–​154, 213, 261 187, 237 144–145, 169, 265, 268 166, 273

Jean-​Claude  Risset Sud 

169, 178, 267

Kaija Saariaho Du crystal . . . à la fumée  From the Grammar of Dreams  L’amour de loin 

147, 164 273 36, 127, 281

Lonh 

96

Nuits, adieux 

96

Nymphéa/​Nymphéa Reflection  Oltra mar 

96, 157–​158, 164 36, 198

Toru Takemitsu In an Autumn Garden 

184

Edgard Varèse Amériques 

154

Acknowledgements This book had its origins in a project funded by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Foundation (2014–​ 16) titled ‘Music, Voice, and Language in French Musical Thought’. I am grateful to the Foundation for funding two years of research leave, away from the pressures of teaching and administration, which enabled me to negotiate a move from my previous work on Austro-​German musical culture to the current study of French music. I am also grateful to Royal Holloway, University of London, for a period of sabbatical research leave immediately preceding the commencement of the Leverhulme Fellowship. This book has much deeper roots however. They reach back some thirty years to an earlier part of my career when I was still a composer and when the idea of music I have tried to articulate here informed the daily business of my creative work. In this respect, I owe a particular debt to Jonathan Harvey, my teacher for a year (1988–​89), subsequently a colleague for several more, and a much-​loved friend and mentor until his untimely death in 2012. I would dearly have liked to discuss the content of this book with him, and I would be delighted if I have managed, in some small way, to bring into the realm of discourse an idea of music he so richly embodied in his own creative practice and life. After Debussy is a wide-​ranging book and is necessarily shaped by a host of intellectual exchanges impossible to list. Those who exerted the most direct influence on my thinking are cited in my text, footnotes, and bibliography. But for their particularly close encouragement and support, and for opening windows onto ways of thinking that I  might not otherwise have come across, I would like to single out for thanks Jeremy Begbie, Federico Celestini, Jonathan Cross, Erling Guldbrandsen, Tomas McAuley, Jean-​ Paul Olive, Stephen Rumph, and Nikolaus Urbanek. I am especially grateful to colleagues and friends in the Music and Philosophy Study Group of the Royal Musical Association with which I have been associated since its inception in 2010 and without whom I would never have been so exposed to

xviii Acknowledgements current debates in the fraught but fascinating borderland between our two disciplines. I thank the two anonymous readers from Oxford University Press, the first readers of this work, who offered invaluable detailed comments and saved me from some serious omissions. I owe a special debt to Benjamin Walton who not only kindly read the whole of the typescript but also offered me a level of encouragement that is rare in academic life. His gentle but perspicacious insights saved me from errors of judgement far worse than those I have chosen to leave in. In the course of pursuing my work on Debussy I  have been fortunate enough to try out some of its materials on various groups of students –​at Royal Holloway, University of London, the Liszt Academy in Budapest, the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, and at the Université Paris 8. I thank all of them for their engagement with the topic, their challenging questions and their insightful comments. I am also grateful for some wonderfully rich exchanges with my PhD students, past and present, in particular to Sam Wilson and Clare Brady whose wonderful theses I cite in the text. To those unnamed friends and family who, in ways both academic and not, helped me find the re-​orientation of my work reflected in this book, I offer special thanks. I am grateful, as ever, to Jeremy Hughes for the precision and musicality with which he has set the music examples. Finally, my thanks to Suzanne Ryan and her team at OUP: without Suzanne’s quiet encouragement, patience, and faith in my work, I may never have brought this book to completion. I am grateful for permission to reuse material that has previously appeared in slightly different form elsewhere: My discussion of Debussy’s ‘Fêtes galantes’ in Chapter 4 draws on material that originally appeared as ‘Present absence: Debussy, song, and the art of (dis)appearing’, 19th-​Century Music 40, no.3 (2017), 239–​56. My discussion of Debussy’s ‘Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé’ in Chapter 3 reproduces material that originally appeared in ‘Vertige!:  Debussy, Mallarmé and the edge of language’ in Steven Huebner and François De Médicis (eds), Debussy’s Resonance (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2018). My discussion of Debussy’s Études in Chapter  7 draws on my chapter ‘Le corps en jeu: Debussy et “L’art de toucher” ’, which appears in Joseph Delaplace and Jean-​Paul Olive (eds), Le corps dans l’écriture musicale

Acknowledgements  xix (Arras:  Artois Presses Université, 2019). My discussion of Debussy’s La mer in Chapter 6 appears as part of a chapter, ‘Debussy, La mer, and the aesthetics of appearing’ in Andreas Dorschel and Emmanouil Perrakis (eds), Life as an Aesthetic Idea of Music, Studien zur Wertungsforschung (Vienna: Universal Edition, 2019).

Figure 0.1  Auguste Rodin, La cathédrale (1908). Photo: Daniel Stockman

Prologue: Music and language Music –​ logos –​ musicology All music is pró-​logos; it comes before the discourse it provokes. In that sense, music making and music listening are anterior to speaking about music.1 But isn’t the opposite also true? Isn’t all music made and heard in a world already pervasively discursive? There is no place, neither the space of the concert hall nor that of private listening, that isn’t already saturated with language. It’s not just that we bring linguistic minds to our listening, nor that all cultures of musical encounter are linguistically framed, but that all music is made within and against a dense weave of extra-​musical discourse. As Albrecht Wellmer argues, musical experience always occurs within an ‘enabling horizon of language’ that ‘precedes the immediacy of musical performance and listening’.2 So, if discourse frames music before a single sound is heard, any priority we accord to musical experience is, at best, virtual. And if music provokes discourse, it is also true that speaking about music provokes new musical experience. Were it not for this reciprocity, there would be little value in speaking of music at all. The tension between these ideas shapes this book. On the one hand, I urge readers to real-​time acts of musical engagement; on the other, the words do not simply come after, by way of explication, interpretation, or translation. They are not a supplement to musical experience, neither in the sense of being additive or ancillary, nor in the sense of substituting for music, by articulating its otherwise mute content. On the one hand/​on the other hand: the figure of speech is itself telling since, as figure, it marks a logic of the figural (two-​handed) body present within language itself. Rodin figured this play of discursive desire in one of his best-​known sculptures. La cathédrale (1908) is a larger than life-​size study of two right hands, on the verge of touching at the very edge of the fingertips, a sculpture in stone that nevertheless evokes a gentle, almost imperceptible presence of the touch of another (see Figure 0.1).3 But it is the charged space, framed by the cathedral-​like arch they form, that is as much the content of the work as the hands themselves.

After Debussy. Julian Johnson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066826.001.0001

2  After Debussy I place its image here as an epigraph, because its figuring makes tangible the productive tension between two things, the difference that joins what it also holds apart. My topic is the counterpoint of music and language –​the play of two hands, two kinds of creative invention, two modalities of the mind.4 It is precisely the charged space between two things that enables the spark that joins them. From the firing of microscopic synapses in the brain, to the gap imaged by Michelangelo between the hand of Adam and the hand of God, it is the invisible spark across the gap that ignites us, not the closing of the difference. Such is my approach here to the difference between music and language as a constitutive gap of the embodied human mind. My focus, however, is neither the co-​evolution of music and language in human pre-​history,5 nor the similarities and differences in how our own brains process music and language.6 It is, rather, an exploration of music (playing, listening, writing, thinking music) as a way of continually gapping the mind –​making audible and thinkable a sparking across the gap between music and language, sound and grammar, embodied actions and abstract concepts. Minding the gap, in the sense of taking care of it, attending to it and bringing it into the realm of self-​reflection, is precisely what I invite the reader to do in these pages. I am not interested in this gap as one of unbridgeable différance, perpetually deferred and unspeakable; to be clear, this is not another hymn to the ineffability of music. Neither do I  repeat the romantic claim for music as somehow ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ language, nor fetishise music as an experience of sensuous immediacy that language cannot provide. I am interested instead in an embodied and dynamic interaction between things –​music and language, language and the world. My interest is with their close relationship of non-​identity –​a play of imitation and difference, of like and not-​like, a counterpoint of parallels and divergences, one compensating for the lack of the other but always bound together. To think one without the other would be like thinking Rodin’s sculpture one hand at a time.7 My project therefore proceeds from the idea that music is better known through its dynamic and intimate relation of non-​identity to language –​and vice-​versa. There is no resolution of this non-​identity, nor is any sought. Music repeatedly becomes the topic of discourse, but continually reasserts itself as sound in a way that discourse cannot grasp. If philosophical or musicological discourses shape our understanding of music by bringing linguistic categories to bear upon it, music no less challenges those discourses by its recalcitrance towards them. It is a defining paradox of speaking about music that one of its most powerful contrapuntal moves is to insist on its own redundancy. Witness a

Prologue  3 much-​quoted statement of Vladimir Jankélévitch: ‘Music has this in common with poetry, and love, and even with duty: music is not made to be spoken of, but for one to do; it is not made to be said, but to be “played.” No. Music was not invented to be talked about.’8 And yet we do, as Jankélévitch himself did, at great length and with great eloquence.9 Why should we do such a thing –​to say, over and over and in different ways, that music’s saying cannot be said by language? Isn’t one answer because re-​approaching music through language reframes our saying in general? Since the nonverbal doing of music engages the same mind as speaking –​a patterning of neural networks in the same brain and a structuring of energies in the same body –​isn’t bringing music and language into proximity, over and again, a means to de-​habituate our linguistic grasp of the world?10 Musical practice, in its widest sense, exhibits this free and dynamic mixing of words and music at every turn –​from words about music, to words within music. I am not interested here in the philosophical question as to whether music is a language. Adorno warns us, in a short fragment from 1956, that: ‘Music resembles a language [ . . . ] but music is not identical with language. The resemblance points to something essential, but vague. Anyone who takes it literally will be seriously misled.’11 For Adorno, it is precisely the relationship of non-​identity that is definitive. That is to say, music and language are better understood through their intimate relation of difference. Both are constituted by ‘a temporal sequence of articulated sounds which are more than just sounds’. Like language, music possesses a kind of logic, but whatever is said by music ‘cannot be detached from the music’.12 Adorno’s wider exploration of music hinges on this language-​like character, rooted in the lexical units of tonality and its imitation of syntactical structures of linguistic discourse (phrase, sentence, paragraph, question, answer, idea, argument, closure). In the twentieth century, music’s deformation of such linguistic patterns embedded in tonality might seem to become all but unrecognisable; for Adorno, the relation therefore remained all the more critical. As the editors of a volume titled Speaking About Music justly assert: ‘It is impossible not to speak of music, for language and music are inextricably linked’.13 In the opening chapter, Lawrence Kramer (one of the most prolific and eloquent writers about music in recent times), asks simply ‘What problem?’: It is no problem because the problem of speaking of music is the same problem as the problem of speaking of anything. It is the same problem as

4  After Debussy the problem of speaking at all, which is not a problem that has ever caused any one in normal circumstances to stop speaking.14

Kramer’s breezy dismissal sounds reasonable and yet I want to disagree. Speaking about music is not the same as speaking about anything else  –​ chairs or trees or cars, history or economics. Why not? Because music is itself reflective on the relation between speaking and not speaking, and on the relation between (bodily) sense and (linguistic) signification. Speaking about music, all too often, proceeds in a manner that is the inverse of music’s own way of working. It accords no voice to the music it takes up into its own discourse. To speak about a chair or a tree, or history, is of a different order to speaking about music, in the same way that it is different to speaking about a person. I can speak about all these things in the same way, but my speech is radically different if another person is present to me; since she too has things to say, I don’t treat her like the chair on which she sits, as a mute object to be spoken about. Music, where we allow it to be present to our discourse, exerts a similar claim. The meeting of music and discourse is doomed to be sterile if the former simply becomes the mute object of the latter. Or, put the other way round, we have much to learn about music and language by thinking through their relation in ways that allow both to speak. But that requires listening. Not just the act of attending to musical sound in a more or less directed and deliberate fashion, but listening in a much expanded way –​as a kind of openness to the material sense and logic of music that work in related but inverse ways to those of language. Such a listening to sensuous particularity, however, is at odds with the kind of thinking we associate with rigorous disciplinary practice. It would require a suspension of (professional) discourse that resembles a condition of naïvety. As Jean-​Luc Nancy famously puts it, at the start of his book, Listening: Is listening something of which philosophy is capable? [ . . . ] Isn’t the philosopher someone who always hears (and who hears everything), but cannot listen, or who, more precisely, neutralizes listening within himself, so that he can philosophize?15

Nancy plays here on the different resonance of two French verbs (entendre –​to hear, but also to understand, and écouter –​to listen). The philosopher hears, the musician listens; one orders the world according to the logic of understanding, the other allows space for a recreative disordering of that

Prologue  5 logic. Or, put another way, (musical) listening allows space for the indeterminacy of aesthetic perception whereas (philosophical) understanding hinges on the determinacy of the concept.16 If this is a distinction that reaches back to Kant (for whom the relationship is definitive of the idea of freedom), Nancy’s statement might also recall a scene in Jacques Derrida’s essay on ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. Derrida pictures Plato overwhelmed by a kind of multiplying acoustic resonance, a proliferation of words as sound that undermines the semantic stability of language, with the end result that ‘Plato gags his ears the better to hear-​himself-​speak, the better to see, the better to analyse’.17 But if the philosopher, in order to do philosophy, has to stop his ears to the particularity of the world, the musicologist often proceeds along similar lines. It is not that the musicologist (a one-​time, perhaps still part-​time, musician) cannot listen, it is that this pleasurable but unverifiable experience of the particular, however much it may be a starting point, is generally set aside or even superseded by the requirements of scholarly and professional practice. Roland Barthes once set out three types of listening –​indexical (as an animal listens for prey or danger), deciphering (the human activity of reading signs), and ‘modern listening’ (listening for the ‘who’ within the speaking). Barthes also describes the third kind as a psychoanalytical listening –​a way of attending to the world that has nothing to do with signification.18 Such is the kind of listening that attends to the human voice not for the semantic sense of what is said, but for the way the voice carries and discloses one person to another. It is an idea taken up by Adriana Cavarero in her discussion of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, a play about the slippage of word and world (‘What’s in a name?’) in which everything is staked upon the authenticity of a voice heard in the darkness (Romeo as lover), even though it is at odds with all the signifiers of the daylight world of social discourse (Romeo as a Montague).19 Contra Lawrence Kramer, Barthes insists that: It is very difficult to speak about music. Many writers have spoken well about painting; none, I  think, have spoken well about music, not even Proust. The reason for this is that it is very difficult to unite language, which belongs to the order of the general, with music, which belongs to the order of difference.20

For Barthes, this has to do with music’s different relation to the body. Music, he writes, ‘is inscribed within me, but I don’t know where: in what

6  After Debussy part, in what region of the body and of language?’. It provokes for him a linguistic bewilderment that precludes any simple relation between the two. Music, in the end, is simply ‘what struggles with writing’.21 George Steiner puts the same problem more graphically: ‘where we try to speak of music, to speak music, language has us, resentfully, by the throat’.22 And yet, in Real Presences, a book preoccupied ‘as to whether anything meaningful can be said (or written) about the nature and sense of music’, Steiner makes the astonishing claim that ‘no epistemology, no philosophy of art can lay claim to inclusiveness if it has nothing to teach us about the nature and meanings of music’.23 We should be cautious, however, not to equate Barthes with the recent disciplinary lurch towards the body. Barthes’ insistence on music’s location in the body remains provocative, but he makes no simple equation between the two. To do so would be to take an earlier form of music’s ineffability (the romantic metaphysics by which music is ‘beyond’ language) and simply transpose it into a new form (a material aesthetics of music as somatic rather than semantic). I return to this problem in Chapter 8 (‘Writing the Body’). Far more productive, as a starting point, are Barthes’ scattered attempts, in essays resonant with the particularity of the music he discusses, ‘to displace the fringe of contact between music and language’.24 For fringe one might equally read gap, overlap, threshold, margin.25 In the same spirit, and at the same time, Susan Sontag famously argued ‘against interpretation’ because bringing language to artworks, in this way, so often produces a closing down of their unsettling effects: ‘Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.’26 Sontag was primarily concerned with literature, forever being read as an allegory of something else, but the case of music is not so different. If a popular reception of music tends towards a solipsistic activity (this music speaks to me of my own feelings), musicology often lurches to the other extreme by denying the primacy of (an always and necessarily subjective) listening without which music can hardly be said to take place. But in both cases, music is forever being taken as the vehicle for something else. Interpretation, as Sontag reminds us, wants to show that art is more than appearance, that it has meaning and significance. But the value of artworks, she argued, ‘lies elsewhere’, pointing to movements within modern art predicated on a refusal of the idea of meaningful content, from the attempt of symbolist poetry ‘to put silence into poems’ to that of abstract painting ‘to have, in the ordinary sense, no content’.27 In place of interpretation, Sontag argued,

Prologue  7 we should attend to the artwork with a transparent attention: ‘Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art  –​and in criticism  –​today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.’28 Before we can interpret, we must first experience and that, she argued in 1964, can no longer be taken for granted. If the work of Sontag and Barthes still resonates, fifty years on, it is because we have still not resolved the challenge they laid down –​how to write and speak about the artwork in a way that preserves, rather than supersedes, its material presence. In an influential study, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht expressed this idea more recently in his call for ‘a relation to the things of the world that could oscillate between presence effects and meaning effects’;29 music, he insists, resists the Cartesian attitude that thinks the world in terms of meaning and representation, which is why opera –​whose first appearance is contemporary with Descartes at the start of the broad period of modernity –​ becomes such a vital musical form for its epiphanic reassertion of presence.30 But it is hard to detect such an attitude in a good deal of musicology, despite Joseph Kerman’s lament, more than thirty years ago, about its lack of real musical encounters. Musicology today may be radically plural, but it is plurally fragmented around a shared absent centre. A glance at the programme of any major musicological conference will demonstrate my point. The overwhelming majority of papers are not about music but the material and discursive contexts in which music takes place –​ historical, cultural, sociological, anthropological, political, philosophical, psychological. These are surely valid approaches for musicological research, but the almost exclusive dominance of contextual studies is based on an ideological premise that remains unspoken and unexamined –​that music is somehow inaudible to the enquiring mind until filtered through the contextual. It is as if the transparence of art’s appearance, that Sontag held up as the highest goal of our attention, is the very thing that musicology refuses. Instead, like adding dye to a clear liquid the better to follow its movements, musicology insists on the contextual over the transparent clarity of the aesthetic. Or, to change my metaphor, rather than listening to the transparent sounds of music, musicology fixes its attention on the opaque contextual noise against which music is made. Sontag’s idea of the luminous transparence of aesthetic appearing is inverted into the idea of music as empty sign or blank screen, a mere vehicle for the carrying of other meanings. Witness how a recent and already tired expression of musicology is to talk of music as ‘freighted’ with this meaning or that. When did musical works become

8  After Debussy empty trucks for the carrying of semantic freight?31 Presumably when we stopped listening to them in order to write about them. Musicologists thus risk becoming like Golaud in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Having got lost in the forest, hunting for something he has wounded but failed to catch, Golaud comes across the traumatised Mélisande, whose beauty takes his breath away but whom, from the very beginning, he will never understand. At the end of the first scene, having agreed to accompany him out of the forest, Mélisande asks Golaud where they are going. He cannot tell her because he is also lost. We might ask a similar question: where is it that musicology wants to take music? What is it that musicology wants to do with music? Later, Golaud will ‘espouse’ Mélisande (as the French verb has it), only to become bitter because he can never be close to her, and he will take her back to the dark, sunless rooms of the ancient family home where she will perish for never being properly heard. Debussy, following Maeterlinck, juxtaposes this scene of encounter with a scene of writing, as Geneviève reads a letter from the absent Golaud describing his meeting with Mélisande. And what does the letter say? It sets out, like all writing, its failure to grasp the subject of which it writes: ‘It is now six months since I married her and I know no more about her than the day we met.’ Would that we musicologists were so honest. For all Golaud’s laments that he is ‘like a blind man seeking his treasure at the bottom of the ocean’,32 it is less Golaud’s blindness than his deafness that lies at the centre of the operatic drama, his inability to hear what, in saying, exceeds the words that are spoken, and to hear what is given by the music aside from the words. But Golaud is no musician; he insists on the clarity of language and the straightforward nature of a world ordered by language. For him, there is no world that is not contained in words. ‘What I’m saying is very simple. I have no hidden thoughts . . . if I had, why shouldn’t I express them?’ he cries in exasperation to Mélisande (Act 4.ii), shortly before forcing her to her knees and dragging her violently across the floor by her hair. Musicology is rarely quite so violent, but it is not hard to detect an undercurrent of frustration and bitterness in the manner in which it polices the boundaries of its acceptable discourse. ‘You are like children’, says Golaud (Act 3.i), as he discover Pelléas entangled in Mélisande’s hair beneath her window. Such childlike naïvety has no place in either Allemonde or musicology.33 Having paid lip service to the mystery of music and charted the poetic topics of Symbolism or the importance of silence in Debussy’s opera, don’t we generally carry on as before? Music, after all, is not silence, and discussing silence offends

Prologue  9 against the insistence that it should say something, and that musicologists should say something about a music that says something.34 But isn’t music mute in the same way that Mélisande is mute? That is to say, powerfully expressive through its sonorous presence, but nevertheless linguistically silent. One is a condition of the other, it seems, for both Mélisande and music. It is an idea taken up by Jean-​François Lyotard in an essay titled simple, ‘Music, mutic’.35 Not only is music not speech, Lyotard suggests, it is not merely sound either. ‘Music struggles, it labors in the strong sense of the word, that used by obstetrics and psychoanalysis, to leave a trace or make a sign, within the audible, of a sonorous gesture that goes beyond the audible.’36 Music takes place through sound, but all our readings and technical analyses of sound alone do not touch what is at stake in a musical piece –​‘namely, the enigma of letting appear, of letting be heard an inaudible and latent sonorous gesture’. Or, put another way: ‘What is audible in the work is musical only inasmuch as it evokes the inaudible.’37 The problem is not simply that, for philosophy, music is a mute object. The philosopher Laura Odello suggests that philosophy is guilty of having itself muted music precisely through the discourses that it foists upon it: ‘music starts to get sick insofar as the word tries to cure it’.38 Yet why, she asks, does Plato have Socrates, on the eve of his death, couch the highest philosophy in terms of music, by means of the dream in which he is urged to compose.39 So what is it, Odello goes on, that music has to say to philosophy? Her conclusion is powerful: In neutralizing music as the otherness that must be excluded in order to keep the logos unharmed, the logos not only loses music, but it jeopardizes its own integrity, since it loses the constitutive alterity that lies at the heart of its very ipseity.40

This comes close to a guiding thread of my book. It is not the familiar complaint that music is poorly served by words, nor a thinly disguised reassertion of a romantic belief in the ‘higher’ truths of music, nor another protest against the repressive nature of language in favour of the bodily pleasures of music. On the contrary, it is the idea that since we are constituted both within language and without, our balanced knowing and being in the world hinges on a constant movement between the two. There is no simple binary here of mind and body, language and music: both are linguistically shaped and both resist language at the same time, both are duets of grammar and desire, discourse and figure. As Lawrence M. Zbikowski puts it: ‘To be human is, in

10  After Debussy part, to be defined by language; but it is also to be defined by what language is not, and it is in the resonance of this absence of language that the sonic analogs of music have their proper home.’41

After Debussy I explore this idea as exemplified in the music of Claude Debussy and a wider current of French musical thought across the century since his death. ‘After Debussy’ is merely a convenient term delineating less the work of a single composer than the idea of a watershed moment in musical history.42 There was no Debussy school –​or, at least, those who were deemed to imitate Debussy were soon to be forgotten.43 Nor did Debussy single-​handedly discover or create a radically new approach to musical composition  –​his debts to a wide range of forbears, from Fauré, Franck, Borodin, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-​Korsakov, to Wagner, Schumann, Liszt, and Chopin, are well documented. Indeed, on the face of it, Debussy’s music was not radically new. As Jean-​François Gautier insists, in Debussy ‘everything depends on the manner and not the content of the technique’,44 a view echoed by Arnold Whittall, who underlines that Debussy’s musical language is ‘essentially traditional’, in the sense that it is not the elements themselves that are innovative but the ways in which they are combined in a new syntax.45 Debussy’s musical revolution, if it was one at all, was a remarkably quiet one.46 My title ‘after Debussy’ plays on an ambiguity that French clarifies by distinguishing between après and d’après, coming after in time as opposed to following in the sense of imitation; Debussy himself famously played on the distinction, while working on the Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faune, insisting that while he was necessarily après Wagner it was important not to write d’après Wagner.47 My discussion is largely focussed on the music of Debussy himself but also moves freely between French composers who came after him and those who were his contemporaries, those who acknowledged his importance and those who hardly spoke of him. It is not a history and does not address questions of influence.48 Its focus, rather, is a particular idea of music, and thereby an idea of art, that links diverse figures across a century of music, poetry, painting, and philosophy.49 While my theme is exemplified in a trajectory of French musical and philosophical écriture, there is nothing exclusively French about it. The same concerns are found in all sorts of composers and writers outside the

Prologue  11 French tradition and any suggestion that these ideas are confined by national borders would be ridiculous. I might equally have written a study of music ‘after’ Sibelius, Janáček, Bartók, or Ives.50 But it is hard to conceive of much of the music of the last hundred years without Debussy, from the primacy of sound in musique concrète and electronic music, to the centrality of the body in the work of Helmut Lachenmann or Mauricio Kagel, from the imitation of natural processes in the music of Iannis Xenakis, to the exploration of the borders of silence in the work of Morton Feldman and Giacinto Scelsi. Arnold Whittall has explored the idea of a twentieth century ‘after Debussy’ in terms of composers as diverse as Elliott Carter, György Ligeti, and Toru Takemitsu.51 The editors of Regards sur Debussy, a volume that came out of a conference in 2012, marking the 150th anniversary of Debussy’s birth, included chapters on Debussy’s presence in the work of Messiaen, Xenakis, and Takemitsu.52 Pierre Boulez argued for the centrality of Debussy to the music of the twentieth century as early as 1956, in his article ‘La corruption dans les encensoirs’ (‘Corruption in the Censers’) where he set out, against the prevailing centrality of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, an alternative French genealogy based on the triumvirate of Debussy, Cézanne, and Mallarmé.53 Edward Campbell suggests that, in his understanding of Debussy’s historical position, the young Boulez was very probably influenced by the work of André Schaeffner.54 In the centenary of Debussy’s birth in 1962, two separate studies argued for a belated rethinking of Debussy as the key figure for the subsequent trajectory of twentieth-​century music. Jean Barraqué underlined Debussy’s unique importance to contemporary music –​above all for his refusal of pre-​existing formal schemes, his constant re-​invention within works and between works, and what Boulez called his ‘pulverisation of musical language’.55 In the same year, André Hodeir’s Since Debussy: A View of Contemporary Music, suggested that the ‘deeper implications of Debussy’s music and its historical significance [ . . . ] did not come fully to light until after 1945’. Only then, Hodeir argued, did Debussy the impressionist and the soft-​focus painter of sound ‘give way to the real Debussy, the composer who destroyed rhetoric, invented the contemporary approach to form, and reinstated the power of pure sound, sound per se.’ ‘We have come to realize’, he went on, ‘that Debussy was both the Van Gogh and the Cézanne, the Rimbaud and the Mallarmé of music’. Indeed, to underline the importance of Debussy as a kind of watershed in western musical history, he likens his role to that of Monteverdi.56

12  After Debussy A century after his death, these claims for the nature of Debussy’s significance made by figures like Boulez, Barraqué, and Hodeir remain curiously timely. If we are still struggling to rethink our understanding of the music of the last one hundred years, it is perhaps because we still have not fully grasped the idea of music represented, emblematically, by music ‘after Debussy’. Thirty years ago, that idea might have been offered as a corrective to an over-​narrow view of musical modernism ‘after Schoenberg’, but the need for such a gesture has long since passed. To be sure, a reading of twentieth-​century music ‘after Debussy’ rather than Schoenberg, that begins with the primacy of sonority rather than pitch or motif and that frees itself from historical and generic anxieties, necessarily produces a very different picture of musical modernism. But it is not a question of backing one composer over another. Our understanding is not well served by a dialectical lurch from one extreme to the other, and a French topos is not advanced here as a belated counter-​balance to Adorno’s exclusively Germanic construction of musical aesthetics (from Kant, Hegel, and Beethoven, via Nietzsche, Marx, and Wagner, to Freud, Mahler, and Schoenberg). Nevertheless, listening to French voices does expose a definitive lack in Adorno’s Der Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949) and its decisive effect on the intellectual frameworks through which twentieth-​ century music was subsequently understood. And while Adorno’s privileging of the music of Schoenberg and his pupils is now widely discredited, the imprint of his thinking still shapes the discourses of musical modernism. In the decades after his death in 1969, as music took other directions, the limitations of Adorno’s model became increasingly obvious. Looking back, fifty years on, one particular ‘deaf-​spot’ of Adorno’s is striking:  his resistance to the embodied experience of musical sound. To be fair, for all his engagement with the Darmstadt avant-​garde in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Adorno remained sceptical about the directions suggested by the abstractions of serial thought, as is clear in essays like Das Altern der neuen Musik (1955) and Vers une musique informelle (1960). But in general, Adorno’s theorisation of new music was shaped around a profound ambivalence towards its central element. In this, he represents the culmination of a long tradition of German Idealism, identifying the rational project of enlightenment, in the realm of aesthetics, with the abstract order of musical organisation over its sonorous but mute material. To privilege the latter, as Adorno heard in the music of Debussy, Sibelius, Stravinsky, and, latterly, some avant-​garde music

Prologue  13 of the 1960s, was to risk a regressive slide back to the ahistorical and mythic immediacy of the body. Adorno’s ‘deaf-​spot’ was arguably personal and psychological as well as cultural and historical; for all the philosophical and historical arguments, the force with which he distances himself from musical sonority suggests a powerful level of (self-​)repression. But while the discourse around new music after 1945 emphasised definitively abstract schemes of serial thinking, opposed to what Adorno dubbed the ‘culinary’ aspect of mere sound, musical practice began to move in the opposite direction. For Albrecht Wellmer, Adorno’s idea of the ‘language-​like’ (sprachähnlich) character of music was critically opposed not only by directions in twentieth-​century music itself, but also by the rethinking of music this necessarily provoked, and takes as a starting point for his own study the opposition to Adorno expressed in Dieter Schnebel’s insistence on sound as the central category of the new music.57 More recently, Makis Solomos has explored a change in the basic paradigm of music in the twentieth century, as significant as the emergence of tonality in the seventeenth century, defined by music’s ‘refocusing on sound’ (recentrement sur le son) as opposed to musical tones. In the formulation of Jean-​Claude Risset, ‘the composition of sound replaces composition with sounds’.58 The history of music ‘after Debussy’ is thus one in which composers increasingly foreground the concrete particularity of sound –​witness music as diverse as that of Cage, Feldman, Xenakis, Scelsi, Ligeti, Berio, Sciarrino, and Lachenmann, to say nothing of Pierre Schaeffer, musique concrète, the development of electronic music, sound synthesis, and the possibilities for composition opened up by the computer. As Hugues Dufourt suggested in respect to spectral music, such directions ‘essentially represent a change in our modes of thinking music’.59 And as fundamental ideas of music began to change, so too did conceptions of the historical past. Viewed from a different perspective (the materiality of sound as opposed to abstract principles of musical order), the first part of the twentieth century begins, retrospectively, to take on quite different contours.60 Which begs the question: what would an account of twentieth-​century music look like that took sound as its focus rather than grammar –​that took Debussy as its starting point rather than Schoenberg or Stravinsky?61 This book attempts a partial answer to that question. In doing so, it tries to avoid the crippling ‘Either/​Or’ at the heart of Adorno’s philosophy of music. Nothing is gained by dismissing Adornian thought as the product of some

14  After Debussy deep-​seated repression of the body only, in its place, to fetishise the body. The task is surely to steer a path between these positions, to recover the body within music without collapsing music into the body. My focus is therefore neither sound nor the experience of sound but a historical repertoire of musical écriture that arises from the writing of sound, that is to say, from the tension between the sensuous materiality of sound and its shaping in acts of speculative thought, imagination, and play. To understand this repertoire we certainly need to listen to sounds, engage the body, think with a logic of the senses, but in constant dialogue with the counter-​movement of critical thought. So I concentrate here on music understood as both sound and text, as sound written by the text, rooted in the listening body but shaped by acts of musical writing. Which is why this book, for all its desire to explore a relation between music and language, theory, and philosophy, insists on returning again and again to musical works –​to what they do, what they write, the manner of their appearing and the way they engage with sound and sounding bodies. Debussy’s music offers plentiful and rich examples of a rethinking of musical sense. I have singled out a few works for more detailed discussion –​ Pelléas et Mélisande, the Nocturnes and La Mer, the Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune, the song settings of Verlaine and Mallarmé, the Préludes and Études for piano. What is found in these works is certainly to be found in other works not discussed here and, of course, Debussy’s music has many other voices –​the ironic play with historical genres, the enjoyment of dance forms and character pieces, the close alliance of music to storytelling, all of which constitute other facets of Debussy’s compositional persona. But this book is not a study of Debussy’s music; it is the study of an idea of music exemplified in some of Debussy’s music. I am not interested in lines that construct a genealogy of composers in a diagram of evolutionary progress. I am interested in a related set of ideas, common ways of thinking about musical sound, time, and form, and a shared migration from older ideas of musical grammar to a newfound space shaped by a logic of the senses. My concern is a writing of musical sound that plays across the borders between sensuous knowing and linguistic sense, thus loosening the distinctions (in ways both pleasurable and unnerving) between the embodied self and the resonant environment in which it finds itself. To have traced all the forms of this idea across the century since Debussy’s death would have resulted in a book ten times the size. Instead, detailed musical discussion is here confined largely to a selection of works by Debussy, but these are used to suggest

Prologue  15 ways of hearing a repertoire of music stretching across more than 150 years, from Fauré and Ravel to Varèse and Messiaen, from Dutilleux and Boulez, to Risset, Grisey, Murail, and Saariaho. There are some unlikely neighbours here, including composers usually claimed by other historical accounts. In the preface to his Aisthesis, Jacques Rancière sets out his intent, by focussing on some less familiar scenes, to offer a kind of ‘counter-​history’ of aesthetic modernism, one which ‘aims to capture the occurrences of certain displacements in the perception of what art signifies’.62 I share some of this ambition but might reword the last expression; my own book aims to illuminate displacements in the perception that art signifies at all and to explore, instead, a kind of musical art that foregrounds the how of its appearing over the what of its saying.

Music and the margins of philosophy Jacques Derrida published Marges de la Philosophie in 1972.63 I allude to his title both to signal an idea of exploring the edges of a discipline and to reference a tradition of French thought key to my own study.64 In ‘Tympan’, the opening essay, the margins of Derrida’s text are quite literally the site of another writing –​passages from Biffures by Michel Leiris, which fill the spaces normally left blank at the outer edge of the page. Here, poetry and philosophy share a margin, each one a writing at the edge of the other, tangentially related but visibly gapped. The Leiris text elaborates a language suffused with images of organic forms  –​‘everything that is wreathed, coiled, flowered, garlanded, twisted, arabesque’  –​as the proliferation of the underground realm of Persephone, a subterranean kingdom of the ear rather than the eye.65 It borders the edges of philosophy uncomfortably, since the latter ‘has always insisted upon assuring itself mastery over the limit’, as Derrida’s own text puts it.66 Philosophy, after all, is founded upon the idea that ‘it thinks its other’, it masters what is not philosophy. Derrida’s wrestling with this problem is thus drawn into a kind of dialogue with the Leiris text it borders/​is bordered by. The membrane of the ear (tympanum) becomes a metaphor of the passage between the two, a hinge between two systems, between sound and thought, the sung voice and the spoken voice, music and language. Derrida’s strategy is not adopted here, though the interleaving of music examples (so often left unheard) marks the presence of a different kind of writing. Nor have I imitated the radical disruption of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s

16  After Debussy Kater Murr, whose editorial preface explains that two separate tales have been accidentally mixed up and bound as one volume. But I do move repeatedly between two different tales, one of music and one of language, in an attempt to stitch into a single book two parallel but quite different texts. In that sense, I borrow another idea from Derrida, that of the ‘Double Session’ which famously begins by laying out two texts on the same page, one a Socratic dialogue from Plato, the other a passage from Mallarmé’s Mimique.67 For Derrida, this is a key historical juxtaposition in which Plato stands ‘for the whole history of Western philosophy’, above all for its metaphysics of presence and the idea that ‘what is imitated is more real, more essential, more true, than what imitates. It is anterior and superior to it’. Mallarmé, on the other hand, stands for a very modern challenge to such an understanding, questioning whether the image, the copy, the double, necessarily implies an originary presence. Art, Derrida reads from Mallarmé’s text, might work differently, such that ‘through the liberties it takes with nature, art can create or produce works that are more valuable than what they imitate’.68 By this view, it is precisely the image that brings the truth to appearance; only in the doubling does the thing appear to itself, produce and unveil itself. Though it brings together questions of music and philosophy, After Debussy does not aspire to form part of the philosophy of music, understood as a sub-​division of academic philosophy. I am not a philosopher and this is not a book on philosophy. It is, rather, a book that begins from the thinking that music provokes –​a thinking that grazes the margins of philosophy but is not enclosed by them. How could this not be the case? Music, after all, is the result of thought, the product of minds that do not stop being linguistic when they work on music, and is possessed of many of the characteristics we associate with rational thought. At the same time, music is the product of vibrating bodies, both the sounding bodies that emit patterns of disturbance through the air, and the receiving bodies set in motion by them. This relationship to language, of similarity and difference, is key to my discussion. While music possesses logical properties, it also foregrounds an idea of play, as Kant remarked over two hundred years ago, a multivalent and polyphonic logic without any extraneous function, quite different to the unitary notion of the concept. So, rather than trying to render this polyphonic and embodied logic into the concepts of philosophy, this book starts from music to ask questions of philosophy. What is it that philosophy lacks that music affords? What might philosophy’s logic of the concept learn from music’s logic of particularity?69

Prologue  17 Unphilosophical and beginning from music, this book nevertheless explores the idea that the substance of music traces the working of a highly sophisticated and elaborated non-​linguistic thinking.70 It investigates the capacity of music to act as a kind of sense-​making and thus a kind of knowing that both differs from and relates to language. In other words, it takes seriously the idea that music ‘makes sense’ in a manner that affords us a different way of knowing the world. Music ‘after Debussy’ foregrounds sound over syntax, sense over signification, and desire over discourse. In doing so, it poses a question about all music as a mode of knowing the world –​a connaissance sensible that compensates for the losses incurred by linguistic ways of knowing (from science to theology, history to politics). Since it has to do with knowledge, it is a question that borders on philosophy, but it is one that philosophy cannot grasp because it is asked, and answered, in terms other than those of philosophy. These are, in part, historical questions, as the portmanteau ‘after Debussy’ also signals.71 It might be helpful to imagine that this volume is the second part of a two-​part project, the first of which had already demonstrated how the imitation of language is key to the development of tonal music from the sixteenth century onwards, reaching a high point in the classical style of the late eighteenth century, evident in both musical surface and structure.72 Indeed, the early history of music aesthetics was similarly a history of the relation between music and language, from Plato to Luther, and from the Counter-​Revolution to the Enlightenment. The anxiety occasioned by music without words seems to be as old as music itself,73 such that the definitive rise of Viennese classicism in the late eighteenth century was itself predicated on the imitation of language and its rhetorical structures, as the work of Mark Evan Bonds has persuasively shown.74 The subsequent trajectory of romanticism to modernism can be understood as a series of deformations of that idea, with the abandonment, in much twentieth-​century music, of the quasi-​ linguistic structures embodied by tonality, resulting in a challenge to normative ideas of musical language that has not dissipated with time.75 The real shock of modern music was not new sounds or techniques in themselves, but the underlying refusal of structures based on the imitation of linguistic grammar. The problem, which persists in a musical culture whose normative mode remains quasi-​linguistic, is not simply that this music does not seem to work ‘like a language’ in terms of its surface, but that it appears to refuse the communicative function that this normative view takes to be essential to music and musical value. To the frustration of the listener, not only does this

18  After Debussy music appear to make ‘no sense’, it seems to do so quite deliberately. ‘After Debussy’ denotes just such an idea of music –​one that has nothing to do with communication or representation that makes no statements and carries no messages. This is a musical repertoire which, as Katherine Bergeron puts it, ‘has almost nothing to say’.76 The writers and philosophers on whom I draw discuss music rarely. But they meet my musical discussion half-​way, because they elaborate linguistically the gaps in language, its lacunae, its aporias, and its margins. I focus on texts contemporary with music ‘after Debussy’ but the literary and philosophical self-​critique of language is obviously much older; the adequacy of language to the world, after all, is a central and perennial question of modernity. Derrida famously engages with a lengthy critique of Rousseau’s idea of language, but Rousseau’s purpose was really to say something about music, not language; this Derrida acknowledges but then ignores.77 What Derrida has in his sights is the idea that the speaking voice affirms a metaphysical presence of which writing can only mark the absence or lack. But music offers a different view upon the non-​equivalence of signs and presence; it offers a kind of inversion of the relation that pertains in language. Words (as Saussure made clear) generally have only a conventional or arbitrary relation to the objects to which they refer,78 but in speech acts (as Barthes, Kristeva, and many others made clear) they are deployed through a speaking body which affirms presence through tone, rhythm, and energy. Music presents this relation in reverse: it foregrounds the sonic, sensual, rhythmic, and bodily while nevertheless projecting a trace of meaning as if in a linguistic manner. The power ascribed to music, in a predominantly linguistic culture, has its origins here; compared to the abstract authority of language, which signifies precisely but without making anything appear, music seems to make present, to speak with the authority of presence, while apparently not saying anything at all. In Rousseau’s terms, whereas in writing ‘language becomes more exact and clear, but more sluggish, subdued and cold’, in speech, as in music, ‘it is the sounds, the accents, the inflections of every sort, that constitute the greatest part’.79 Derrida refuses this ascription of presence to speech, challenging the ‘apparent transcendence’ of the voice which purports to make ‘the signified, which is always essentially ideal [ . . . ] immediately present to the act of expression’.80 But music is not speech; however close its relation to the voice, its relation to language is tangential at best and often antithetical. So it is odd that Derrida largely ignores the case of

Prologue  19 music, which reworks and reorders the key terms of the equation that so fascinates him, between absence and presence, signs and signifieds, voice and ideality. Rousseau sets out a familiar myth of origin and decay, a perennial cultural narrative by which an originary plenitude is subsequently lost. In the Christian doctrine of the Fall, the plenitude of presence is lost precisely through the acquisition of language –​or, rather, with the bifurcation of words and things, language and the world. Music, for Rousseau, seems to promise a means of recovering that lost fullness precisely by reversing the losses of language. But not just for Rousseau; the age of Debussy saw a recurring fascination with originary myths, with the often violent breaking of aesthetic forms and languages to better access the immediate, the primitive, the childlike, the pre-​reflexive and the pre-​linguistic –​from Gauguin’s journey to Tahiti to Picasso’s encounter with African masks, from Kandinsky’s faith in inward, intuitive vision to Stravinsky’s use of Russian folk culture or Debussy’s experience of the gamelan at the 1889 Paris Exhibition. Everywhere, the refined languages of European art sought to break open the hard shell of learnt techniques in order to make room for the authenticity of immediacy. But, as Derrida insists, there is no ‘prehistory’, the myth of fullness is precisely a myth. There is always and only a state of separation and the projection of an imaginary origin to compensate for it. Song, Derrida goes on, was always shaped by this ‘fissure’ –​‘the necessity of interval, the harsh law of spacing’.81 Music as a whole arises from this fissure, gap, and separation. This is an important caveat because, from Rousseau to Schopenhauer, and Wagner to Jean-​Luc Nancy, writing about music rarely avoids the danger of ascribing to it the very plenitude that writing seeks but cannot embody. Music thus quickly becomes the fetishised Other –​the body, the voice, the absolute, the world, the pure presence for which the absences of language can only long. Derrida therefore serves us well in deconstructing Rousseau, not in order to reject music’s promise as a kind of lie, nor to revalue language as somehow more true, but to make us more self-​aware of their relation –​to foreground both the counterpoint between music and language, and the counterpoint that constitutes each one separately. He warns us of the danger, much evident amid the new materialism and the rush back towards the immediacy of the body, of reinscribing old dualities simply by reversing them. My reflection on language and philosophy, in counterpoint with music, is no more restricted to French thinkers than it is to French composers. French writers provide a parallel focus for my study, but represent merely part of

20  After Debussy a much larger intellectual field. One can hardly discuss Merleau-​Ponty or Derrida without reference to Debussy’s contemporary, Edmund Husserl.82 If Husserl, then also Heidegger, whose earlier work was so closely imbricated with Husserl’s and whose later fascination with art chimes with a similar late turn in the work of Merleau-​Ponty.83 Indeed, it is hard to ignore a whole series of intriguing synchronicities. Husserl’s work on the consciousness of internal time was pursued in the years 1893–​1917, contemporary with the late work of Mallarmé and the principal work of Proust, Bergson, and Debussy. It was not published until 1928, as On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, two years after the completion of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Husserl’s famous reduction (epoché), the suspension of cognitive judgement of the perceiver, as ‘a shift of attention away from what she experiences and towards the way that she experiences it’,84 suggests not only an overlap with Bergson, for whom intuition ‘represents the attention that the mind gives to itself, over and above, while it is fixed upon matter, its object’,85 but also with the experience invited by Mallarmé’s poetry or Debussy’s music. All of them point to a sidestepping of propositional statements and instead, a focus on attending to the experience of taking place, of appearing rather than saying. It is, nevertheless, in relation to a broad current of twentieth-​century French thought that I locate much of my discussion. There is nothing systematic about this and I make no attempt to survey a set of key thinkers in terms of how their work might shed light on music.86 Instead, I explore a set of resonant encounters between music and philosophy. My interest is not with theory in and for itself, but always with the relays between the rethinking of language and the parallel recherche that takes place within music over the last hundred years –​a parallelism of ‘music and letters’ that runs from Mallarmé and Debussy to Derrida and Grisey.87 There were few aspects of work in the humanities and social sciences unaffected by the explosion of theory in the 1960s and 1970s –​a flood of intellectual energy that linked a re-​questioning of our relation to language in structuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, to its underpinning of the politics of the self and others, from post-​colonialism to feminism, post-​capitalism to environmentalism. A political question in the widest sense therefore, the ‘time of theory’ questioned a world view enshrined in the idea of the ‘transcendental signifier’ and the autonomous subjectivity that rests upon it. Except music. Until recently, music has been almost entirely left out of this account. There are familiar reasons. Music is a ‘language of its own’88 closed off, technically, to the non-​specialist, or else, it is semantically ‘slippery’.

Prologue  21 There is also, until recently, the institutional conservatism of professional musicology, its cautious suspicion of theory and its anxiety about aesthetic experience that underpins a turn to a new positivism (from the empirical approaches of history, sociology, and the anthropology of music to the digital analysis of sound objects). But I want to suggest another reason: that music ‘after Debussy’ has not only explored its own version of this destabilising of the relation between language and subjectivity, but has also anticipated within its own embodied logic of particularity some of the most radical conclusions that theory has achieved within the realm of language. Let me be clear: it is not that music reflects, recalls, evokes, or in any other vague way summons up a feeling similar to that occasioned by reading recent theory; I do not mean that at all. I mean that music, as a practice of embodied thought, as a highly sophisticated écriture, explores the ground that theory arrives at only belatedly. The shift in philosophical paradigms of late twentieth-​century thought, from a metaphysics derived from language to one shaped by the experience of the sensible body, is pre-​figured and pre-​thought in music. The fractures and fault lines of the mobile subject, located between phenotext and genotext (Kristeva), between the Imaginary and the Symbolic (Lacan), between discourse and figure (Lyotard), between body and text (Barthes) –​ these are so many attempts to theorise the tension between energy and form already played out and explored in music, from the opposite direction. So my focus is neither theory nor philosophy in themselves, but the challenge that music brings to them in the particularity of individual acts of musical écriture. The French term implies something more than the English ‘composition’; its insistence on the notion of a musical writing marks a refusal to be collapsed into questions about either composers or listeners. It suggests the writing of music in the widest sense, an act of invention in which the musical subject is made, put in play and destabilised. It is here, I suggest, that music challenges philosophy and its logical orders. Above all, music refuses the priority that philosophy accords to the concept; it refuses to subsume sensuous particulars under the abstract rubric of the general while, at the same time, being more than the sum of its own contingent particularity. In this, it works counter to the habits of language and all its discourses. As Michel Serres sums it up: ‘There is only one science, that of the general; there is no creation, but of the particular’.89 Henri Bergson’s entire philosophical system was based on a similar idea –​that while philosophy, science, language, and a practically oriented intelligence have to do with the fixed entities conferred by generality, intuition, art, and the creative durée of experience have

22  After Debussy to do with the fluidity of particularity. One makes us fixed and stable subjects who perceive fixed and stable objects, the other arises from a relationality which plays across the margins between the ‘I’ and what the ‘I’ perceives.90 Our habitual mode of perception, Bergson argues, is designed for a kind of practical mastery of the material world around us. It ‘shows us less the things themselves than the use we can make of them. It classifies, it labels them beforehand; we scarcely look at the object, it is enough for us to know to which category it belongs.’91 Or, in the olfactory formulation of Michel Serres: ‘The victory of reason: the apricot has no other taste than the word which enters the mouth to speak it.’92 My purpose, however, is not to denigrate linguistic discourse in order to advocate for immediate musical experience. It is, to repeat, to explore the margin between two modes of the same embodied mind.93 The two meet across the gap between the making of art on the one hand, and the discourses that it provokes on the other. Key among the latter is philosophical aesthetics, a branch of philosophy that, in the view of Martin Seel, has remained ‘quite marginal’ to the academic organisation of the discipline despite being, historically, ‘very central’. What links this area of thought across more than 250 years, from Alexander Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (1750) to contemporary philosophy, is ‘an affirmation of the conceptually and practically indeterminable [ . . . ] a sensuous consideration of what is indeterminable in things’.94 What could be a more troubling problem for philosophy than what is ‘indeterminable in things’? Art is troubling to philosophy, both because it too seems indeterminable in this way, and because –​still worse –​it appears to propose itself as a kind of knowing of the indeterminable. Baumgarten referred to such a knowing as a cognitio sensitiva –​a sensuous knowledge, a connaissance sensible, a compensatory mode of being in the world that offers a counter-​balance to the abstract thought that produces conceptual and scientific knowledge. Kant, famously, stopped short of calling aesthetic judgment a kind of knowledge; instead, he characterised it as a suspension of determining the world by means of concepts. But such aesthetic perception, whereby the object is ‘perceived solely in the presence of its appearing’,95 was nevertheless very highly valued by Kant, precisely because he understood it as involving the mind in a kind of ‘free play’ which he saw as one of its most distinctive activities. But what might be the consequence of this suspension of our habitual ways of thinking (linguistic and conceptual) occasioned by aesthetic experience? Such a suspension of normative modes of knowledge, practical frameworks

Prologue  23 of thought designed for action within and upon the world, has an unsettling effect. It momentarily displaces us from our active attitude –​witness the effect of the aesthetic contemplation of landscape, art, or music. Such displacement unsettles the normal epistemic order of the world; in Martin Seel’s words, ‘indeterminacy flares up’.96 It is unsurprising, therefore, if what follows is an unsettling, if not a derangement, within the orders of language through which we attempt to make sense of such experience. We encounter this in two ways –​firstly, in the material modes of artworks themselves and, secondly, in the language of discourse surrounding art, including that of philosophy. Michel Serres characterises this relation in terms of a margin, a gap/​ overlap at which language either closes back towards its habitual manners, or opens out towards something foreign to it: Language closes itself at the edge of language, closes by its exactitude, precision, rigour, its qualities; it opens at the edge of the world, inchoate and inexact, hesitant and fecund. The teacher, critic, theorist and politician live at the closed edge, the writer takes up residence along the open fringes [ . . . ]97

Jessica Wiskus observes something similar about Merleau-​ Ponty, suggesting that his later work reads as if he ‘deliberately employs words in such a way that they work not so much to convey an explicit meaning as to articulate the empty space upon the page: as space –​as an opening –​for a continuous reinitiation to philosophical thought’.98 This edge of language, uncovered by artworks and the experience they provoke, seems to have fascinated and frustrated philosophers in equal measure. More recently, what was once deemed marginal seems to have become key to the central philosophical questions of how we know the world and the manner of our being in it. It is hardly insignificant that key figures in the recent history of philosophy have turned to art in the face of the aporias of philosophy, not as a late capitulation to immediacy or irrationality, but for instruction in the logic of particularity. Witness Heidegger’s late turn to art (especially the poetry of Hölderlin),99 Wittgenstein’s late fascination with music, Bergson’s discussions of melody and the painting of Turner and Corot, Merleau-​Ponty’s musing on visual art (especially the painting of Cézanne),100 Michel Serres’ writing on the paintings of Pierre Bonnard, the recurrent importance of painting to the thought of both Jean-​Luc Marion and Jean-​Luc Nancy, Roland Barthes’ essays on music (the voice, the piano) and visual art (Cy Twombly), Gilles

24  After Debussy Deleuze’s study of the painter Francis Bacon, or the centrality of Mallarmé and Proust for the thought of Kristeva, Derrida, and Rancière. Many of these thinkers have found it necessary to develop new modes of writing. The Anglo-​Saxon tendency to mock the language of continental philosophy as literary self-​indulgence is sometimes sobering and valuable, but it often masks a refusal to consider that restricting thought to only one mode of language merely guarantees the repetition of one kind of knowledge (as Nietzsche put it, in extremis, ‘we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar’.)101 The different registers of writing found in Heidegger, Merleau-​Ponty, Derrida, Nancy, or Serres, are ways of writing oneself out of the enclosure of an everyday language (the vehicle of everyday ‘common-​sense’), or crossing boundaries of thought to reformulate what might be thought. It is telling that, in his introduction to a special issue of Contemporary Music Review devoted to philosophy and music, Martin Scherzinger drew attention to ‘a new body of work that turns the tables on the relation between music and philosophy. Instead of bringing philosophy to musicology, this work critically analyses how music inhabits philosophy itself ’. In Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and others, he suggested, a certain movement in philosophy exhibits a kind of sonotropism –​an ‘aspiration towards the condition of music’.102 It is a tendency, one might argue, that not only looks back to Bergson, Husserl, and the work of Mallarmé, but much further still, to a defining moment of modernity around 1800 when philosophy and music acknowledged their peculiar asymmetrical interdependence.103 It also makes for some strange bedfellows. If the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, concerned with the rigorous demarcation of a logical use of language, might seem to be the exact opposite of such writing, let alone the poetry of Mallarmé, we might remember that Wittgenstein once suggested, in a letter to Ludwig Fricker, that the Tractatus might have been prefaced by two highly suggestive lines: ‘My work consists in two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.’104 The result of a retreat from the world into logical relations, with its attempt to eradicate any gap between language and thought, is that all the important business of human life –​the relations to others and to the world –​are excluded. Truth, as a function of language used in a purely logical fashion, shrinks into self-​referentiality, largely irrelevant to lived relations. Wittgenstein’s later fascination with art and music, conversely, has to do with his realisation that language use is plural and a means for making a creative relation to the world. As A. C. Grayling puts it: ‘In the Tractatus there

Prologue  25 is a single, strictly uniform calculus underlying the whole of language; in the Investigations there are many different language-​games whose “grammars” lie open to inspection.’105 In Wittgenstein’s notebooks from the 1930s and 1940s, we find a collection of intriguing observations about music as a kind of thought and its relationship to language.106 Much the longest entry in Culture and Value is Wittgenstein’s note on what it is to ‘understand’ or to be able to explain music, given that all attempts to do so remain separate from the music.107 It is striking that this fascination with art and music as a kind of thought, and a kind of language, forms part of his wider questioning of philosophical language. ‘We are engaged in a struggle with language’, he noted in 1931;108 ‘We keep repeating the same philosophical problems because we have the same language.’109 One wonders how serious he was when he jotted down the thought that ‘philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition’,110 but it nevertheless forms part of a series of reflections on ‘the odd resemblance between a philosophical investigation [ . . . ] and an aesthetic one’.111 His reflection on colour, for example, might almost recall lines from Merleau-​Ponty, a very unexpected similarity:  ‘colour spurs us to philosophize [ . . . ] Colour seems to present us with a riddle, a riddle that stimulates us –​not one that disturbs us’; ‘I cannot explain what “colour” is, what the word “colour” means, except with the help of a colour sample’.112 Such coincidences are not themselves proof of any collective shift and there are plenty of quite different currents in art and philosophy. Nor am I suggesting any simple equivalences between such disparate figures. What interests me is the shared fascination with an intellectual, creative, and critical space opened up between ‘music and letters’ as two different modalities of thought. The counterpoint may be defined by the interaction of two lines, converging and pulling apart differently across philosophy and the arts in the twentieth century:  firstly, a critical distancing from language, a tendency to see its limits, to observe the gap between world and word; secondly, a new priority accorded to the body as a way of knowing the world, a cultivation of ‘sensible being’ in the world. It is precisely this counterpoint that brings art to the forefront of recent enquiry as a medium of embodied thought and embodied knowledge. If philosophy attends to art anew it is because, in phenomenology, philosophy attempts to discover a level of particularity in our knowing of the world that art cultivates as its fundamental activity. Philosophy turns again to artworks, because artworks offer highly articulated and sophisticated examples of a

26  After Debussy kind of perception of the world, a kind of sensuous knowledge not only of objects but also of ourselves. But here, surely, we approach the margins of philosophy. When Bergson suggests that the goal of the philosopher should be the same as that of the artist (‘to lead us to a completer perception of reality by means of a certain displacement of our attention’) he also concedes that this lies beyond the ambit of philosophy. What would be needed, he suggests, is a radical empiricism that would adapt itself to each new object, but ‘a concept appropriate to the object alone’ is ‘a concept one can barely say is still a concept, since it applies only to that one thing’.113 Derrida dwells on this moment as ‘the originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute’. He goes on: ‘To think the unique within the system, to inscribe it there, such is the gesture of the arch-​writing: arch-​violence, loss of the proper, of absolute proximity, of self-​presence.’ For Derrida, the philosopher of language, such self-​presence is not recoverable (in language) because it never existed (in language). The loss of self-​presence is ‘in truth the loss of what has never taken place, of a self-​presence which has never been given but only dreamed of and always already split, repeated, incapable of appearing to itself except as its own disappearance’.114 If, on the other hand, the writing of Bergson, Merleau-​Ponty, Serres, Nancy, or Marion suggests not only that self-​presence is possible, but is the goal of philosophy, it is because they are no longer seeking for it within language. Their turn to art is the flipside of Derrida’s deconstruction of the presence promised by language. Because, if the philosophical problem on which all these figures converge is the impossibility of thinking the particular, art does otherwise. To return to Martin Seel’s formulation, from Baumgarten onwards, the cognitio sensitiva of art proposes a way of knowing ‘what is indeterminable in things’. Such an idea is asserted in Hugues Dufourt’s recent study of spectral music, subtitled ‘une révolution épistémologique’.115 Its thesis is not just that new music can be related to a new epistemology, but that music is itself a key means of its exploration. In other words, the gap between compositional thought and musicological thought reflects a wider philosophical tension between ‘sense’ and ‘signification’, embodied knowing and linguistic discourse –​in short, nothing less than the definitive gap of western epistemology, between the knowledge of the senses and the body on the one hand, and the truth claims of language and its conceptual logic on the other. Musical écriture and its linguistic theorisation thus offers a rich field for an enquiry into the interaction of these two kinds of knowing.

Prologue  27 But how is this to be explored without collapsing the very particularity one seeks into the generality of language? In his study of the painting of Francis Bacon, subtitled The Logic of Sensation (1981), Gilles Deleuze produced a close-​reading of a group of paintings as a way of exploring a mode of thought through the material particularity of art. In its way, it thus offers a kind of physiognomy of Bacon’s art, in the sense that Adorno signalled with the subtitle to his late monograph on Mahler.116 After Debussy is written in the same spirit, as a reading outwards from the material categories of a specific musical repertoire. Just as Deleuze points to a break with figuration (with representation and signification) in Bacon’s foregrounding of the figure (the body),117 so music ‘after Debussy’ distances itself from narrative and representation in order to foreground the materiality of sound and the embodied logic of its dynamic processes. What I have in mind, then, is a similar kind of reflection on music that arises from a thinking through music –​not thinking about music, after the fact, but bringing to the realm of articulated language something of the material processes of music. This is predicated on the fact that music and language are not antithetical; they exhibit not only gaps but also overlaps and shared margins. Søren Kierkegaard reflected on the same problem in 1843, imagining music and language as ‘two countries bordering on each other’, one familiar and the other unfamiliar, divided by a border one cannot cross. Nevertheless, he concluded, one might be able to form a conception of music by working at the boundaries and margins that divide it from language. ‘I would travel to the boundaries of the kingdom I knew and follow them constantly, and as I did so my movements would describe the contours of that unknown land; in this way I would form a general idea of it even though I had never set foot in it.’118 In thinking the margins of philosophy, more than a century before Derrida, Kierkegaard thus listens for music. This is not to suggest that music provides some kind of revelatory content that language cannot; on the contrary, Kierkegaard is at pains to underline that he is not interested in exposing the ‘impotence of language, the more so since I do not regard this impotence as an imperfection in language but as a high potency’. Instead, it is precisely the productive margin between the two which he wants to demarcate and explore, an oscillation as unending as that of the tides across the shoreline between our linguistic minds and modes of musical knowing. I cannot think of a better way of summing up what I am trying to do in After Debussy:

28  After Debussy to illuminate the idea from as many angles as possible, and its relation to language, and in this way constantly encompass more and more of the territory in which music has its home, scaring it into breaking cover, as it were, though without my being able to say more about it, once it can be heard, than, ‘Listen!’ . . .119

1 Sirènes Wordless voices A low murmur in the bass, edged by a quiet tolling of the harp, a little swell of movement in the horns, and then, like a flicker of sunlight on water, a rapid arpeggio in the clarinet –​all gently moving but contained, like the faint rise and fall of the calmest of warm seas emerging through the morning mist. The beginning of Sirènes, the third of Debussy’s three orchestral Nocturnes, does not so much represent a seascape as put our listening bodies into a gentle motion of rise and fall as if we were on water (see Example 1.1). But this realism of wave-​like movement frames the appearance of a wordless call, a simple grace-​note figure, given by eight mezzo sopranos divided into four parts. Using the same pitches as the clarinet, and like a distant echo of the horns, the women’s voices are part of the orchestral sound but also quite distinct from it. The insistent repetition of their two-​note figure leads to a brief ripple of surface motion (the shimmer of violins, the harp arpeggiation, and the return of the horns). After the preceding two movements of purely orchestral music, this sudden appearance of voices is arresting. On the one hand, they are carefully integrated into the orchestral sound; on the other, we cannot help but recognise the distinctive timbre of the human voice. By blending them with the instruments, Debussy achieves a magical ambiguity between half-​heard human voices and the orchestral seascape in which they float –​a bit like a mermaid. As the movement unfolds, the blurring of timbral identity persists:  the mezzos are associated with the cor anglais while the entry of the sopranos produces a bright splash of tremolando violins. Debussy’s control of doubling allows the voices to move, back and forth, between being part of an orchestral mix and assuming the foreground. Sometimes this doubling is exact, sometimes rhythmically displaced, but more often than not the voices have an independent line, weaving in and out of the orchestral sounds to create a kind of acoustic flickering. By the end of the movement, the vocal lines have contracted either to single held notes, with the open vowel sound now closed

After Debussy. Julian Johnson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066826.001.0001

32  Saying nothing Example 1.1  Claude Debussy, Sirènes, bb. 1–​4

to a hum (bouche fermée), or at rest in simple wave patterns; the half-​heard voices merge back into the orchestral whole, like half-​seen forms beneath the surface of the water. Debussy presents us with voices but framed as if not-​quite human, voices which do not sing any kind of song since they have neither words nor the kind of melodic patterning that song implies. Constantly emerging from and disappearing into the orchestral ‘ocean’, these voices are as elusive and ungraspable as the mermaids they evoke.1 In this way, Sirènes, just like the preceding two movements, is a study in saying nothing. Avoiding the daylight world of musical discourse, each of the three Nocturnes elaborates a moving tableau without a viewing subject. If you believe the titles and Debussy’s few words about these pieces, they have to do with clouds (Nuages), nocturnal festivities (Fêtes), and the rise and fall of waves, mixed in with a half-​heard siren-​call of wordless voices (Sirènes). But these are merely the veils (voiles) that cover the radical emptiness of these pieces –​shocking, in terms of the compositional values of the late nineteenth century. Each one says nothing

Sirènes  33 with engaging and seductive charm. As Vladimir Jankélévitch puts it, ‘the song of the enchantresses is a wordless song, the sirens say nothing and address no-​one: the sirens do not look us in the eye; and, moreover, they have no eyes’.2 Sirènes was not Debussy’s first use of wordless voices within an orchestral texture (he had earlier experimented, in 1887, with a wordless choir as the ‘unarticulated voice’3 of nature in Printemps) but it is a striking essay in exploring the liminal overlap between words, the singing voice, and instrumental tones. The wordless choir produces all sorts of problems –​practical ones (from the economics of concert promotion to acoustic balance in the concert hall), and cultural ones (by the 1960s, the wordless female chorus had become a staple of sci-​fi film soundtracks but, even in 1900, the mermaid topic already bordered on kitsch).4 For all that, Debussy’s Sirènes demarcates an important cultural exploration of the resonant space between music and language. Its presentation of a pre-​or a-​linguistic voice connects to a broad body of music associated with the wordlessness of nature from Maurice Ravel to Kaija Saariaho.5 There is a long musical tradition of sounding the voice of nature by means of a wordless vocalise (often a solo soprano). In Debussy’s time it joined the decorated lines of the woodbird in Wagner’s Siegfried to the coloratura arabesques of the nightingale in Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol (1914).6 In the music of Olivier Messiaen the precisely notated presence of birdsong is often juxtaposed with wordless ‘singing voices’. In the Quatour pour la fin du temps (1940), the second movement (‘Vocalise pour l’Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps’) presents the angel’s announcement as an unending wordless melody ‘sung’ in octave unison by the violin and cello. And in the final movement (‘Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus’), marked ‘extatique’ and ‘paradisiaque’, the heartbeat rhythm of the piano provides the accompaniment to the infinitely slow melodic lines of the violin’s wordless song. Elsewhere, the intensity of this wordless voice is given by the ondes martenot, an instrument that produces a sound halfway between human singing and something quite other. In the Turangalîla Symphony (1948), both the second movement (‘Chant d’amour I’) and the sixth (‘Jardin du sommeil d’amour’), use the ondes to ‘sing’ on behalf of the mute lovers. Its vocal origins can be heard in Messiaen’s earlier writing for voice, as in the first song of Poèmes pour Mi (1937), where the soprano takes off in extended melismas in the long Alleluia sections. Between the two it is not hard to hear the echo of Debussy’s sirens –​ on the one hand, the singing voice leaning over into wordless vocalise and,

34  Saying nothing on the other, the imitation of a wordless singer in the ‘voice’ of the ondes martenot. Maurice Martenot’s instrument, invented in 1928, is, after all, predicated on playing between the oscillations of the waves (ondes).7 A century or so after Debussy’s sirens, we can hear their echo in Kaija Saariaho’s opera L’amour de loin (2000) in which wordless female voices are again blended into orchestral music that evokes the constant presence of the sea. Like Oltra Mar (1999), a preparatory work for the opera, it presents a music of the waves and tides in which the global containment of harmony and sonority, criss-​crossed by repeated running figures and arpeggiations, combine to form a moving stasis, an elaboration of a single immersive space. Just as Debussy does in Sirènes, Saariaho blends wordless voices into the orchestral ebb and flow.8 The final movement of Oltra Mar, for example, foregrounds the ambivalence of the siren call –​a beautifully seductive music, with its rich textural weave and its constantly fluctuating and modulating containment, it is also the evanescent scene of both arrival and of death. More generally, Saariaho’s music often takes place on the edge of words, exploring the gap between instrumental tones and vocal ones, and between the singing voice and the speaking voice. This is true not only of her vocal music, but also of instrumental works which ask for the performer to vocalise in various ways –​witness the exploration of breathing, whispering, and speech in her music for solo flute.9 In Speakings (2008) for orchestra and electronics, Jonathan Harvey explores the liminal space between music and language by an astonishing use of the orchestra that continually borders on vocal tone and gesture. By transforming the instrumental tones electronically, ‘vowel and consonant spectra-​shapes flicker in the rapid rhythms and colours of speech across the orchestral textures’.10 In Les septs paroles (2010) for orchestra, chorus, and electronics, Tristan Murail plays off a real choir onstage with a virtual ‘spectral’ choir via the electronics, synthesised voices that sing in microtones and at registral extremes, and which move freely around the performance space. The gap between the visible human choir and the invisible spectral voices foregrounds a play across the border between the human and the not-​ human, just like Debussy’s sirens.11 Gérard Grisey’s Les chants de l’amour for twelve voices and tape (1982–​84), uses words but stretched out in such a way that their function is sonic rather than signifying.12 Music after Debussy has often played across this gap between conventional word-​setting and a radical fragmentation of text that produces a kind of wordlessness even in the presence of words. György Ligeti’s Lux aeterna (1966) makes its minimal

Sirènes  35 text effectively ungraspable through its complex multipart textures, reducing words to purely phonetic material in its slowly shifting clouds of sound. Ligeti’s chromatic micropolyphony might seem quite distant to Debussy’s sirens, yet both foreground the human voice detached from any direct linguistic and signifying function; what was an occasional device of music at the fin de siècle for evoking the presence of a supernatural voice thus becomes a staple of avant-​garde music by the 1960s –​witness the radically fragmented use of the voice in the work of Berio or Xenakis.13 The mellifluous charm of Debussy’s sirens might pose the modern listener less of a challenge than some of these more recent works, but it is perhaps no less problematic. Adriana Cavarero is not alone in warning us of the ‘misogynist overtones’ of this kind of presentation of a ‘seductive, carnal, primitive, feminine voice, which goes back at least to the Homeric Sirens’.14 Far from the beautiful creatures which tradition has made of them, Cavarero argues, Homer’s sirens, about which Circe warned Odysseus, are monstrous ­figures –​half bird, half woman.15 Nevertheless, she continues, ‘the charm of the voice, rendered even more disturbing by the absence of speech, still calls men to a pleasurable (and often explicitly erotic) death . . . There is a feminine voice that seduces and kills, and that has no words.’16 But Cavarero is perhaps too literal here; the myth of the sirens is surely a myth about music and language, the pre-​linguistic consciousness and a world made in language, not simply about men and women; the feminised voices of the sirens sing within us all. And as voice, the sirens are heard before they are seen; they are present first to the mind’s ear, which is why their appearance in music is far more unsettling than their rather awkward representations in nineteenth-​century painting. The myth of the sirens projects a profound anxiety, but it is the anxiety of an identity defined through language, one that fears the excess and fluidity of a voice (and thus a body, and thus a world) not ordered by language. The temptation of the sirens, from which Odysseus must steer clear, is a return to a pre-​linguistic state. For Adorno and Horkheimer, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the call of this elemental plenitude is profound but regressive. For them, the sirens are those found in Wagner’s Tannhäuser, or the flower maidens of Parsifal: ‘Their allurement is that of losing oneself in the past. But the hero to whom the temptation is offered has reached maturity through suffering.’ The Wagnerian hero, for Adorno, defends the achieved identity of the integrated bourgeois subject against the ‘narcotic intoxication’ of the sirens and their tendency to disintegration.17 And here we come close

36  Saying nothing to Adorno’s problem with Debussy and those who followed in his wake –​his stern refusal of tone (Klang) and an insistence on grammar that verges on a neurosis born of repression. He even seems to want to tell us as much in language that suggests a kind of self-​mutilation: ‘Men had to do fearful things to themselves before the self, the identical, purposive, and virile nature of man, was formed, and something of that recurs in every childhood. The strain of holding the I together adheres to the I in all stages; and the temptation to lose it has always been there with the blind determination to maintain it.’18 We do not need to share Adorno’s anxiety to understand it; as Cavarero puts it, pleasure in the acoustic ‘destabilizes language as a system that produces the subject’.19 Undoubtedly, Adorno and Horkheimer’s position represents a fear about the loss of self, about ‘the risk of regressing to the joy of a pre-​semantic stage for which it still feels nostalgia. It is as if the vocalisation of the in-​fante called out behind the adult, returning the self to the pleasure of the ear and phonetic emission.’20 But we should perhaps not be too quick to reject their position; Jankélévitch, no opponent of the pleasures of music, is clear that the siren voices in Debussy’s music are not to be followed and, in this, comes close to Adorno. The depth to which the Sirens draw us is a somewhere which is nowhere; this depth is a snare and a deception; a false depth! Or if we dare transpose this to another dimension: the man tempted by the Sirens becomes something which is nothing; his becoming is a pseudo-​becoming and opens out onto non-​being [ . . . ] that is to say, he does not become.21

It is, for Jankélévitch, a closed nothingness: ‘an impasse, a dead-​end road, a time without perspective and without hope’.22 I do not hear this in Debussy’s Nocturnes. It may certainly be one aspect of the sirens’ voices to draw us towards an abyss, but there is surely another, which Debussy explores in both L’isle joyeuse and in La mer. Here, the call of the sirens is not a descent to nothingness, but the upward leap of a kind of aural/​oral jouissance that characterises a state of being without language. What is L’isle joyeuse except a celebration of this libidinal excess embodied in the siren’s voice –​one woven into the plural genesis of the work that includes Watteau’s painting Le Pèlerinage à l’Isle Cithère (1717), Debussy’s elopement to the island of Jersey with Emma Bardac in the summer of 1904, and (for Michael Klein), Chopin’s Barcarolle?23 Debussy’s music here richly embodies what Cavarero calls the ‘libidinal register of the vocal’, the vocal excess largely

Sirènes  37 regulated by the infant’s passage to adult language, but still alive in poetry where ‘the semiotic drives of the phonic find some fissures through which to invade language and disturb it with the agitation of its rhythms’.24 Given that, in French, the ubiquitous play between la mer and la mère is no mere pun, but a recurrent topos of poetry and literature,25 we should not be surprised to find Debussy’s explorations of this ‘sonorous, presemantic source of language’26 in works connected to the sea.27 Simon Trezise notes that ‘the main motifs of La mer are imbued with a quality of incantation, of ancient voices crying out from the depths of the oceans’, pointing to several writers who ‘refer to the first cyclic motif as the “call of the sea” or as a “melancholy call” ’.28 More specifically, a number of commentators, including Pierre Boulez, have remarked on how this call of the sea relates back to that of the sirens.29 Jankélévitch hears the three-​note descending motif of the woodwind in the third part of La mer (b. 56) precisely as the whisper of siren voices (see Example 1.2) –​‘Viens à moi’ (come to me) they seem to sing, he suggests, in a ‘song of a seduction which leads us vertiginously, irresistibly into abyssal depths’.30 There is other musical evidence for considering Debussy’s first orchestral triptych as intimately related to the second,31 but what binds them together, beyond specific motivic or gestural similarities, is this shared aesthetic of saying nothing, or what Jankélévitch points to as a ‘seduction of underwater depths’, that runs through Debussy’s music from Sirènes to the water nymph Ondine in the second book of piano preludes.32 In other words, the sirens we hear in the last movement of the Nocturnes announce a key theme of Example 1.2  Claude Debussy, La mer, ‘Dialogue du vent et de la mer’, bb. 56–​59

38  Saying nothing music ‘after Debussy’, a theme certainly not confined to the relatively rare use of wordless voices. It is a topos that not only pervades Debussy’s instrumental music but also exceeds any suggestion of representation. The sirens’ voices link to something pre-​semantic which evokes the in-​fans, one who is without speech but not without voice. Indeed, the pre-​linguistic infant is characterised by an excess of vocality whose loss, if not repression, is coterminous with the idea of maturity into adulthood –​witness the stark warning of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the Little Mermaid for whom the price of entering the human (adult) world is not only the loss of her (siren) voice but the painful and bloody bifurcation of her fish tail into legs. On the one hand, for Adorno and others, the siren’s voice is a call to regression (as the sound of a pre-​linguistic condition), on the other it remains haunting and enchanting precisely because of its a-​linguistic nature. Jankélévitch uses the term balbultiant (babbling) for the ‘saying’ of music, underlining this connection with the world of the in-​fans.33 Infants babble –​that is to say, they vocalise without semantic content. They say nothing while saying constantly, and in highly musical ways. Cavarero describes the wordless vocalisations of infant-​mother exchanges thus: This is an acoustic-​vocal relation in which, importantly, what gets said is, as yet, nothing. There is not yet any signified in this voice –​no reference through the linguistic sign to the noetic presence of an absent object. Materialized by the physicality of the vocal exchange, the only presence is the act of the relation.34

I am not suggesting that music is equivalent to the babbling of infants or the vocal responses of their mothers (a practice linguistic theory denotes as ‘infant-​directed speech’, or IDS), but rather that music amplifies a use of the voice that exceeds the signifying function of language. This is uncontentious in that music has always foregrounded vocal excess, from the Italian madrigal with its sobs and stutters, and cries of pain and pleasure, to operatic coloratura and vocalise.35 My rather different point is that a music ‘after Debussy’ draws attention to the material medium of music’s ‘saying’ not to accentuate any linguistic or signifying content but, like the siren song or the infant-​mother exchange, as a kind of touch or contact, the phatic condition of all speech. It is not insignificant that, to demonstrate his insistence that artworks do rather than say, Jankélévitch points to Rimsky-​ Korsakov’s operatic

Sirènes  39 heroine Fevroniya who sings like a nightingale, ‘and just as the nightingale produces vocalise, rather than lectures about vocalise, so Fevroniya knows only how to sing; her business is to do, not to discourse’.36 He might just as well have pointed to the avoidance of all saying in the coloratura vocalises of Stravinsky’s ‘real’ nightingale in Le Rossignol, composed a few years later, or to Messiaen’s birdsong as the vehicle (and legitimation) for elevating wordless voices to the highest aural prominence and structural significance. If birdsong comes to occupy an important place in twentieth-​century music it is less a matter of mimesis or symbolism and more a question of foregrounding a ‘babbling’ that threatens to drown out the orders of musical language. But there is nothing new about this topic; Elizabeth Eva Leach shows how the elision of birdsong and siren song was already made in medieval music theory. She sums up the anxiety of the (male) medieval scholastic thus: ‘If a man allowed inappropriate, especially effeminate music to act upon him without engaging rational judgment, the passive nature of his listening would feminize him’, an effect that in turn leads to a kind of ‘bestialization’.37 There is a striking similarity here between the discourse of medieval monastic culture and Horkheimer and Adorno; the siren song is immoral and destructive because it threatens the singular achievement of rational humans over irrational animals, a self-​divided antagonism couched in specifically gendered terms. Music theory thus assumes a task of regulative control that exceeds merely aesthetic concerns; it has to do with an ordering of the sensory by means of the rational. It is perhaps what is lost in the process of such rational control that Cavarero laments in language itself, in the way it ‘exploits, reduces, and regulates the marvellous exercises of the infantile voice. Stripped of its excesses and its imagination, the infant’s emission is frozen into the syllable and tones that language permits.’38 But the exploration, within poetry and music, of the play of language between sens (sense) and son (sound) is no regressive return to an infantile phase; music, like the voice itself, is a ‘pivotal joint between body and speech’.39 Which brings us back to the ambivalence of the siren’s voice. For Jankélévitch, music’s charm relates to Orpheus, for whom music ‘harmonizes and civilizes’, rather than the sirens whose goal is always ‘to reroute, mislead, and delay Odysseus’ on his journey ‘towards duty and truth’.40 But George Steiner hears the voice of the sirens differently. The fable of the Sirens, he suggests, is about music itself, which ‘lies in wait for the speaker, for the logician, for the confidant of reason (Odysseus par excellence)’. He goes on:

40  Saying nothing The Sirens promise orders of understanding, of peace (harmonies) which transcend language. The language-​animal, man, armoured in his will to power which is grammar and logic, must resist. He must deafen himself to the solicitations of the song. Otherwise he will be drawn out of himself –​ the ecstatic motion –​to some irremediable sleep of reason.41

For Steiner, this siren call is present in the musicality of all language, a sound that ‘is always threatening to pull after it, with the force of the ebbing tide, the servile stabilities of sense’.42 From such a perspective, the sirens tempt the listener to a perilous place beyond language –​an abyss, an island (as in Rilke’s ‘Die Insel der Sirena’), or a silence (for Kafka, it is precisely ‘The Silence of the Sirens’ that is so terrifying).43 Aristotle makes the voice (the sounding body) secondary to the signified idea it carries.44 It has no value other than to carry the semantic, otherwise it is no more than an animal noise (or, presumably, the babbling of infants). The history of philosophy from such a perspective, as we observed in the Prologue, is thus coterminous with the devocalisation of logos, a tradition that from Plato onwards equates a rise in signifying content (the ideal) with a reduction in the phonic material –​an idea of language that Hegel carries through into his notorious gradation of the arts (the more material, the less spiritual). In Plato, suggests Laura Odello: The timbre and the voice –​that is to say, the sonority –​are subordinated to the logical ideality of things: the Platonic gesture is as obvious as it is decisive for philosophy. The philosopher does not want to know anything about listening; hearing is of no use to the philosopher because the end as well as the beginning of all philosophizing resides in the intellectual understanding: sonorities are superfluous, secondary, unnecessary for the silent vision of the logos, of the idea, of the ideal signified, which also serves to grasp the truth.45

It is not that philosophy is somehow wrong; merely that it presents only one kind of position and one kind of language use. It tries to remake Rodin’s La cathédrale with only one hand. Its opposite, ventures Cavarero, would be the central character in ‘Funes the Memorious’, a short story from 1942 by Jorge Luis Borges. For Funes, the world is unique in every instant and irreducible to the generic signifiers of language. But for all the epiphanic intensity of each and every experience as utterly new, to be so outside the collective

Sirènes  41 logos is a kind of madness and an impossible way to live.46 Is one position any more unbalanced than the other –​the extreme empiricism of Funes any more than the extreme idealism of Plato?

Shipwreck and abyss If the siren voices of a wordless, pre-​linguistic nature entice the unwary listener towards danger, like a sailor towards the rocks, what exactly is that danger? What is the nature of this shipwreck and drowning of the self of which the myth warns us? It is a theme that pervades the work of Stéphane Mallarmé, whose poetry is haunted by the siren figure, the threat of shipwreck and drowning. For Mallarmé, as Jacques Rancière observes, the idea of poetry itself is a linguistic adventure on the edge of shipwreck, an idea that runs through Mallarmé’s Poésies from its opening poem, ‘Salut’.47 Here, the poet toasts his fellow poets as the crew of a ship, fearless beneath their white sail and ready to ‘cleave wintry seas of blast and gale’, all the while acknowledging that the poem is ‘nothing’, no more than foam (écume) –​both that of the glass he raises and that of the sea in which ‘plunges far away a body of sirens’. But the ship of poetry launched in the first poem, Rancière suggests, is sunk in the penultimate one. ‘À la nue accablante tu’ presents several images of shipwreck –​the mast stripped bare, the gaping of the abyss, a drowning, and the flank of a siren in the white foam. And who is the siren? For Rancière, she is the figure of fiction itself, ‘the beautiful power of artifice’ that momentarily joins two worlds together.48 But this is far more than a theme of Mallarmé’s work. As Roger Pearson has shown, the shipwreck first and foremost occurs in the syntax of Mallarmé’s poetry, famously so in the case of ‘A la nue accablante tu’ which has no punctuation and relies instead on spatial organisation and enjambement. The shipwreck, Pearson suggests, ‘is no mere analogy for the process whereby the “vessel” of language ceases to “convey” when stripped of its traditional representational function’; even the word shipwreck (naufrage) suggests a breaking up of the ship in the coming together of eau and rage.49 For Pearson, ‘the “sirène” is at once an agent of death and a means of renewal and salvation: and the poem as siren song both destroys everyday language and offers the prospect of poetic beauty’.50 The abîme to which the ship sinks is thus ‘the bottomless, empty abyss of a language that has cast off from the shores of reference’.51

42  Saying nothing This resonant imagery is central to Mallarmé’s late and most radical poem, Un coup de dés, published in 1897, the same year in which Debussy began the orchestral Nocturnes.52 No longer the master of his ship of language, it takes a dramatic shipwreck for the mariner-​poet to find the transformation for which he voyages. The structure of language itself is here lured towards destruction by the siren song of a musicalised language, breaking up the vessel held together by the ordering planks of grammar and syntax, and giving way to something fluid and mobile  –​a polysemic world of infinite difference, beautiful but dangerous, that loosens the grip of the mastering ‘I’ upon language.53 This is famously presented by Mallarmé’s dissolution of the usual visual order of the printed page. Un coup dés falls across the page like the sinking ship towards the abyss, its lines falling apart, breaking up into multiple strands and reconfiguring its semantic order as it does so. This dissolution is, for the poet as for the mariner, both a death and a setting free. At the poem’s still centre is the edge of the abyss, bounded on either side by the ‘comme si’ (as if) of all art, where the solitary act of writing encounters the juxtaposition of the blank white of the page and the infinite possibility of the sky (see Figure 1.1). Mallarmé’s metaphor of shipwreck is central to Pierre Boulez’s magum opus, Pli selon pli –​portrait de Mallarmé (1959, rev. 1983). The third of its three ‘Improvisations sur Mallarmé’ takes Mallarmé’s sonnet ‘À la nue accablante tu’ as its starting point, a poem that similarly drowns linguistic COMME SI Une insinuation au silence

simple enroulée avec ironie ou le mystère précipité hurlé

dans quelque proche voltige

tourbillon d’hilarité et d’horreur autour du gouffre sans le joncher ni fuir et en berce le vierge indice COMME SI

Figure 1.1  Stéphane Mallarmé, Un coup de dés, pages 7–​8

Sirènes  43 grammar in its exploration of the shipwreck of language –​key markers in the sonnet include naufrage (shipwreck), épaves (wrecks), le mât dévêtu (the stripped mast), perdition (destruction), se noyé (drowned), sirène (mermaid). Discarding all punctuation, it was famously singled out by Tolstoy as an example of a poem with ‘no meaning whatever’.54 In Boulez’s ‘Improvisation’ the soprano does not sing the words of the poem –​or at least, she sings only the first word, which, being ‘A’, is the default vowel sound of wordless singing. Her five entries in the piece are all extended vocalises on this single syllable, elaborating a musicalised voice at the edge of language. This, surely, is another instantiation of the wordless voice of the siren, shorn of all late nineteenth-​ century kitsch. Its lyrical and self-​sufficient play might also recall the ecstatic wordless singing of Stravinsky’s nightingale in Le Rossignol. Its cyclic returns are like those of the tides, a coming in and out of presence that contrasts with the apparently timeless submarine space of the orchestral interludes. There is no saying here, no narrative, no musical adventure, just the movement of an aquatic voice against the stripped-​back wreck of linguistic grammar. Sudden percussive attacks alternate with long resonances, silences are interspersed with the gentle shimmering of celesta, harp and mandolin. The long, drawn-​ out instrumental postlude of quiet noise and timeless resonance seems to take us back to the opening bars of Debussy’s La mer. Mallarmé famously anticipates Derrida in the way he opens out a vast space that becomes visible only when the ship of language breaks apart. The white spaces of the page are, at one and the same time, the space of possibility and the dark abyss of language. Like Derrida, Mallarmé treats language negatively in order to show that its operations do not add up to a metaphysical closure (in which the word would denote the presence of a thing) but rather opens outwards and point beyond its own limits. In their different ways, both use language to delimit its own margins. Derrida’s terms are famously negative (erasure, deconstruction) in the same way that so many other key ideas of aesthetic and philosophical modernism are negatively defined (atonality, abstraction, negative dialectics). The sense of opposition arises from the instinct to clear a space by breaking up the restrictive nature of old forms –​ ‘to philosophize with a hammer’ as Nietzsche put it, anticipating Boulez’s composing with one in Le marteau sans maître. Instead of making a kind of linguistic enclosure, and insisting that only what lies within the walls of language is true and real, such an approach uses the walls to define the space outside of them (much like Kierkegaard’s metaphor of the border between two countries). Derrida’s philosophical language-​work here thus converges

44  Saying nothing with Mallarmé’s poetic work, and both meet Debussy’s music as it arrives from the opposite direction. The abyss opens where language ends abruptly, like a cliff edge, dropping off into the unplumbed depths of the a-​linguistic. The poetry of Mallarmé takes place on this cliff-​edge, holding out its words over the edge, risking their footing within language by allowing their play with the sensuousness of rhythm and sonority. The risk of falling is thus a kind of loss of the linguistic self, guaranteed and shored up by language, the self that manages to carve a path across the ocean of the natural world for as long as it is held within the ship of language. But the shipwreck threatens all of that. The breaking up of the ship risks the drowning of the linguistic self –​hence the omnipresence of the siren in Mallarmé’s poetry. As Stefan Hertmans suggests, such radical wordlessness is ‘a gorge, a gap, a void or a division’, an ‘abyss’, ‘a chasm one cannot look into without getting giddy’.55 For Mallarmé, the poet stands on the vertiginous edge of this abyss, braving the terror of a fall in order to make appear the luminous silence to which poetry aspires. It is an approach that closely relates the work of Debussy and Mallarmé, a parallel between their aesthetic projects that goes far beyond Debussy’s few song-​settings of Mallarmé or the Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faune. Jankélévitch identified in Debussy’s music a defining ‘geotropism’, by which he meant a recurrent tendency to fall. His exhaustive analysis of the astonishingly varied kinds of descent in Debussy’s music makes ‘La descente dans les souterrains’ by far the longest chapter of his Debussy book. Taking its title from Act 3.ii of Pelléas et Mélisande, Jankélévitch reads the whole of Debussy’s opera as a kind of descent: ‘At first sliding gradually then in an accelerating fall, the destiny of Mélisande and Pelléas descends vertiginously towards the abyss, beyond control or redress.’56 It is a central image, of course, in La chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher), the unfinished opera based on Edgar Allen Poe’s short story on which Debussy worked for some ten years, on and off.57 At the heart of Debussy’s music, Jankélévitch contends, there is an ‘obsession with the abyss’,58 an emptiness which ‘is both the object of horror and temptation, and for that reason gives us vertigo’.59 To be sure, Debussy’s music depicts no shipwrecks, though there are both journeys by boat (L’isle joyeuse) and some violent storms (La mer), but, as with Mallarmé, it is within the use of (musical) language itself that the abyss opens up, in the spaces that appear when music allows itself a kind of freedom from its earlier grammatical orders. It is on this level that Debussy’s music

Sirènes  45 relates most powerfully to the boundless self-​sufficiency of the aquatic –​not because his titles tell us so, but because his music unfolds immersive musical structures whose harmonic and sonorous continuities have let go the firm footing of tonal ground. Mallarmé was hardly alone in equating the allure of a musicalised poetry with that of the sea, or the adventure of language as akin to embarking on a voyage towards the sea’s distant horizon. ‘Music often takes me like the sea!’, Baudelaire declares in the first line of ‘La musique’. It is not just that music is experienced as a kind of transport to distant places, but that it moves in a quite different element. Its rhythmic transport is not confined to the hard enclosures of the land, but floats across the unbounded surface of the water. Such a poetic view of music being like the sea was in turn reclaimed by musicians as song texts and thus the site of new kinds of musical space. In Fauré’s early song, ‘Les matelots’ Op. 2, no. 2 (c.1870) to a text by Théophile Gautier, the poet voyages by means of language, like a mariner in his ship: ‘Sublime existence/​rocked within our nest/​we live over the abyss/​in the bosom of the infinite’ (Existence sublime /​Bercés par notre nid/​ nous vivons sur l’abîme /​au sein de l’infini). It is a theme that recurs periodically in Fauré’s work, right up to his late set of songs L’horizon chimérique, Op. 118 (1921), to poems by Jean de La Ville de Mirmont. All four of these songs exemplify Fauré’s use of the piano as a constant background that nevertheless constantly changes, a paradox created by means of an unchanging ostinato figure subjected to infinite nuances of harmonic shading. ‘The sea is infinite’ (La mer est infinie) is the opening line of the first song: ‘my dreams dance over its surface like drunken birds, carried on the vast motion of the waves, shaken and tumbled in the folds of the breeze’ –​a metaphor embodied in the way that the vocal line is carried aloft by the constancy of the semiquaver accompaniment figure, endlessly varied in its harmonic folds (see Example 1.3). It shadows the voice but without interaction, response, comment or discourse, as a silent travelling companion like the sea to the sailor. This is a song that foregrounds an a-​ grammatical play on the liminal edge of sea and air, moving eccentrically outside of the straight lines of grammar –​a release from the symbolic order, a play at the margins and thus a celebration of the power of music and its seductive pull towards an a-​linguistic self. The rhythm of the waves defines the movement of the second song, ‘I have set out’ (Je me suis embarqué), marked by Fauré in a constant dotted figure

46  Saying nothing Example 1.3  Gabriel Fauré, ‘La mer est infinie’, L’horizon chimérique, Op. 118, no. 1, bb. 1–​7

in the left hand of the piano, and syncopated chords in the right, which, in the opening bars of the song, leaves the last beat of each 3/​4 bar empty, a rocking that embodies the singer’s sentiment that ‘the supple waves have taught me other cadences, lovelier than the weary rhythm of human songs’. This rhythmic effect is mirrored in the chromatic slippage of the harmony, a gentle disorientation of the tonally grounded self. The desire of all these songs is for a different state, a different space of language that recalls the pleasure and freedom of the in-​fans: ‘I want nothing but the sea, nothing but the wind /​to rock me like a child in the trough of the waves’. Not a confusion or unstructured nonsense but a state of calm, self-​ sufficient speechlessness: ‘O moon, I want your clarity’, yearns the singer in the third song, ‘Diane, Selène’. The utter simplicity of the slow piano chords and the mute quality of their non-​functional circling underline that this is all about not-​saying. The piano speaks the interior silence of what the words lament; they voice the silence for which the words yearn. Each points to what the other cannot. But it is desire that ends this short cycle. ‘Ships, we would have loved you’ (Vaisseaux, nous vous aurons aimés) explores the tension between two worlds –​between being landlocked by language and the unstilled desire for the great voyages promised by poetry: ‘For I have great unsatisfied departures within me’, is the gentle lament with which Fauré ends his song and, symbolically at least, his life as a voyager across the space of music and poetry.

Sirènes  47

Constellation Mallarmé’s poem does not end with the drowning of the mariner on the bed of the ocean. Its still centre (the lost and lonely quill) is followed by a vision of a mermaid who slaps aside with her tail the hard structures (faux manoir) that had imposed a limit on the infinite (qui imposa une borne à l’infini). ‘Down falls the quill’ (choit la plume) in the face of what is revealed in its place. One polyphonic trajectory of the poem muses on the transformation of the mariner/​poet in the face of this radical dissolution while another, separated by its larger, bold and upper-​case typeface, slowly coalesces to deliver a single line with the force of an epiphany: ‘NOTHING . . . WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE . . . OTHER THAN THE PLACE . . . EXCEPT . . . PE RHAPS . . . A CONSTELLATION.’ The result of the shipwreck of linguistic order, the unstitching of its signifying forms, is a clearing of space within language itself. In place of the solidity of things, one can now see the patterning of relations between things, the spacing of form that is their constellation. It recalls the effect of lines by the seventeenth-​century Japanese poet, Mizuta Masahide: ‘Now that my barn has burned down, I can see the rising moon.’ Elizabeth McCombie, in her book-​ length study of Mallarmé and Debussy, points to the ‘grandeur and finality’ of this ‘symphonic conclusion’ to Mallarmé’s poem, with its ‘visually and semantically dramatic ascent towards the shimmering “CONSTELLATION” of the last page’.60 In this, she compares Mallarmé’s poem to Debussy’s Jeux, but to my ears it is surely the ‘grandeur and finality’ of the ‘symphonic conclusion’ to La mer that offers the most resonant musical parallel. On one level, the chorale ending evokes a musical gesture all but worn out by the time of Debussy’s work, suggesting a kind of symphonic language Debussy otherwise distances. But, as in Mallarmé, the ‘grandeur’ of the ending is less the arrival of some thing than the luminescence of appearing itself, less the proclamation of some discursive conclusion than a resonating of the space that has been opened. Malcolm Bowie draws an explicit link between Un coup de dés and La mer: both place centre stage, he suggests, the contradiction between the sea as a ‘spectacle of endless possibility and plurality’ and as an ‘emblem of intellectual defeat and of humankind at the mercy of an inhospitable world’.61 To be sure, ‘Dialogue du vent et de la mer’ does not depict any shipwreck, but the violence of the sea and its ‘in-​human’ aspect have been heard by many commentators. Like Mallarmé’s poem however, Debussy’s music ends not with some a-​linguistic abyss but with the shimmering ‘constellation’ of its closing bars.

48  Saying nothing McCombie’s reference to Jeux reminds us that Debussy’s music, like Mallarmé’s poem, presents a mosaic-​like patterning of recurrent but endlessly varied figures whose unfolding is without obvious teleology. Taken as a whole, the six movements that make up the Trois nocturnes and the Trois esquisses symphoniques of La mer form a kind of constellation of related but separate movements, underlined by some specific motivic connections across separate works as well as within them. The sense of a larger set of pieces is reinforced by further suggestive links to both D’un cahier d’esquisses and L’isle joyeuse from 1903.62 Simon Trezise, for example, underlines how D’un cahier d’esquisses is not only in the same key as La mer (D♭) but also ‘makes extensive use of a rhythmic figure that dominates the cello theme of the second principal section (first movement): there is, therefore, a possibility that this piece, about whose genesis little is known, is a spin-​off from the composition of La mer’.63 Aside from such specific material points of contact, it is not insignificant that both works are described as esquisses. Analysts have made much of Stravinsky’s debts to Debussy in this respect, seeing the French composer as the origin of the idea of ‘block form’ which comes to define, through Stravinsky, an attitude to musical time in the twentieth century quite different to the linearity of an earlier age. The metaphor of the ‘block’ emphasises something defined by discrete and hard edges, as in Stravinsky, but the structural effect in Debussy is more fluid –​associative rather than oppositional, working with allusive links rather than hard juxtaposition. Messiaen, who learned from both composers, is rather less like Debussy than he is often assumed to be, but at times displays a similar kind of musical logic. In the ‘Regard du silence’, for example, No. 17 of the Vingts regards sur l’enfant Jesus, he presents a kaleidoscopic play of crystalline chords to form a structure that is neither discursive nor propositional but constellational. As Messiaen’s Vingt regards exemplifies, the new formal principle is also echoed on a macro level in terms of large, multi-​part forms: it is striking how often, in music after Debussy, composers have found a way out of the teleological structures generated by tonality by reaching for forms made of multiple parts, works often consisting of several, shorter movements, rather than the narrative linearity that is the legacy of the sonata, symphony, or concerto  –​witness many works of Messiaen, Saariaho, Dutilleux, and Boulez. Debussy’s two books of piano preludes might be heard in this way, neither an arbitrary and disconnected set of pieces nor a strictly ordered sequence like the four movements of a symphony, but a constellation of individual pieces that make a larger pattern in relation to one another. The same

Sirènes  49 may be said of Debussy’s song collections, so often, as David Code has noted, presented in groups of threes.64 Given the ephemeral nature of its material, music might be thought to lend itself well to a kind of sense-​making that is made of nothing but relations –​ that projects the constellation of its dynamic parts, rather than anything of fixed substance. The charme of music, in the words of Jankélévitch, ‘thus stems from a kind of infinite totalisation and it is in this sense that it is literally made of nothing, that it comes from a nothing!’.65 The very idea of a ‘spectral’ music is rooted in the idea of constellation –​to understand sound as a complex structure of overtones is to understand it not as an opaque concrete object but as a set of relations defined by interval and intensity; in the possibilities made available by computer technology, it is a constellation that can be expressed precisely in terms of number. But in their working out, spectral compositions proceed by exploring not linguistic structures but spatial ones, defined by global, spatial conditions of relationality rather than musical objects. They amplify the patterns that emerge between sounds and within sounds once the structures of language have been dissolved. The constellation is a resonant image for music on many levels; rhythm, melody, harmony, and form exist only on account of interval and the patterning of intervals, a network of differences like language itself. Such a patterning reveals itself in music only through time, as a continuously unfolding edge of the temporal moment, running like an elongated wave from start to finish, yet leaving its trace as it goes. Not for nothing did Henri Bergson look to music for an embodied image of his idea of the durée as opposed to an atomised idea of time based on the separation of spatial co-​ ordinates. Try to grasp music as a set of things or objects and you end up only with ‘bassoon’, ‘B♭’, ‘minim’, not the music formed from the constellation of all its parts. But while music is essentially constellational, defined by its patternings, it resists being reduced to endless différance. It is striking that the development of the ‘Method of Composing with 12 Tones’, developed by Schoenberg and his circle in the decade after Debussy’s death, is entirely based on this idea of interval, on the gap between things, and yet is quite opposite to the musical tradition that emerges with Debussy. The difference has to do with a system based only on intervals (the abstract law of number) and a kind of ‘logic of sensation’ that emerges between things. In serialism, the identity of any musical object is conferred by the system; in Debussy, the constellation of relations arises from the sensuous given (donné) of the musical materials.

50  Saying nothing They move in opposite directions:  one makes musical sounds the carrier of the abstract system, the other starts with sounds in motion to discover a constellational form. It is telling that Debussy, trying to articulate his discovery of a new kind of harmonic grammar to Ernest Guiraud in 1889, should reach for an aquatic metaphor:  ‘In submerging tonality (en noyant le ton), one should always proceed where one wishes, one can go out and return by whatever door one prefers. And our world, thereby expanded, is capable of greater nuance.’66 Debussy’s phrase ‘en noyant le ton’ is just as well translated as ‘in drowning tonality’67 –​not just an immersion but a kind of re-​making, such as follows the drowning of the mariner in Un coup de dés. For Debussy, this new ‘aquatic’ space of harmony brings with it a kind of ‘polymorphous’ quality (to borrow Freud’s term); compared to the phallocentric law of tonal direction, in Debussy’s world one can enter or exit harmonic space in multiple ways. The aquatic metaphor captures well how Debussy dissolves the hard structures of tonal grammar and reorganises them by a different, more fluid logic. Musicology often remains tongue-​tied in relation to this different logic. More than a century on, it still falls back on phrases about Debussy’s ‘static’ harmony, even though this music is palpably full of movement and, in the face of Debussy’s astonishingly rich and multiple harmonic connections, often resorts to the negative and utilitarian label of ‘non-​functional harmony’. On the one hand, it’s a reductive and ridiculous label, suppressing bewilderment that music might deploy triadic harmony to any other end than that of tonal progression towards closure. On the other hand, the negative label unwittingly underlines that Debussy’s triadic but ‘non-​functional’ harmony constitutes a kind of tonality under erasure; it undoes the terms of tonality precisely in order to point elsewhere, to open to a different space. The discourse of the young Boulez, in the 1950s, could hardly be further from the world of Debussy; its bristling array of quasi-​mathematical techniques, its aesthetic of asceticism and apparent rejection of pleasure, hardly recall Debussy. And yet the soundworld of the later Boulez suggests a quite different picture and a proximity between the two composers that music history has too often obscured. In the closing section of Répons (1984), the shimmering arabesques of arpeggio figures in harp, pianos, cimbalom, vibraphone, celesta, and their transformed electronic echoes, suggest a cultivation of the sensuous aspects of the sonic that relates directly to passages in Debussy or Ravel.68 Hearing the later works in this way invites a rehearing of the earlier ones –​not just the more obviously indebted juvenilia but classic

Sirènes  51 serial works of the 1950s, like Le marteau sans maître and the Mallarmé-​ based Pli selon pli. Boulez was explicit that in Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés he found a rich model for the structures of his own music. Peter O’Hagan cites a letter from Boulez to Stockhausen of September 1957 in which he states that ‘Constellation’, which forms part of the Third Piano Sonata, ‘is a little like Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés with structures playable in all directions following the layout of the page’.69 Influential in this respect were Mallarmé’s posthumous notes, published by Jacques Scherer in 1957 as Le ‘Livre’ de Mallarmé.70 For a composer exploring the permutational possibilities of the number twelve, the resonance with the throwing of two dice is obvious (2 x 6). Mallarmé’s text consists of 24 pages (the number in a printer’s cahier), each of which has space for a maximum of 36 lines; 24 is also the number of syllables in a couplet of alexandrines.71 But the possibilities suggested to Boulez by Mallarmé’s own fascination with numerology are perhaps less important than the larger poetic move here, of stepping away from representation through a play of language itself. Mallarmé’s move from book to album (a collection of loose sheets) can certainly be found in Boulez too, in the mobile forms of the 1950s, insisting on the piece as a kind of ‘unfolding’ of the text rather than a ‘folding up’ and binding together as the making of books is usually taken to be. Nowhere is this idea more obvious than in the Third Piano Sonata (1955–​ 57), on which Mallarmé was a key influence.72 In Constellation-​Miroir we find an exemplary case of the coming together of quasi-​mathematical wonder at the system of relations and the embodied pleasure of sound. The Third Sonata exemplifies the idea of an open work, a text that remains a ‘work in progress’ (a notion Boulez borrowed from James Joyce). In its five-​movement plan, Constellation-​Miroir forms the central point.73 The other four movements have titles that refer to ways in which music takes on structures and modes of address drawn from language: Antiphonie, Trope, Strophe, Sequence. The same literary and linguistic ideas abound within the movement; the structural plan for Strophe is based on sonnet form; the four sections of Trope, which can be played in a variety of different orders are titled ‘Text’, ‘Parenthesis’, ‘Gloss’, and ‘Commentary’. These four sections are not bound in to each other, but printed on four loose leaves to facilitate their re-​ordering by the performer. Additionally, they use red and green print to differentiate between ‘blocks’ and ‘points’ of material. The fascination, shared with Mallarmé, with the idea of constellation, mirror, symmetry,

52  Saying nothing and mobile forms is surely to be understood as part of a wider shared aesthetic outlook, not merely as an arbitrary borrowing of techniques. As Peter O’Hagan underlines, for Boulez, by the mid-​1950s, the triumvirate of Mallarmé, Cézanne, and Debussy were simply ‘the source of all contemporary art’.74

2 Mélisande and the silence of music Framing nothing At the beginning of Act 3 of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, we encounter Mélisande alone for the first time. Seated at the window of her room in a tower of the castle, she sings to herself as she combs her hair for the night. Her song is unaccompanied, quite naked of any orchestral dress, but it is framed by a brief orchestral introduction, a musical outline of nothingness, the faintest of pencil lines on a white background. A single repeated pitch, flickering gently across three octaves in the harp, lightly ripples the scrim of viola and cello harmonics, a mere breath of sound, ghosting the single sustained note of the flute. To this is added the thin, muted line of the violins, floated in like the distant movement of clouds in the night sky, allowing a sudden moment of moonlight, marked by the punctuation of a B major chord, a momentary thickening of the texture, and the repeated three-​note figure given by two flutes –​a gentle premonition of the stirring of the doves who will take flight later in the scene (see Example 2.1). Opera composers have often found ways to conjure the presence of the heroine before her actual appearance on the stage. With these seventeen bars Debussy does something similar yet evokes an empty space. The sonic ripple that runs through the orchestra frames almost nothing. By means of its veil of sound, silence appears. Debussy’s only completed opera has been much discussed. It has in particular been much discussed for its symbols, as if the opera’s relation to Symbolism meant that it should be full of symbols, presenting a series of musical devices that stand for ideas of other (non-​musical) things. I take a different view. My approach has nothing to do with ideas of expression or communication, the carrying of messages or the ‘freighting’ of meaning. Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande does not, I suggest, convey either ‘the interpretative message of the composer’ or ‘the psycho-​dramatic meaning of the original play by Maeterlinck’.1 Neither do I hear this music as the ‘encoder of the Unconscious’, whether that of the composer, the dramatist or the collective

After Debussy. Julian Johnson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066826.001.0001

Example 2.1  Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande Act 3.i, bb. 1–​17

audience. Debussy’s opera does not translate or transpose some content previously expressed elsewhere: it writes and thus makes present. It foregrounds the primary activity of all aesthesis –​the act of art’s appearing, of making itself present, of taking place.

Mélisande and the silence of music  55 Of all the aspects of Debussy’s opera, none has been more discussed than the nature of Mélisande herself. Jankélévitch sums up a prevalent understanding of her in his simple remark that ‘Mélisande is almost inexistent’. She is, he says, ‘a breath, a feather, a disappearing apparition’.2 The association of Mélisande with silence, transparency, childlike innocence, luminosity, and weightlessness saturate accounts of Debussy’s opera. The quality of her voice and the listening it demands seems to lie at the heart of the opera’s concerns. Both Jann Pasler and Katharine Bergeron3 have underlined the definitive idea of a vocal delivery ‘presque sans voix’ by which naturalness becomes associated with a kind of artless truthfulness. Thus, Mélisande’s plain and unaccompanied singing, at the start of Act 3, Pasler suggests, allows us ‘to look for the truth not in clear expressive melodies, but in the emptiness and ambiguities of sound –​Debussy’s “déclamation épurée” –​as well as silence’.4 Carolyn Abbate suggests that, in the opera, it is only Pelléas that truly hears this quality of Mélisande’s voice for what it is, because he listens to her voice not the words: ‘Pelléas, not noticing what Mélisande says instead hears music:  a grain that for him drowns out the literal meaning of her words.’ Abbate concludes that ‘what Pelléas hears in Mélisande’s voice is analogous to what Symbolist poets wished to hear in poetic language: sonority, not philosophy’.5 It is Pelléas alone who has this ‘capacity to hear sounds that are inaudible to everyone else’ but after his death, Abbate suggests, this ability passes to the audience who, in Act 5 of the opera, finally hear Mélisande’s voice merge with the ‘phantom’ voice of the orchestra. It is salutary to remember that Debussy’s cultivation of a musical art ‘with almost nothing to say’6 was exactly contemporary with the high point of programme music in the tone poems of Richard Strauss and with the grand symphonic narratives of Gustav Mahler. The music of Debussy, by contrast, is often impersonal to the point of anonymity  –​brief, microscopic, non-​discursive, focused on the elaboration of particularity, disinterested in narratives of the subject. As Schoenberg and his pupils explored a highly-​ wrought Expressionism, breaking musical language apart in the urgent impossibility of trying to say, Debussy’s quiet revolution took a different path. This arresting contrast marks the overlap, and short-​lived simultaneity, of two quite different ideas of music. Strauss, Mahler, and Schoenberg stand at the end of a musical tradition whose paradigm was essentially that of nineteenth-​century literature; Debussy stands at the beginning of one whose paradigm is closer to that of twentieth-​century painting.

56  Saying nothing It was in relation to the composition of Pelléas et Mélisande that Debussy wrote, in a famous letter to Chausson (in September, 1893), about his fascination with silence as a means of expression, a discovery that helped him to distance himself definitively from Wagner. We might understand this, retrospectively, as part of a wider aesthetics of reticence in French music, a quality which, as Carlo Caballero has shown, is related to notions of both sincerity and interiority.7 In its refusal of messages, signs, and symbols, Debussy’s music finds common ground with both Fauré and Ravel; but also, in its distance from the idea of musical discourse, it shows a certain kinship with quite different kinds of later French music –​with the neoclassicism of Les Six, with the organization of sound in Varèse, and with the constructivism of Boulez. In their different ways, all constitute a refusal of an idea of musical speech that had become vulgarized by Debussy’s time. It is interesting to hear the same aesthetic point of view expressed by a composer like Tristan Murail a century later. Talking about his orchestral piece La dynamique des fluides (1991), Murail reports that the work originated in ‘a desire for lightness, suppleness, polyvalency, a concern to avoid as much as possible grandiloquence and rhetorical effects’.8 Debussy’s comment about opera, after his second trip to Bayreuth in 1889, is well-​known: ‘I am not tempted to imitate what I admire in Wagner: I visualize a quite different dramatic form. In it, music begins at the point where the word becomes powerless as an expressive force: music is made for the inexpressible.’9 He went on to outline what he looked for in a librettist in ways that come remarkably close to the Maeterlinck play he was to encounter a few years later: ‘A poet who half speaks things. Two related dreams: that’s the ideal. No country, no date, [ . . . ] scenes with different locations and of different types; characters who do not discuss, submitting to life and destiny.’10 In the same year, Debussy attended the Exposition Universelle in Paris. His encounter there with non-​western music, including a Javanese gamelan orchestra, is well-​known, but he seems to have been equally struck by the theatrical elements of what he saw. He was amazed, for example, at the simplicity of means in Vietnamese theatre:  ‘There are simply more gods and less scenery. A bad-​tempered little clarinet directs the emotion. A tam-​tam organises the terror . . . and that’s all. No special theatre, no hidden orchestra. Nothing but an instinctive need of art, ingeniously satisfied.’11 But, of course, Debussy’s opera is not nothing: it is a five-​act drama lasting two and half hours and containing some of the composer’s most engaging

Mélisande and the silence of music  57 and intense music. And for all that he sought to capture Mélisande’s enigmatic silence, she appears in ten of the opera’s fifteen scenes and must sing and move and fall in love. So it is the paradox of saying nothing that I explore here –​not the idea of nothing itself but a palpably audible and articulate musical saying, a sonorous voicing of nothing. That quality was not sufficiently evident for Richard Strauss who protested, after hearing Pelléas et Mélisande in 1907, ‘There is not enough music [ . . . ] this is nothing, nothing at all’.12 Adorno would later remark similarly, about Debussy’s music in general, that ‘everything seems to be a prelude [ . . . ] the overture to musical fulfilment [ . . . ] which never arrives’.13 This quality, definitive of much of Debussy’s work, was often a target for contemporary critics. Edmond Stoullig wrote, after a concert in March 1913 which included some of the second book of Préludes, that the first piece (‘Bruyères’), ‘contains nothing at all; the second, “Feuilles mortes”, not much more [ . . . ]’.14 Debussy may not have welcomed the implication of such remarks, but we might understand them as the flipside of what he quite deliberately cultivated within his music, summed up in his comment about trying to portray Mélisande musically: ‘I have spent days in pursuit of the “nothing” she is made of ’.15 Understanding this ‘nothing’ as something of high value in Debussy’s music, rather than in the pejorative way Edmond Stoullig doubtless intended, has shaped a certain reception of Debussy’s music ever since the premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande. It has often been noted that, in Maurice Maeterlinck’s play, Debussy found his perfect libretto in a theatre of non-​event, one whose drama emerges from the silences between characters and from the gaps within its language. ‘It is idle to think that, by means of words, any real communication can ever pass from one man to another’, Maeterlinck wrote in ‘Le Silence’: ‘from the moment that we have something to say to each other, we are compelled to hold our peace’.16 This might seem like an odd assertion for a writer, but it is not a call to cease writing or speaking. On the contrary, it is part of Maeterlinck’s aesthetic that only through the framing activity of what is said, only by means of the words that are used to demarcate a space within language, does such a silence become audible; in his own words, ‘the words that we let fall have no meaning apart from the silence that wraps them round’.17 Characters speak in Maeterlinck’s plays, just as they sing in Debussy’s opera, but, as Patrick McGuinness puts it, ‘dialogue is valid predominantly in so far as it advertises the unspoken or unspeakable, alluding to the ever present, incoherent, unformulated, voiceless world beneath it’.18

58  Saying nothing Such a use of language, he continues, ‘implies both the absent (what language leaves out) and the omnipresent (what language is none the less always about) [ . . . ] The unspoken governs, shapes, and confers meaning on the language that tries to exclude it’.19 Or, in the words of Jacques Derrida (who had plenty to say), the proper object of the critic is ‘nothing’, even though ‘nothing is not an object’, but rather ‘the way in which this nothing itself is determined by disappearing’.20 The bare simplicity of Maeterlinck’s prose draws attention to the edges of language. By fracturing the surface of language he shapes the silences between the words –​quite literally in his use of various kinds of punctuation (such as the dash and the ellipsis), but also through non-​sequitur, repetition, and questions that seem neither to expect nor receive answers. Just as a composer writes a rest (un silence in French) to define a gap between musical events, Maeterlinck often inserts a direction for un silence between lines of his scripts.21 The result, as McGuinness comments, is ‘to leave the reader/​ spectator with an overwhelming sense of the inadequacy and provisionality of language’.22 For Maeterlinck, silence, like speech, has its own expressive register, just as it has its own graphic code: a dash may denote interruption, rupture, or shock, while three dots may signify the petering out of discursive energy, the phrase dwindling into nothingness, an unfinished sentence, or the point at which dialogue ebbs away. It may be a pregnant pause or semantic discontinuity, and, as it is used by Maeterlinck, it is far from the ‘opposite’ of speech, if by this, we mean to imply that speech expresses while silence does not.23

Maeterlinck’s text is characterised by constant repetition  –​of both single words and whole phrases. This too has the effect of undermining the signifying function of language; the semantic and syntactical logic of clear statement is broken up by the (em)phatic rhythm of the body. The abstract adequacy of language is displaced by a supplement of bodily repetition. Debussy made relatively few alterations to Maeterlinck’s text, but he often increased this phatic quality by adding an extra repetition of a phrase –​such as Mélisande’s ‘ne me touchez pas’ in Act 1.i, or the threefold repetition of ‘je me suis enfuie, enfuie, enfuie’. In the tower scene, Act 3.i, Debussy adds a third ‘donne’ to increase the sense of Pelléas’s urgent and

Mélisande and the silence of music  59 erotic ‘donne, donne, donne’ –​a device carried over to the love scene in Act 4.iv. As McGuinesss comments, Maeterlinck’s introduction of silence, ‘l’Inconnu’ and the ‘néant’ into theatre parallels Mallarmé’s discovery of the potential of the blank page and the spaces that precede, surround, and interrupt the printed poem. Like silence in the theatre, the white page for Mallarmé is both an abyss of nothingness (a ‘gouffre’, a ‘vide’, and ‘abîme’) and a source of plenitude and multiple suggestion.24

The abyss underlies Maeterlinck’s play in the form of the dark underground vaults of the castle, above which the precarious drama of its fragile characters takes place. It has often been noted that the dramatic space is structured on a vertical axis that runs from the height of Mélisande’s tower to the unknown depths of the grottos, and the risk of falling pervades a number of its key scenes.25 The final scene of Act 1 takes place on a cliff-​top looking out towards the open sea, the precipitous margin between the closed world of Allemonde and the infinite space of the ocean. But, as in Mallarmé, the ‘gouffre’ is first and foremost the terrifying space beyond language. It is the space to which Golaud, a man of rational relations between words and things, brings Pelléas to terrify him by the prospect of falling into a world without language. The same sense of a gaping abyss, and the asemantic world of noise that lies beyond language, haunts Debussy’s later operatic project based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Debussy often opens up similar gaps in the musical surface, moments of silence framed by the music either side of it, one half of musical language which we have barely begun to explore.26 His opera emerges, however, not from any simple parallelism of literary and musical devices but precisely from the tension between the two; less important than literal silences are the ways in which Debussy uses musical tone to make linguistic silences speak. In Act 2.ii, Mélisande tells Golaud that she is not happy. Golaud presses her for the reason with increasing agitation –​‘has someone been unkind? Is it the King? Is it my mother? Is it Pelléas?’. Mélisande answers at first with a rapid denial (‘No, no, it’s not Pelléas, it’s no one, you wouldn’t understand . . .’), the expressive tension in her voice accentuated by a high solo viola. And then, more calmly, she continues on a declaimed monotone, ‘It is something

60  Saying nothing stronger than me . . .’ (C’est quelque chose qui est plus fort que moi). The final word is timed with the re-​entry of the orchestra. The ellipsis at the end of the sentence, marked as such in Maeterlinck’s text, is not followed by a bar of silence, but a bar of music sounded from the mute and invisible orchestra. The harmonic slippage across these two bars might be explained as a simple series of dominant-​ninth chords under the repeated D♮ of Mélisande’s vocal line, but more than that it is a slippage of affective register, a slippage of voice, from addressing Golaud outwardly to a turn inwards (see Example 2.2). It is above all the tone of the strings’ ‘voice’, the upper line doubled in the flute

Example 2.2  Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act 2.ii, bb. 70–​77

Mélisande and the silence of music  61 (très doux et très expressif) that makes audible what was framed by the silence of Maeterlinck’s ellipsis. One of the most explicit and concentrated examples of Debussy’s foregrounding of this gap is heard in the closing bars of Act 1. Descending the steep path from the cliffs, Pelléas offers to take Mélisande’s hand. Her reply signals neither agreement nor refusal: ‘Look, you see my hands are full of flowers’ (Voyez, voyez j’ai les mains pleines de fleurs), so Pelléas takes hold of her arm instead before, a few steps later, declaring ‘I may be leaving tomorrow’ (Je pars peut-​être demain). ‘Oh’, Mélisande replies, ‘why do you have to leave?’ (pourquoi partez vous?). And with the very last word, the simplicity of the question is utterly changed by means of a sidestep in the harmony and a new orchestral tone (see Example 2.3). As the words imply future absence the music whispers a fragile promise of presence. Rarely does music present such an exposed edge between two worlds; a single barline here marks the gap between the absence of saying and the presence of music. Mélisande’s line should end with her G♮ falling to the tonic F♯, but with its twist up a semitone to G♯ instead, her question opens to a wholly new space. Coupled with the added D♯ in the chord, the resulting pentatonic harmony allows the unanswered question, and all the open potential it implies, to resonate well beyond the final bar (the chord will not resolve nor does it need to). It is one of the clearest examples to be found of music’s capacity to make resonate something unsaid. The closing bars of the orchestral music are a study in fragile presence suspended in absence. The music speaks infinitely what the words only hint at, neither touching nor parting. As the final bars fade, the flute takes up Mélisande’s question and turns it, wordlessly, twice more in a manner that has no end nor answer. The precipitous drop of the cliffs into the sea is as nothing compared to the gap that has been opened up within language. In Act 3.i, the tower scene, Mélisande’s words outline an internal drama of anxiety and desire, of wanting to let go but fearing to do so, a psychological study achieved with great economy by Maeterlinck. Encouraged to lean out of the window by Pelléas, her long hair falls down towards him, a dramatic moment marked by a preliminary climax, complete with a falling figure in the orchestra. Pelléas begins his lyrical hymn to her hair, ‘I hold it in my hands, I hold it in my mouth’ (Je les tiens dans les mains, je les tiens dans la bouche), in a state of quiet rapture, while Mélisande attempts to resist:27 ‘Let me go . . . you’ll make me fall’ (Laisse moi! . . . tu vas me faire tomber). In Debussy’s setting, the lassitude of her ‘laisse moi’ already suggests that

62  Saying nothing Example 2.3  Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act 1.iii, bb. 88–​96

the sense of the words is quite distant to the sense of the body. The musical phrase, and the delivery it invites, ensure we listen to the voice not the words, or rather, that we attend to the gap that opens between them. Once again, it is with the sideways move of the final syllable that the gap is opened to reveal an utterly different musical space. As the descending vocal line ends on a C♯ (instead of the expected C♮) over the beginning of a gently rocking figure in the lower strings, a fragile melodic line emerges, first in the clarinet and then the oboe (see Example 2.4). It is Pelléas who sings, but it is Mélisande we hear.

Example 2.4  Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act 3.i, ‘Je les tiens dans les mains’, bb. 107–​17

64  Saying nothing The tower scene presents a gap in order to make it resonate –​the gap between two lovers, between the absences of language and the presences of music, the gap that sparks between differentiated identity and release into the other, the vertiginous difference of desire, of body and language, music and words. After Mélisande’s hair tumbles down to him, Pelléas becomes rhapsodic.28 The deliberately plain language of statement, question, and answer that makes up most of Maeterlinck’s drama is released into a musicalized language characterized by an unpunctuated flow of rich imagery; saying, in terms of declarative statements, gives way to poetic rhapsody. With this, the music comes into its own, because rhapsody is music’s default mode of saying. Or, to put it another way, at this point Debussy temporarily closes the gap between the restrained declamation of Materlinck’s truncated lines and the rich flowering of the orchestral voice. ‘My lips can’t reach your hand!’ (Mes lèvres ne peuvent pas atteindre ta main!), complains Pelléas: the mouth that speaks is divided from the hand that touches. And in urging her to give him her hand (Donne, donne, donne!), Pelléas anticipates the climax of the later love scene in Act 4.iv when it is her mouth that he demands (Ta bouche! Ta bouche!). Her impassioned response in the later scene (Oui! . . . oui! . . . oui ! . . .) makes an inverted echo of her reply in the earlier one (‘Non! Non! Non!’). With the only moment of unison singing in the entire opera, the reciprocity of giving and receiving is marked by his ‘donne! donne!’ and her ‘toute! toute!’ sounding together on the very brink of Pelléas’s death at the hands of Golaud. At the dramatic and musical climax of the work, Debussy thus frames the bodily urgency of language; as words collapse back to the gestural violence of repetition delivered at full voice, the bodily force of music breaks through as nowhere else in the opera. This breaking out is, of course, all the more powerful for the earlier restraint. Throughout Act 4.iv Pelléas has a passionately released music that almost trips over itself in its desire to be heard. Memory is insufficient (‘like carrying water in a napkin of muslin’); only the immediacy of an embodied presence/​present will suffice. Saying thus takes on a new function in the epiphanic moment –​here, one must say everything rather than nothing (il faut que je lui dise tout ce que je n’ai pas dit). This impossible desire to tell everything generates the performative act of the declaration of love which, famously, is almost lost in the saying. The everything he wishes to say is, at the climactic moment of his speech, close to nothing, merged with the resonance of the orchestral rush that proceeds it, a mere echo in the silence that follows. But the gap is a hinge, a threshold, an axis between two worlds. Three bars

Mélisande and the silence of music  65 of unaccompanied vocal exchange separate the long-​range build up to this moment and the new space that follows, three bars in which not only do the lovers speak their love for the first time, almost in silence, but immediately reflect on hearing and listening: ‘Oh, what did you say Mélisande! . . . I hardly heard it! . . .’ (Oh, qu’as tu dit, Mélisande! . . . Je ne l’ai presque pas entendu! . . .). Debussy is quite explicit in the way he inverts the usual relation between silence and saying. At the climax of Pelléas’s rush of words, his declaration (Je t’aime) signals a breakthrough into a musical resonance on the other side of the words. Maeterlinck’s image at this point is the breaking of ice with red-​ hot irons. The magical single sonority heard here (see Example 2.5) –​the icy mirror of the high violin harmonic ‘E’ above, with the gently rocking chords in lower strings below –​is a production of presence, a statement of immanent

Example 2.5  Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act 4.iv, ‘Tu ne sais pas pourquoi’, bb. 86–​99

Example 2.5 Continued

appearance, bringing the listener to an edge in order to gesture to a new fullness beyond it. This is a threshold moment of the entire opera: it is not Mélisande’s words, but the transformed tone of her voice that Pelléas finally hears. In crossing this threshold, he hears the presence conferred by the voice rather than the absence which is the content of the words: ‘Tu dis cela d’une voix qui vient du bout du monde!’. As the tone of the voice becomes audible over the words it carries, the effect upon him is phatic rather than semantic: the touch of her voice is ‘fresher and purer than water . . . like pure water on my lips . . . on my hands’. With its definitive shift to F♯ major the music achieves a new space and sense of self-​completion. Pelléas continues in his rhapsodic mode: ‘One

Mélisande and the silence of music  67 would say that your voice had passed over the sea in spring! I had never heard it until now’ (On dirait que ta voix a passé sur la mer au printemps! Je ne l’ai jamais entendue jusqu’ici). Hearing her (musical) voice for the first time is also the moment he accesses a new (musical) world. His rhapsodic lyricism, now at one with the orchestra, delivers a presence only occasionally hinted at in the rest of the opera. By framing what it is he now hears, Pelléas enables us to hear it too. After Pelléas dies, as Carolyn Abbate puts it, ‘his auditory peculiarity –​a capacity to hear sounds inaudible to everyone else –​survives his death. It is transferred, through music, to the audience.’29 Which is why, for Abbate, Act 5 has a quite different sound quality. Just as, at Mélisande’s death, Arkel comments that ‘she has gone without a word’, so the music of Act 5 ‘says’ less and less, gradually shedding all its harmonic and motivic rhetoric. Even the tone becomes progressively thinner as presence dissolves into silence. Debussy marks the strings ‘dans une sonorité douce et voilée’, as the solo woodwinds withdraw to a childlike simplicity in the luminous nothingness of C♯ major with which the opera closes. Golaud, of course, cannot bear the idea of nothing, hence his anger in Act 4.ii. When Arkel says, of Mélisande’s eyes, that he can see nothing in them but a great innocence, Golaud replies: ‘Listen –​I am so close to them that I can feel a little breeze when the eye-​lashes blink, and yet I am nearer to the great secrets of the next world than I am to the smallest secrets of those eyes!’. He cannot tolerate that the materiality of the world does not speak, that it stands outside language, that it says nothing and tells him nothing. Even in Act 5, as Mélisande lies on her death bed, he is still pressing her to tell him the truth –​ he wants discourse, words, the assurances of the linguistic world; he cannot accept that the world, in its fullness, is not contained by linguistic statement, and becomes increasingly angry as language ties him up in impossible knots. The two worlds, the two ways of being, are caught in the contrast of tone: the urgent tragedy of Golaud’s questions and the flat tone of the orchestra for Mélisande’s empty answers. For Golaud, being mortal brings with it the urgency of needing to say, to tell, in the face of death; for Mélisande, the timelessness of death brings with it only innocent silence. Debussy’s opera is not a silent opera, but a work that uses the gap between words and music to frame a silence and to make it resonate. We may not be surprised that such a different musical personality as Richard Strauss concluded in bewilderment that the opera was ‘nothing at all’, but the coincidence of such antithetical aesthetic positions underlines the density of

68  Saying nothing this historical moment. Debussy might have taken comfort in the fact that, nearly a century earlier, the paintings of his beloved Turner elicited similar responses; William Hazlitt famously quipped of Turner’s Snow Storm (1812) that the artist’s works were ‘portraits of nothing, and very like’.30 The idea of framing a silence or an empty space, which pervades Symbolist literature, is made palpable in Rodin’s La cathédrale, whose two hands are the means by which something is made present that is not there (in an everyday or material sense). Only in the most basic sense is Rodin’s sculpture a representation of two hands; what this work projects is a specific field of tension, a quality of relatedness, which has to do with the space between the hands as much as the hands themselves. The ‘nothing’ between the hands, the empty space, is of course everything here. It makes appear, brings to presence, a relationship, that is –​if one insists on the term –​the content of the work. Kant, and a whole tradition of linguistically-​constrained philosophy of art following him, wants to insist that this content is an idea, by which he means a concept, a word –​say, ‘love’, or ‘tenderness’, ‘intimacy’, or ‘care’ –​but this is a closure of the material which the work neither invites nor requires. Standing in the presence of Rodin’s hands, our experience is first and foremost ‘sensible’; I understand the work because I know what it is to touch and to be touched, because I know the affective language of the hands. What begins as a visual experience (I see the sculpture) is also at once tactile and affective, it engages the emotional intelligence of the body. Music ‘after Debussy’ does something similar.

Orchestral voices Debussy’s opera unfolds in a highly distinctive way. Each scene is followed by an orchestral interlude that simultaneously prepares the next, passages of wordless music whose expressive fullness of tone contrasts strongly with the veiled quality of the scenes themselves in which characters deliver their lines in simple, declamatory statements, closer to speech than conventional singing. The result is an operatic paradox that the moments of emotional overflow, of most articulate expression, are largely to be found in the orchestral passages in which the singers are absent. This binary division is built into Maeterlinck’s drama, expressed in Arkel’s line that ‘We only ever see the reverse side of other people’s destinies, even the reverse of our own’ (Act 1). The idea proposed in a whole series of textual

Mélisande and the silence of music  69 metaphors between inner and outer, visible and invisible, spoken and silent, is thus embedded in the structure of Debussy’s opera, alternating between the singing of on-​stage characters and the wordless operation of the orchestra. If Debussy inherits from Wagner the idea of the orchestra as a kind of musical Unconscious to the words and actions of the characters on stage, he nevertheless departs from Wagner in thematizing the idea that words and music can never fuse –​that they always work to opposite ends, that music is necessarily a supplement, a compensation for the losses and exclusions of language. The alternation in Pelléas et Mélisande of incommunicative speech and articulate orchestral music foregrounds this definitive gap. Although the interludes are often discussed in terms of a commentary on what has just taken place or what is about to happen, as a development of the ideas given in the text, the opposite is the case.31 The interludes accentuate the gap between what is spoken and what is felt, and underline the incommensurability of human actions and words with the vast seascapes of human life that cannot be spoken. One washes against the other, but the two remain separate –​hence the aching sadness at the heart of both drama and music. It is an astonishing thought, given their musical weight, that significant parts of these orchestral interludes were late additions as the opera neared its first performance in 1902. About a month before the opening, it became clear that the scene changes would take longer than expected and Debussy had to agree, ‘very reluctantly’ to extend some of them.32 Whatever their genesis, the nature of these passages, in their final form, is that they voice wordlessly something unsaid in the vocal scenes that come before and after them. But for all the presence of recurrent leitmotifs or figures amenable to semiotic coding, these interludes are not to be translated or decoded; there is no external action that equates to their interior drama. The interlude that joins Act 1.i to Act 1.ii is built on a march rhythm that might suggest the courtly world of Allemonde or Golaud’s royal provenance, but the twist of the harmony to the dark realm of F♭ minor and the rising trumpet theme (grave et expressif), just a few bars before the curtain rises on scene ii, tells a far more ambivalent story. Its sudden and portentous intensity leaves a stain on the blank silence of the letter scene that follows just a few bars later. In turn, the lyric emptiness of the letter scene is followed by a brief but passionate orchestral interlude that joins Act 1.ii to Act 1.iii. The heightened intensity here seems to arise simply through the insistent repetition of its dotted note motif and the focused tone of the strings, not through any musical discourse or argument

70  Saying nothing Example 2.6  Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande Act 1.ii, bb. 147–​60

(see Example 2.6). Momentary and short-​lived, a mere twenty-​six bars, one hears no statement but only a straining and thickening of the voice under the burden of unspoken feelings. If the characters speak but communicate very little, by contrast, the orchestra seems to say everything by saying nothing. Where the characters seem not to hear one another and fail to communicate, the orchestral interludes are marked by a fullness of presence heard vocally only in the two love scenes. The orchestra gives voice not just to what characters have not said but also to thoughts and desires of which they are themselves not aware. In this sense, they voice an excess, something in excess of language, and

Mélisande and the silence of music  71 part of the force of this most gentle of operas arises precisely from this appearance of music that is so palpably in excess of its words. It is striking that Proust, having listened to a performance of the opera on the théatrephone in 1911, wrote to Reynaldo Hahn that the parts he had enjoyed most were those without words.33 Part of Debussy’s technique, in the orchestral music, is to allow the emergence of inner voices  –​a presentation of interiority that the flat, blank surface of the vocal dialogue seems to deny. In the passage quoted in Example 2.6, for example, from the interlude between Act 1.ii and Act 1.iii, it is the emergence of the cello in the middle of the texture that breaks out most forcefully at the climax. The same idea recurs in the interlude between Act 4.ii and Act 4.iii, where the orchestra has to deal with the emotional excess left by the end of a scene in which Golaud has thrown Mélisande to her knees and dragged her across the floor by her hair. As Alban Berg later found in Wozzeck, where the mute suffering of the onstage characters exceeds any words they have, it falls to the orchestra to voice a sense of care, concern, and pity that is left out of the telling of events. Debussy’s interlude here seems to expand on Arkel’s closing comment, ‘If I were God I would have pity on the hearts of men.’ For all its relative brevity, the orchestral passage achieves a searing intensity before giving way to a return of Melisande’s gentle (doux) theme in the oboe. In an opera which largely avoids counterpoint, this orchestral expansion opens up a dense weave of inner voices. In a similar way to the emergence of inner voices within the orchestral texture, the orchestra more generally creates a kind of interiority to the otherwise ‘flat’ surface of the vocal dialogues, inhabiting the scenes as a wordless inner voice –​not in the romantic sense of interiority, disclosing what a character feels but keeps secret, but in the sense of something that lies beyond the individuality of the characters. Act 1.ii begins in a singularly undramatic manner, with the blankness of Geneviève reading Golaud’s letter. And yet, the scene is poignant and deeply expressive; Mallarmé never encapsulated better the tension between music and letters than Debussy does in this scene. It is poignant partly because of the bare declamatory voice of Geneviève, but also because of the gap that divides it from the rich tone of the brief moments of orchestral commentary, a gap accentuated by Debussy’s avoidance of continuous orchestral underlay. Note, for example, the flowering of tone and melody, given by divided cellos and basses (très expressif) under the line in which the letter expresses Golaud’s hope that Arkel will accept and welcome

72  Saying nothing Mélisande. Or again, a few bars later, where Golaud expresses his hope that a light will be lit in the tower as a sign that his ship will be welcome, now with the same melodic motif given in unison by two flutes over viola, divided cellos and basses (see Example 2.7). Example 2.7  Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande Act 1.ii, bb. 27–​46

Example 2.7 Continued

We hear the words and what they tell, but we listen for what emerges from the orchestra. Debussy plays constantly with the disorientation of juxtaposing these two modalities. This is explicit as Geneviève reaches the end of the letter and turns to Arkel to ask ‘What do you say about it?’. The answer is given in the fulsome response of the orchestra (bb. 42–​44), in slower tempo (in the full score, très expressif; in the vocal score, avec une grande expression): a rising melodic line in the cellos climbs towards a falling one in the violins, but the intensity of the phrase has as much to do with the tone of the string ensemble, its warmth contrasting with the flat coolness of the letter reading. Only after this brief but intense swell in the orchestral underlay does

74  Saying nothing Arkel ‘speak’ for the first time, and that to say ‘I have nothing to say’ (Je n’en dis rien).34 The gap is here presented in naked form –​the inward nonverbal answer of the orchestra juxtaposed with Arkel’s outward ‘saying’ that he has nothing to say. In fact, in what follows he goes on to say more, but in order precisely to enlarge on the nature of this gap, insisting that we only see one side of the fate of others, an image centred on the notion of just such a dual aspect. This sense of the meeting of two sides of things is what defines the opera, not simply because it is written into Maeterlinck’s play but because it is played out in the constant oscillation between the edges of the words and the music. The contrast is all the greater here because of Debussy’s famously spare, declamatory text setting: a kind of degree zero of melodic writing. Language thus rises through the heightened speech of simple declamation and meets music coming in the opposite direction, a music divested of the conventional function of expressing any text. Arkel is a key figure in this respect as the only member of the family who seems aware of this tension between words and silence. His most extended scene is Act 4.ii in which, alone with Mélisande, he embarks on what begins as a lengthy monologue on the darkness of the castle and his concern for Mélisande since her arrival. The unusually drawn-​out prose hardly promises a fulsome lyrical aria, nor does it get one, except that the orchestra is richly eloquent and radiant, presenting in an expansive tone a sense of what the words alone do not say. Arkel’s meditation on old age and death versus youth’s affirmation of life might be prosaic or even banal at the level of the words alone, but the orchestra makes present what the words lament –​a life force long absent within the walls of Allemonde. Debussy’s restraint in the word-​ setting makes space for the articulate presence of the orchestra. At first these are isolated moments –​the lyrical addition of the violins giving Melisande’s theme (b. 123) or the intensity of the dense chordal scoring of the strings (bb. 131–​33), but these are hints of a desired presence which the orchestra gradually makes present. Arkel’s statement that ‘from now on’ things will change is marked by the single D♭-​ninth chord (b. 137), the beginning of a drawn-​out process of enlargement (animez peu à peu) that delivers the old man’s vision which climaxes with a sense of arrival (b. 155) with his declaration ‘and it’s you, now, who’s going to open the door to a new future that I forsee’ (Et c’est toi, maintenant, qui vas ouvrir la porte à l’ère nouvelle que j’entrevois). What for Arkel is only a vision, the music momentarily makes real –​witness how the rich sonority of the horns seem to recall the life-​giving power of Freia’s golden apples in Wagner’s Das Rheingold (see Example 2.8).

Mélisande and the silence of music  75 Example 2.8  Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande Act 4.ii, bb. 152–​58

The orchestral interludes, and the moments of orchestral commentary between and beneath the declamatory delivery of the text, might seem to embody Debussy’s oft-​quoted words that he imagined an opera in which ‘music begins at the point where the word becomes powerless as an expressive force’. In this, of course, he was not as distant from Wagner as he imagined. It is not so much Debussy’s use of the expressive power of the orchestra that sets his own opera apart from that of other post-​Wagnerian composers, but rather the gap he creates between what the voices do and what the orchestra does. The orchestra, which is linguistically mute and can ‘say’ nothing, appears to speak on behalf of the characters who speak but nevertheless say very little. The wordless instrumental music compensates for the inarticulacy and incommunicativeness of speech foregrounded in Maeterlinck’s text and underlined by the declamatory

76  Saying nothing vocal style of much of the opera. It is perhaps not insignificant that while both Fauré and Sibelius were drawn to the drama, both wrote incidental music for use in performances of the play, and Schoenberg set out, in writing a tone poem, to explore the core of the drama without any words at all. Maeterlinck’s play needed a musical ‘setting’ no more than Mallarmé’s poem L’après-midi d’un faune needed a musical ‘prelude’, but allied with Debussy’s music both become quite different things. In both literary works, language reflects on the inadequacy of its own expression and points beyond itself, whether through the elliptical use of silence between words or in what is said by the musicality of speech as rhythmic sound rather than as abstract signifier. In Debussy, however, this straining of language to exceed its own limits meets, coming from the opposite direction, a music that foregrounds its own linguistic muteness, its refusal of saying, in favour of quiet appearing.

Being mute Rodin’s La cathédrale had a companion piece, titled Le secret. Once again, two hands are on the brink of touching, but here they are separated by an object –​unknown and indistinct, but nevertheless a hard and tangible thing. The difference between the two sculptures might help elucidate the difference Vladimir Jankélévitch attempts to define between a secret and a mystery at the beginning of his study of Debussy’s music.35 Music, he insists, does not hide or disguise a meaning that might be otherwise disclosed –​it contains no secret, ‘like a hieroglyph, essentially decipherable’ –​but, rather, has to do with something essentially unsayable (indicible). The distinction he makes provides a way of approaching music’s articulate mutism: highly refined, clear and precise in all its details, it nevertheless resists being rendered into other terms. Like the space created by the coming together of the hands in La cathédrale, it is transparent but unnameable, expressive but unsayable. ‘The inexpressible, in Debussy, is a mystery in broad daylight’, Jankélévitch insists in the face of charges that this music is merely vague. After all, he insists, ‘what could be less labyrinthine than the naked, white simplicity of the Étude pour les cing doigts, the Tierces alternées, or Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum?’. Rodin’s La cathédrale and Le secret both make palpable the idea of framing an empty space and, in that sense, ‘saying nothing’. Moreover, in the

Mélisande and the silence of music  77 tangible, three-​dimensional and hard presence of stone, Rodin reminds us that such an aesthetic does not necessarily lead to a kind of art opposed to its own materiality. On the contrary, it makes its own medium more vivid and particular, precisely because it draws attention to its edges; as in the poetry of Mallarmé, the drama of Maeterlinck, or the music of Debussy, it is not, paradoxically, the solidity of things that Rodin’s sculptures reveal, but their capacity to reach beyond themselves, to quietly insist that the ‘content’ of art is not its ostensible content (the object of its representation) but the material and manner of its presentation. It is an idea that finds emblematic illustration in a remarkable series of late still-​life paintings from 1880 by Édouard Manet. In arrestingly simple works, such as ‘A Bunch of Asparagus’, ‘Still Life with Two Apples’, or ‘The Lemon’ (see Figure 2.1), Manet eschews any narrative of events or any historical, political, or social content that was so often the function of nineteenth-​century public painting, and concentrated instead on the silence of mute objects with ‘nothing to say’. These are bare, stripped-​back paintings, even by the standards of the genre, which foreground the nudity of the object over any idea of composition as such. But rendering these simple objects in all their material particularity, finding an arrestingly vivid character in their very everydayness, paradoxically throws attention back to the painting itself. As James Rubin puts it, the closer one looks ‘the more one discovers instances of pure visuality, passages of visual

Figure 2.1  Édouard Manet, Le citron (1880)

78  Saying nothing presence that are undetermined as anything other than indexes of the materiality of painting’.36 The French musicologist, Mathieu Guillot, in a wonderfully rich study of the idea of silence in music, says something similar about the effect of snow upon a landscape; it works, he suggests, as a ‘builder of silence’ (bâtisseuse de silence), making silence audible in a particularly intense fashion. It might recall Mallarmé’s ‘Sainte’, a poem about the silence of music.37 The poem pictures, in a stained-​glass window, a medieval vision of the patron saint of music with a viol, her finger poised to touch the string but suspended above it, like the way the hands of Rodin’s sculpture do not quite touch, and thus framing a silence by framing a space. Mallarmé’s closing line ‘Musicienne du silence’ stands as a metaphor for poetry in general –​a musicalized language that frames a plenitude it does not attempt, like the noisy art of music, to sound out.38 Both Mallarmé and Guillot point to ways in which framing silence detaches listening from its usual distraction by sound. As with Rodin, Manet, Maeterlinck, and Debussy, the art lies in this act of framing, the articulation of a frame of experience that allows a mute content to appear. As Jankélévitch has it: Music is the silence of words, just as poetry is the silence of prose. Music, as sonorous presence, fills the silence, but yet music is itself a kind of silence [ . . . ] and likewise it is necessary to make music in order to coax out [obtenir] the silence.39

Mallarmé found something similar in the mute art of ballet, an art formed by the coming together of two kinds of muteness, mime and dance, ‘two attitudes each possessive of its own particular silence’.40 We might add a third, of course –​the muteness of music. For all the flimsy narrative on which ballet is traditionally hung, and setting aside the few moments of explicit communication through mime, we do not read the dancer’s movements in terms of symbol or meaning but are engaged by them on their own terms. When we do so, Mallarmé suggests, we have achieved the ‘full daydream’ proper to art:  ‘like the illiterate dancer enclosed in her circles or transported by flight, as she gives herself up to the games of her profession’.41 One must approach dance with ‘poetic instinct’ alone in order to grasp it; only then, Mallarmé insists, will the

Mélisande and the silence of music  79 dancer truly reveal herself, ‘silently writing your vision in the form of a Sign, the sign that she herself is’ (silencieusement ecrira ta vision à la façon d’un Signe, qu’elle est).42 Mallarmé’s word play, lost in translation, is a particularly resonant one. The ballet dancer’s prototypical role as a swan (cygne) is a transparent sign (signe); it does not designate or represent another thing (nobody goes to the ballet to watch dancers imitate large water birds). It is not just that the swan embodies the illusion of weightlessness and the elegant gliding motion the ballet dancer creates, nor that its immaculate white plumage is evoked by the dancer’s costume, but that both are mute. Mallarmé is insistent that the dancer’s mute presentation embodies ‘the sole principle’ of the theatre, for all that the latter it is an art of speech, movement, noise, drama. ‘[J]‌ust as the chandelier is supremely lustrous in itself, suddenly illuminating, in all its facets, anything at all  –​our diamond-​clear-​gaze –​so a dramatic work shows the succession of the exterior aspects of the act without any of them containing reality –​so that there happens, finally, nothing at all.’43 Put another way, it is not the ostensible content of art that is of concern in art, but the kind of looking or listening to the world which it occasions. The pure art of ballet, ‘set free from the need to deal with characters, their clothes, their costumes, and their famous words’, is thus a kind of sensual diverting of the mind in order for it to focus on the central act of apprehension itself.44 Ballet is thus ‘the ideal dance of constellations’ which takes us straight towards the state of non-​individuality which is both ‘the abyss of art’ and its goal.45 Writing of Messager’s ballet, Les deux pigeons,46 Mallarmé comments: ‘after the artless prelude nothing takes place (except for the perfection of the performers) that’s worth even the briefest backward glance, nothing!’.47 That ‘nothing takes place’ is the highest accolade from Mallarmé, as he might have reminded Debussy had he lived long enough to see the premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande. Or perhaps not, since in his review of the 1893 Paris premiere of Maeterlinck’s play, Mallarmé suggested that musical additions would be superfluous.48 But it is certainly why Debussy was drawn to Maeterlinck’s play –​not because he saw music as reinforcing the action or underlining the sense of the words, but rather because his idea of music was to articulate the resonant silence to which the words point. What joins all three is the idea of muteness not as the physical

80  Saying nothing inability to speak, but as an active and voluntary act of not saying –​an act of holding oneself silent. The French reflexive verb se taire captures this sense better than English, as a deliberate action, something one does rather than something one does not do. It is the act of the chorus of serving women who, in Act 5 of Pelléas et Mélisande, file into Mélisande’s chamber, unannounced and unsummoned, and simply stand silently around the edges of the room. At the moment of her death, instinctively and without a word, they kneel. Their presence affirms and bears witness to a silence. Se taire derives from the Latin tacere, whence comes tacet, an instruction musicians know well, denoting that here one keeps silent in order to enable listening to another. John Cage famously foregrounded the positive-​negative quality of the instruction in 4’33”, a piece in which, for each of its three movements, the performer’s part is marked ‘tacet’ in order to enable listening. The proper object of our enquiry, therefore, is not a literal silence but the audible means by which it is presented, not ‘nothing’ as a blank absence but rather its framing –​an articulation of the relation between what is presented and what is not (as in Rodin’s hands), between the visible and the invisible, the hard objects and the mutually constituted space between them. As Jankélévitch insists, ‘it is necessary to make music to coax out the silence’. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, trying to get to grips with the notion of the unsaid or unsayable within language, characterize such an articulation as a ‘play of negativity’ that arises from within words themselves: Wordlessness comes in two kinds. The first kind exists beyond language proper [ . . . ] The second kind exists by virtue of language itself. It is evoked by words, it is explored and elicited by words, it is even made possible by words. It is, in short, a post-​verbal wordlessness.49

The ‘play of negativity’ here might be compared to the effect of a photographic negative, the inverse of what appears in the printed image, an imprint of what is not made visible created by what is, but also the means by which the image appears. ‘[N]‌egativity’, Budick and Iser insist, ‘can only be described in terms of its operations, and not by any means in terms of a graspable entity’; it points to ‘a void within what is being said’.50

Mélisande and the silence of music  81 Common to all accounts of this idea is the notion of a dynamic movement across a threshold, a movement characterised variously as play, oscillation, or flickering: ‘only through play can difference as oscillation be manifested, because only play brings out the absent otherness that lies on the reverse side of all positions drawn into interaction’.51 If there is a long tradition of thought and language that constitutes this otherness in terms of a ‘negativity’ (from theology to deconstruction), as Budick and Iser insist, such negativity ‘constantly lures absence into presence’. It does so not to displace one binary term with the other, to turn a negative into a positive, but precisely to put their relationship into dynamic play: ‘While continually subverting that presence, negativity, in fact, changes it into a carrier of absence of which we would not otherwise know anything’.52 What allows the unsayable to speak is the undoing of the spoken through negativity. Since the spoken is doubled by what remains silent, undoing the spoken gives voice to the inherent silence which itself helps stabilize what the spoken is meant to mean. This voicing of the unsayable is necessarily multilingual, for there is no one language by which sayings of things can be undone.53

This sounds not only like Mallarmé and Maeterlinck, but equally Jacques Derrida. In ‘How to Avoid Speaking:  Denials’, Derrida answers the criticism that his works adds up to no more than speaking merely for the sake of speaking: to speak for the sake of speaking, to experience what happens to speech through speech itself, in the trace of a sort of quasi-​tautology, is not entirely to speak in vain and to say nothing. It is perhaps to experience a possibility of speech which the objector himself must presuppose at the moment when he addresses his criticism. To speak for nothing is not: not to speak. Above all, it is not to speak to no one.54

Heidegger expressed a similar idea, insisting that speech and silence are mutually constitutive: Keeping silent authentically is possible only in genuine discoursing. To be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say –​that is, it must have

82  Saying nothing at its disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself. In that case one’s reticence [Verschwiegenheit] makes something manifest, and does away with ‘idle talk’ [‘Gerede’]. As a mode of discoursing, reticence articulates the intelligibility of Dasein in so primordial a manner that it gives rise to a potentiality-​for-​hearing which is genuine, and to a Being-​with-​one-​ another which is transparent.55

Gerede, the language of (everyday) communication, is a quite different thing. We understand its language without having knowledge of the things spoken about because we understand only linguistic relationships not the things to which they are meant to refer: ‘the primary relationship-​of-​Being towards the entity talked about is not “imparted” by communication’,56 as Heidegger has it, an idea that Maeterlinck had already encapsulated in Le silence. One form of this negativity, of using the said to delimit the unsaid, is the concept of erasure that Derrida takes up from Heidegger. Erasure in philosophy necessarily functions by means of an essentially negative dialectic (not this, not here). But art has its own version: it is perhaps not possible to understand atonality, for example, except in this way, as a presentation of the absence of tonality. Atonality is thoroughly dialectical; its meaning is founded in being a kind of tonality. But unlike language, when art presents a kind of erasure (not here, not yet) it has to do so in material form, through colour, stone, sound, movement, speech, image, gesture. It has to use what is materially present in order to set up a resonance with what it is not. This, surely, is the critical resonance of all art –​embodied and grounded, but pointing beyond itself to what is not heard or seen. Our focus is thus neither the content of art understood in the everyday sense (of representation or expression) nor an absent content (the invisible or unsaid), but rather the threshold between the two, the manner in which artworks construct a double movement, appearing and at the same time drawing attention to their own erasure through disappearing, in order to make something else appear. This shift in focus displaces the idea of art as presenting some content and replaces it with the an idea of art as articulating a threshold; it displaces the idea of art as a kind of saying and replaces it with an idea of art as a kind of appearing. Such a shift, in both the making and experiencing of art, leaves behind any residual and ridiculous notion of concealed content or ‘hidden meaning’ in artworks, let alone the attribute of vagueness or ambiguity of meaning, all of which presume some (linguistic) content deformed or

Mélisande and the silence of music  83 masked by the materiality of the artwork. The muteness of art is, rather, a play of negation that opens a space between the edges of signification and what the world might be when it is released from the insistence on signifying. Music and poetry open such a space to make resonant the gap between the sensuous and the rational aspects of language, the son (sound) and the sens (sense). Such a gap allows the non-​identical and the non-​determined to resonate and thus allows us, momentarily, to be similarly non-​identical and non-​ determined. If talking about art sometimes borders on a quasi-​religious way of speaking –​of artworks possessing or occasioning a ‘redemptive’ quality –​ it is, perhaps, for this reason: that they sometimes afford a kind of experience we register as a recovery, a receiving back of something lost by our entry into language. As Jean-​Luc Nancy puts it: ‘Sense is consequently not the “signified” or the “message”: it is that something like the transmission of a “message” should be possible. It is the relation as such, and nothing else.’57 Indeed, he goes further, arguing that the sense of art is marked by the absence of signification in a strictly linguistic sense. The content of art is rather ‘the nudity of existing’; art underlines, he insists, ‘that existence is (the surprise of) sense, without any other signification’.58 Far from making art meaningless, in the everyday sense of being without value or sense, it is this essential aspect of art that makes it of the highest value, since: ‘To say this almost nothing is the sole task of a writing’ and thus ‘the end of philosophy.’59 The pun is definitive: it is the goal of philosophy but also marks its completion. One might go further and invert Hegel’s progression of Geist by which art must give way to religion and religion to philosophy, in an ever-​increasing process of abstraction from materiality. The mute presence of art seems to say the opposite, suggesting that, while we are still bodies, the highest form of our being in the world is found not in words but in a spiritual flesh. Which brings us back to Debussy’s opera. Hegel’s demand that the embodied particularity of art should give way to the conceptual abstractions of philosophy is equally Golaud’s frustrated demand, that the muteness of Mélisande, which is also that of music, and of the momentary but epiphanic glimpses of the sea and sky, should be spoken, explained, and contained within the dark castle of his language. If this uniquely unoperatic opera, whose central character is without drama and often without voice, is uniquely sad, this is the reason. Golaud is no villain, though he becomes one. Because he cannot listen, all he hears is speechlessness. He cannot hear the music in Melisande’s voice. Even on their very first meeting, in Act1.i, when he finds

84  Saying nothing her weeping and asks her why, he doesn’t hear the answer to his question because it is given not in words but in tone and gesture (a solo viola, oboe, and high violins). Melisande is often weeping, because weeping articulates the gap between speech and speechlessness. She is an ‘infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing’60 because she is too musical for the linguistic world around her.

3 Mallarmé and the edge of language Breathing In 1913, nearly twenty years after composing the Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faune, Debussy returned to the poetry of Mallarmé in search of song texts. All three of the poems he chose, for the Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, have to do with the nothingness of thin air.1 Each one hinges on the rhythmic movement of air –​the breathing in and breathing out of a sigh (Soupir), the waving back and forth of a fan (Éventail) and, in the middle of the triptych, the words of a lover who knows their futility even as he speaks them (Placet futile). Not only do these poems take the movement of air as their topic, each draws attention to itself as an object made of air, a sequence of words carried on the breath of the speaker that, once spoken, disappears into the ether –​a poetic idea to which Debussy responds with music that foregrounds its own evanescence. In this way, Debussy’s late settings of Mallarmé’s poetry reflect upon aesthetic principles that shape his music as a whole. In doing so, these songs offer, in exemplary and exquisite miniature, a musical counterpart to Mallarmé’s poetry as acts of saying that draw attention to the ‘nothing’ of which they speak so eloquently. Soupir

Sigh2

Mon âme vers ton front où reve, ô calme soeur,

My soul rises toward your brow where autumn teeming

Un automne jonché de taches de rousseur, Et vers le ciel errant de ton oeil angélique, Monte, comme dans un jardin mélancolique, Fidèle, un blanc jet d’eau soupire vers l’Azur!

with russet tinges, my calm sister, lingers dreaming, toward the wandering sky of your angelic eyes where a fountain of white water faithfully sighs, as in some mournful garden, reaching toward the Blue! –​

After Debussy. Julian Johnson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066826.001.0001

86  Saying nothing –​Vers l’Azur attendri d’Octobre pâle et pur Que mire aux grands bassins sa langueur infinie: Et laisse, sur l’eau morte où la fauve agonie Des feuilles erre au vent et creuse un froid sillon, Se traîner le soleil jaune d’un long rayon.

toward October’s pitying Blue, pale and true, which mirrors in broad pools its endless lethargy and on dead water where a fulvid agony of leaves drifts windtossed and ploughs a chill furrow, may let the yellow sun trail in a long lingering ray.

Mallarmé’s Soupir consists of a single sentence, rising and falling like the inhalation and exhalation of breath that it evokes. It is shaped around a central axis, a transformative moment of reversal marked by the repetition of the phrase ‘vers l’Azur’, which ends the first half of the poem and begins the second. This key moment is reinforced by the punctuation (an exclamation mark followed by a dash) which both introduces a hiatus and, at the same time, carries one half of the poem into the next, an elision confirmed by the rhyme scheme that requires line 6 to complete line 5. The highpoint of the poem’s trajectory is thus marked by a momentary silence and suspension of motion, before tipping over into the second half of the rhyming couplet and the second half of the poem.3 The reflective symmetry of Mallarmé’s poetic arc is manifest at both a structural and semantic level. The rhythm and enjambement of each half, flowing towards and away from this central point of repetition, reinforces the poetic imagery itself, which hinges on the idea of rising (the key verb, ‘monte’, is delayed until the start of line 4) and falling (the trailing of the sun in the cold furrow of the water, line 10). The upward trajectory of the fountain’s jet of water is mirrored by the languor of the pool into which it falls. The sense of the second half as a reflection of the first is further enhanced by the complex play of acoustic and semantic transformations, half-​heard echoes of sounds and images: hence ‘automne jonché’ (line 2) and ‘Octobre pâle et pur’ (line 6); ‘un blanc jet d’eau’ (line 5) and ‘l’eau morte’ (line 8); ‘errant’ (line 3) and ‘erre au vent’ (line 9).4 The structure of the poem is thus quite literally its content –​a rise upwards that fails to achieve the object it moves towards (her face, the sky), before falling back into the cold water of the pool, with its autumn leaves and weak reflection of the sun.

Mallarmé and the edge of language  87 How does Debussy’s music respond to this contour of a sigh, the architecture of a single moment? In the first instance, it follows Mallarmé’s mirror form, making a clear structural division at an intuitive halfway point of this 31-​bar song (between b. 17 and b. 18), and finding a transformed echo of the opening of the first half (bb. 1–​6) in the closing of the second (bb. 30–​31). Such symmetries in Mallarmé’s poetic form anticipate what was to become a hallmark of Debussy’s musical style –​the elaboration of internal movement contained within a single space, experienced as the prolongation of a single moment. The fountain moves, but within a scene that is static; the azure of the sky is timeless, while the autumn leaves mark the passage of time. Debussy’s melodic lines, unfolding through the animation of rhythm and pitch contour, are similarly contained within the pentatonic set they outline. These are familiar poetic and musical conceits and Debussy’s musical language, as has often been shown, plays constantly with the simultaneity of these two perspectives. But Debussy’s symmetries, like Mallarmé’s, are always slightly asymmetric, as if to emphasise the jointed gap between what otherwise seems to move in parallel. It is in Debussy’s control of harmonic space that this offset symmetry is played out in its most sophisticated form. The pentatonic containment is clear enough, elaborated by the piano in the opening and closing bars of the song. But between these stable bookends the song hinges on the gentle dissonance between a harmonic space elaborated from E♭ and a counterpoised one centred on E♮. Thus, the ascent from E♭ by which the voice delivers the first two lines of Mallarmé’s poem (bb. 7–​10) is followed by a descent from E♮. The ascent traverses a ‘♭’ scale up the octave, the descending octave outlines a ‘♯’ scale; the ascent culminates on the upper neighbour note F, which is repeated to become the first note of the descent –​a musical chiasmus that pre-​empts the central repetition of the word ‘l’Azur’, which Debussy carefully marks with a comma above the vocal line in b. 10 (see Example 3.1). Throughout the song, the E♮ space suggests an alternative to that of the E♭ space –​proximate, sharing a border, yet two quite different realms. Having been set out successively by the voice, the piano then presents them simultaneously: in bb. 13–​14 the left hand sets out the E♭ space while the right hand elaborates the E♮ space by means of the octave triplet motif carried over from bb. 9–​10. In bb. 15–​16 the simultaneity of these two harmonic spaces is heightened by harmonising the E♮ with its ‘own’ triad, juxtaposed with the one against which it clashes –​hence the repeated progression of a C major to A♭ major triad in the left hand, over which the E♮ ostinato continues in the

88  Saying nothing Example 3.1  Claude Debussy, ‘Soupir’, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, bb.  1–​12

right (neatly alluding to the fountain’s motion-​within-​stasis that pervades the whole song). A new middle voice, rhythmically separated from the triplet ostinato by its duple rhythm, gently accentuates further the insistence of the E♮ (see Example 3.2). At the highpoint of the poem, the registral brightness of the right hand and the harmonic possibility of the E♮ similarly suggest a move towards the bright azure, while still trailing a root in the dark containment of the A♭ tonic.5 In Mallarmé’s poem, the upward arc of the fountain/​lover’s gaze does not reach the pure azure to which it aspires, but falls back into the cold pallor of the autumnal pool. The final ambivalent image is of the ray of sunshine reflected in the water –​not the full presence of the sun in the azure sky, but only its reflection as a cold furrow across the surface of the water. Debussy’s parallel musical text is less chilly but works in a similar way. The upward arc

Mallarmé and the edge of language  89 Example 3.2  Claude Debussy, ‘Soupir’, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, bb.  13–​15

of the music from the gravitational pull of A♭/​E♭ reaches towards the brightness of E♮ (harmonised as E major/​C major) but does not realise it. Its ‘image’ resounds in the closing section of the song, which ultimately returns to the very opening bars –​not a definitive annulment or negation of the new harmonic space, but a return to the frame, a closing of the book within which this image of another space has been made. The oscillation between two chords in the final bars (one harmonising E♮, the other E♭) suspends the final movement to A♭. The harmonic irresolution, like Mallarmé’s metaphor of reflection, points to the unresolved term as an absent centre, to the nothing that is said, while the new pulsing rhythm that animates the piano chords, like the faintest of heartbeats, implies the trace of presence. In Mallarmé’s poetic metaphor, the rise and fall of the lover’s sigh is also that of the fountain’s arc. The latter is a familiar image, found in countless poetic evocations of the enclosed space of the garden and frequently taken up by composers for musical treatment. But, according to Vladimir Jankélévitch, there is something very distinct about Debussy’s musical fountains. They have, he insists, nothing of the ‘hydraulic fireworks’ of the musical fountains heard in Liszt and Ravel, in works whose textural and harmonic continuities ‘represent the relative stability of the unstable’. In contrast, Jankélévitch suggests, Debussy is preoccupied with collapse. In ‘Le jet d’eau’, the third

90  Saying nothing of the Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire, ‘the Debussyan fountain soars upwards and bends, hesitates, wavers and finally falls back down without having reached its goal’.6 Arthur Wenk hears something similar, suggesting that, throughout the song, ‘Debussy emphasises not the upward flight of the water but the fall’.7 If the end of the Baudelaire song, with its descending sequence of spread chords, is indeed ‘a kind of sliding towards the silence of non-​being’ (Jankélévitch),8 the same may certainly be said of Soupir, a poem Debussy must have chosen with an instinctive sense of the characteristic declinations of his own music. But –​and this difference is critical –​Debussy’s treatment of the vocal line suggests something that moves in a quite different direction. The second half of the song at first appears to follows the sense of descent projected by the poem, with the autumnal leaves and the ‘dead water’ moving towards the definitively falling phrase of ‘creuse un froid sillon’ in b. 25. But the sudden shift of harmonic space contradicts the poetic idea: the sideways step to the brightness of a C major space and its foregrounding of E♮ links back to the upward aspiration of the first half of the poem. The setting of the last line begins ambivalently, rocking between ascent and descent, and between the C major space and a flatwards move. But the voice resolves this ambiguity with a striking ascent for the final three syllables of the poem (‘long rayon’) to end on a sustained upper E♭, beneath which the piano (ppp, diminuendo, and très retenu) traces out an echo of its opening ascending figure from the first two bars of the song (see Example 3.3). It is not just that Debussy thereby finds a musical corollary for the central conceit of the poem (the simultaneity of ascent and descent, inhalation and exhalation, aspiration and failure); while the whole of the vocal line, necessarily, oscillates between the signifying function of the words it carries and its own sensuous sonority, the final sustained E♭ is almost wholly concerned with the latter. As the poem closes with an image of emptiness, the music closes with the richest aural image of the entire song, with the sonic fullness of the voice, freed from any constraint of syllabic declamation, held in the containment of the piano’s pentatonic plenitude. A reader unsympathetic to Debussy’s music might conclude it had somehow betrayed Mallarmé’s poem by so fulsomely realising what in the poem is necessarily only glimpsed. But perhaps that would be to misread and mishear the way in which song amplifies the interference pattern between the absence conferred by words and the presence conferred by music. In ‘Soupir’ that interference pattern arises from some careful misalignments of voice and piano.9 Thus, after the opening alternation of solo piano and unaccompanied

Mallarmé and the edge of language  91 Example 3.3  Claude Debussy, ‘Soupir’, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, bb.  23–​31

voice, they join on the last word of a line not the first (‘soeur’); when they join up again, after the unaccompanied third line, the piano is delayed until after the first word of the fourth line (‘Monte’). A sense of constantly oscillating between two things is heard in several ways –​in Debussy’s hallmark figure of rocking between two parallel chords (as in bb. 9–​10 and 13–​17), in the juxtaposition of clear metrical patterning with free, unmeasured passages, in alternating between declamatory and melodic uses of the voice (for example, bb. 13–​14 as compared to b. 15), and in the contrast between the apparent absence of harmonic direction with moments of fulsome tonal presence. A definitive misalignment is found at the centre of the song. It is not that Debussy is insensitive to Mallarmé’s syntax or poetic structure; indeed, a number of commentators have drawn attention to how Debussy’s setting

92  Saying nothing makes clearer the complex structure of the poem.10 It is, rather, that the music seems to take a different direction from the poem. Thus, from b. 18, the music takes off with new energy, conferred by the clear tonal function of the harmony, the burgeoning texture of the piano writing and a slightly faster tempo. Not only does the music have a sense of direction and substance that has eluded it thus far, it thereby promises an arrival, a moment of appearance. All well and good, except that this is the very moment in Mallarmé’s poem when ascent turns into descent and the aspiration towards presence falls away. It is a striking misalignment but not a misreading; it is, rather, a playing out of the divergent tendencies of music and words. In doing so, Debussy’s song opens up the space between the two rather than closing down one into the other. Debussy’s settings of Mallarmé’s ‘air’ poems surely come close to Mallarmé’s idea of art as a ‘dispersion volatile’. In a wonderful account, from 1876, of a painting by his friend Édouard Manet (Le Linge, 1875), Mallarmé underlined how the painting dissolves solid objects into air and light: [Le Linge is] deluged with air. Everywhere the luminous and transparent atmosphere struggles with the figures, and the foliage, and seems to take to itself some of their substance and solidity; whilst their contours, consumed by the hidden sun and watered by space, tremble, melt and evaporate into the surrounding atmosphere, which plunders reality from the figures, yet seems to do so in order to preserve their truthful aspect. Air reigns supreme and real, as if it held an enchanted life conferred by the witchery of art; a life neither personal nor sentient.11

Mallarmé’s striking anticipation of what Impressionism was about to accomplish in painting is, at the same time, a manifesto for what poetry might also do. In his much later lecture of 1893, titled simply ‘Music and Letters’,12 Mallarmé set out his vision of the relationship between the two arts. Poetry, he wrote, is a setting free (‘from a handful of dust or reality’) ‘the spirit which has nothing to do with anything except for the musicality of everything’.13 Poetry liberates the world from itself, from its enclosure in the thingness of the world, its reduction to a world of things. It does so by means of its ‘dispersion volatile’, an evanescent dissipation of the boundaries of things which everyday language creates but which poetic language dissolves. The principal mover of poetry is thus, in Mallarmé’s terms, a ‘nothing at all’ but which is also everything. Since the world is divided into separate ‘things’ by everyday

Mallarmé and the edge of language  93 language, when poetic language dissolves these boundaries it steps momentarily out of a world of separate things into a kind of totality.14 For Mallarmé, this ‘game of language’ thus opposes the everyday world and ‘the boredom we feel for things when they establish themselves as solid and preponderant’; poetry detaches them and thus replenishes what is otherwise the void (vide) of mere things. Nothingness, in Mallarmé’s construction, is thus a condition of ‘no-​thing-​ness’, determined not by the constrictive division of the world into things, but rather of the infinite richness of the connection between things –​the constellation he calls the ‘musicality of everything’. Made of the same materials as the everyday language it opposes, poetic language, for Mallarmé, creates a different logic of sense, a ‘silent melodic figuration’ (chiffration mélodique tue). His formulation points to something that is mute not because it cannot speak, but because it keeps silent (se taire), and a kind of calculation or encoding that is also a figuring, a finding of figures, a sensible and sensuous making that has its own sensual logic in the face of the abstract signifier. The dialogue of music and language is thus, for Mallarmé, something internal to poetry itself where it takes place between the sonic, sensuous and ‘musical’ aspects of words and the grammatical, semantic, and signifying aspects of language. For that reason, poetry has no need of the noisy art of music itself. Music may have the same ambition as poetry but it comes to nothing if ‘language, through the reforging and the purifying flight of song, does not confer a meaning on it’. Without being related to language, Mallarmé insists, musical worlds ‘remain blind to their own splendour, latent or without issue’.15 In order for the mind to find its home it must return from the noisy adventures of music to the silence of the word and of thought. Composers ‘after Debussy’ have often sided with Mallarmé, abandoning song in a traditional sense and allowing music and poetry to inhabit their own worlds without mixing. Tristan Murail, for example, has suggested that we are far better off simply reading poetry aloud since ‘in general music destroys poetry, moreover one cannot hear it’.16 In his choral work, Les Sept Paroles du Christ en croix (1987–​89) the words of Christ indicated by the title are never spoken; instead, ‘the choir is used more for the acoustic and emotive quality of the human voice than as a vehicle for a message’.17 In the work of Kaija Saariaho, however, we find a different response to the problem. Although there are examples of what one might call ‘songs’ among Saariaho’s works, more often words are deployed in otherwise instrumental works which ask players to vocalise in various ways. Words appear in this repertoire but in order for their bodily and vocal aspects to be amplified and

94  Saying nothing transformed, not to signify in any conventional linguistic way. In Nymphéa (1987) for string quartet and electronics, the string players whisper a text (a poem by Arseny Tarkovsky), mixing their vocalisations with their instrumental sounds and the projected electronic transformations. Lonh (1996), for soprano and electronics, uses both a lyrical singing voice as well as spoken and whispered sounds within the electronic part. The reconfiguring of music and words here is explored through the ancient and lost language of Occitan of the troubadour Jaufré Rudel (explored further in the opera, L’amour de loin). In this way, Saariaho finds a way to blend the contemporary with something ancient, looking back but also forward to a more musical language in which music and words, speech and song, might not be so fractured and definitively divided. Anni Oskala discusses Saariaho’s Nuits, adieux (1991) in the context of dreams and dream theory.18 The voice here is plural and fragmented, broken into a polyphony of different modes of voice, from noise through to speech. Words break down into phonemes, tones struggle to become words –​a fluid tide, moving in and out of focused forms of speech, a dream logic of music forming and dissolving.19

Fold upon fold ‘Éventail’, the third of Debussy’s Trois Poèmes is no less concerned with the symmetrical movement of air than ‘Soupir’, but explores the idea in terms of the waving back and forth of a fan. The poem set by Debussy here is ‘Autre Éventail’, written in 1884 as a gift from Mallarmé to his twenty-​year old daughter Geneviève.20 It is one of many poems that Mallarmé wrote quite literally on a fan. By his own account, there were some eighteen of these vers de circonstance, some more substantial than others, some published, others not.21 One recurrent metaphor draws them together –​ that of the fan as a wing, beating the air, made of nothing but folds of paper yet, in its movement, summoning an evanescent presence. In this, the fan is like the poem Mallarmé has written upon it  –​a mere movement of the air (as breath) but with the capacity to draw in the presence of distant scents/​sense. With each in-​stroke the fan brings cool air towards its holder, and with each out-​stroke it delicately pushes away the horizon, like an extension of the inhaling and exhaling of the sigh. Mallarmé’s fan poems thus draw attention to the physicality of writing (on the folded

Mallarmé and the edge of language  95 paper of the fan as much as that of the book), but also to spoken words as a mere disturbance of the air. Éventail

Fan22

O rêveuse, pour que je plonge

Dreamer, that I may plunge in sweet

Au pur délice sans chemin,

and pathless pleasure, understand

Sache, par un subtil mensonge,

how, by ingenious deceit,

Garder mon aile dans ta main.

to keep my wing within your hand.

Une fraîcheur de crépuscule

A coolness of the evening air

Te vient à chaque battement

is reaching you at every beat;

Dont le coup prisonnier recule

its captive stroke with delicate care

L’horizon délicatement.

drives the horizon to retreat.

Vertige! voici que frissonne

Dizziness! space is quivering, see!

L’espace comme un grand baiser

like one immense kiss which, insane

Qui, fou de naître pour personne,

at being born for nobody,

Ne peut jaillir ni s’apaiser.

can neither spurt up nor abstain.

Sens-​tu le paradis farouche

Feel how the untamed Eden slips

Ainsi qu’un rire enseveli

like a buried smile of caprice

Se couler du coin de ta bouche

down from the corner of your lips

Au fond de l’unanime pli!

deep into the unanimous crease.

Le sceptre des rivages roses

The sceptre of shores tinged with rose

Stagnants sur les soirs d’or, ce l’est,

stagnant on golden waning days

Ce blanc vol fermé que tu poses

is this, a white flight which you close

Contre le feu d’un bracelet.

and set against a bracelet’s blaze.

Where Soupir has at its centre the idealised totality of the blue sky (L’Azur), Éventail hinges on the quivering of the air itself, ‘comme un grand baiser’, a quasi-​sexual intoxication that ‘ne peut jaillir ni s’apaiser’. And just as the chiasmic repetition of ‘L’Azur’ frames a moment of motionless silence at the apogee of Soupir, so the centre of Éventail (the third stanza of five) is marked by a moment of shudder, the vertiginous vibration of space: ‘Vertige! voici que frissonne l’espace’. The sensual, if not sexual thrill is vertiginous, in part because it is without object, ungraspable, and entirely of and in the moment. The poet, like the Faun in L’Après-​midi d’un faune, seeks ‘to perpetuate’23 this

96  Saying nothing moment of presence, as brief as the flick of a fan, or the fleeting smile it hides, and Debussy’s setting of the poem is similarly characterised as the flight of an instant. The opening piano figure acts as a musical corollary both for the flicking open of the fan (stanzas 1 and 2, bb. 1–​3 and bb. 12–​14) and also its closing (stanza 5, bb. 47–​49). The first vocal stanza is breathless, spoken rather than sung, and highly chromatic. Its rapid syllabic patter, marked by only occasional longer durations to emphasise certain words (‘reveuse’, ‘sache’) is only faintly melodic. Taken together, all these elements make for a vocal beginning that is elusive, insubstantial, and hard to grasp (see Example 3.4). While the second stanza, by contrast, is grounded in a far clearer sense of metre with alternating chords imitating the to-​and-​fro movement of the fan, the third is far more mercurial, beginning with a cry in the voice (‘Vertige!’, bb. 25–​26) as the solid ground falls away to reveal an aerial passage in which the rapid pianissimo figures of the accompaniment buzz and whirr like electrical static (bb. 27–​35), the quivering of the air of which the singer tells. The fifth and final stanza will round out the song with the flicking shut of the fan (bb. 47–​49) but not before the fourth takes a harmonic detour occasioned by ‘le paradis farouche’, to which Debussy responds with a pentatonic ‘wash’, based first on F (bb. 40–​41) and then E♭ (bb. 42–​43), drawing out the sensual rhyme on ‘bouche’ (see Example 3.5). Taken as a whole, Mallarmé’s poetic distillation of the fullness of the moment in Éventail is matched by the evanescent quality of Debussy’s music –​ improvisatory, skittish, and unmeasured. The final song of Debussy’s triptych, it quite literally vanishes into thin air in its closing bars: the closing of the fan is the closing of the poem, and with it the world (‘doux et lointain’, b. 50) that it had momentarily opened. But this saying nothing is hardly inconsequential; the absence of ‘weight’ is no light matter. On the contrary, the

Example 3.4  Claude Debussy, ‘Éventail’, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, bb.  1–​3

Mallarmé and the edge of language  97 Example 3.5  Claude Debussy, ‘Éventail’, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, bb.  25–​31

‘art poétique’ of Debussy as of Mallarmé brings the reader to the vertiginous edge of language: thrilling and terrifying at the same time. In terms of its constant oscillation between sonority and grammar, sense and signification, ‘Éventail’ is perhaps the most uncompromising of Debussy’s Mallarmé songs because it ‘has so little music’ (as Edmond Stoullig might have said). It begins with neither poetry nor music having the upper hand –​a kind of nervous stand-​off from which the voice only gradually moves towards a lyrical tone with the repeated and drawn out falling third (C to G♯) for ‘Sache’ (know) and ‘(men)songe’ (deceit) –​a wonderful musical rhyme which draws attention to the paradox that the kind of ‘knowing’ that the poem makes available is only possible through the ‘deceit’ of its artifice. This ‘frissonne’ is also a place of desire: Debussy follows Mallarmé’s words about a desire ‘born for nobody’, which can neither abstain nor find release,

98  Saying nothing with a thinly veiled reference to the Tristan motif (bb. 36–​39). ‘Sens-​tu le paradis farouche?’ asks the poem, finding its trace in the hint of a laugh, hidden in the corner of the mouth and buried in the folds of the fan. But the music exceeds this idea, sidestepping to a pentatonic plenitude (bb. 40–​ 43) whose sense of contained fulfilment is highly arresting in the context of this song, but which relates back to the closing bars of ‘Soupir’. Once again, the music embodies, for a moment, what appears by means of the folds of the fan, the oscillation between sonority and grammar in the poem, and between words and musical tones in the song –​a palpable and audible articulation of différance. Debussy’s song plays out the articulate gap between music and language, a concrete exploration of what, in the Grammatology, Derrida refers to as ‘The Hinge’ (La Brisure). He begins his account of this idea with a passage from a letter from Roger Laporte (the words in square brackets are additions of the translator in this edition): You have, I suppose, dreamt of finding a single word for designating difference and articulation. I have perhaps located it by chance in Robert[‘s Dictionary] if I play on the word, or rather indicate its double meaning. This word is brisure [joint, break] –​‘broken, cracked part. Cf. breach, crack, fracture, fault, split, fragment, [brèche, cassure, fracture, faille, fente, fragment.]  –​Hinged articulation of two parts of wood-​or metal-​work. The hinge, the brisure [folding-​joint] of a shutter. Cf. joint.24

One might set in motion a similar kind of play with the word ‘Éventail’. The name of the fan derives clearly enough from its function: the reflexive verb ‘s’éventer’ means to fan oneself, from ‘vent’ (wind), but the fan’s name also contains within it the ‘aile’ (wing) that becomes such a key image for Mallarmé. It is the same wing that one hears in the close phonic cousin of the fan –​ ‘vantail’, the movable wing or leaf of a table, of a pair of gates or doors. The French ‘battant’ is a synonym, while also being the present participle of the verb ‘battre’, to beat. So when Mallarmé talks of the ‘battement’ (beating) of the wing (‘aile’) of the fan (‘Éventail’) he plays, sonically, with beating (‘battant’) on the hinged panel of a double-​door (‘vantail’/​‘battant’).25 Derrida warns us that ‘the hinge [brisure] marks the impossibility that a sign, the unity of a signifier and a signified, be produced within the plenitude of a present and an absolute presence. That is why there is no full speech, however much one might wish to restore it.’26 But music, we want to retort, surely promises just this restoration –​no less a writer than Proust powerfully

Mallarmé and the edge of language  99 affirms as much at key moments of his magnum opus.27 The tension between the two positions is that between words and music in song, a particularly acute form of the ‘hinge’ on which all art is articulated, that between absence and revoked presence. Every song is a hinge, the articulated joint of a double-​ door, a ‘double session’ of two juxtaposed texts, a mise-​en-​abîme in which the non-​identical reflection of the words in the music, and the music in the words, sets up a dynamic process without end. Debussy’s Mallarmé songs are not unique in this respect, but they foreground the idea in particularly acute ways, playing with the vertiginous groundlessness they reveal at the edges of poetic and musical language. The vertige they draw out is precisely the gentle dislocation of the linguistic mind occasioned by opening up a non-​identity between words and music, a dynamic space created by the cross-​currents of signification and sense. It makes for a kind of dizziness, a cognitive dissonance provoked by the precarious rapture experienced at the cliff-​edge of sense. But by delineating the gap, of words and music, sens and son, both poet and composer occasion a spark that momentarily bridges it –​experience as a moment of ‘vertige’ or ‘shudder’. Jankélévitch talks of ‘le surgissement de l’instant’, a sudden foregrounding of the moment that leaps out of the temporal continuity of music. It can do so, he suggests, only by means of the gaps –​the tears and fractures in the musical surface –​which is to say that it needs silence in order to appear.28 And the silence, conversely, needs the framing of words/​sounds in order to appear. To borrow a resonant phrase from Merleau-​Ponty, in this delicate play between the two, ‘the force of being is supported by the frailty of the nothingness which is its accomplice’.29 If Debussy’s settings of Mallarmé offer, in highly condensed form, the larger play between absence and presence that defines modern music and art, it is perhaps no surprise that the poetry of Mallarmé played a central role for composers ‘after Debussy’  –​most obviously in the case of Pierre Boulez. His Pli selon pli –​portrait de Mallarmé (composed in 1957–​62 but extensively revised in 1983), comprises five movements, each one related to a different poem by Mallarmé, though the title comes from yet another, ‘Remémoration d’amis belges’.30 On one level, Mallarmé’s poem remembers the Bruges literary group for which it was written; on another, it is about poetry itself. Swans glide down the dead canals of Bruges, but it is poets ‘who trace another flight’ and ‘light the mind’ with the wing of poetry. Poetry is itself a kind of divestment, a stripping away, ‘pli selon pli’, of the outward appearance of things.31 By the same token, Boulez’s Pli selon pli is no more ‘a

100  Saying nothing portrait of Mallarmé’ than La mer is a portrait of the sea. Or, at least, both distance themselves from representation in favour of inward process, movement, dynamic form. Just as Debussy does in his Mallarmé songs, Boulez amplifies the gap between words and music, representation and poetry. The three ‘Improvisations sur Mallarmé’ that form the central movements are, according to the composer, ‘modelled strictly on sonnet form’, a link which can be clearly heard in the way each one marks the central division of the sonnet.32 All three of the poems drawn on by Boulez are Petrarchan sonnets with the form of two quatrains (or one octave) followed by two tercets (or one sestet), and the rhyme scheme: abba | abba | ccd | ede.33 Roger Pearson underlines how this makes for a structure that itself embodies Mallarmé’s poetics: ‘The desire for a poem which folds back on itself in a binary structure and thereby sets up all manner of internal reflection is well served by the division of octave and sestet hinging or pivoting on a volta (the traditional “turn” which takes place between lines 8 and 9).’34 The sonnet form is thus based on a definitive and transformative break –​ascent/​descent, outward/​inward, solidity/​flight; as in ‘Soupir’, the centre of the poem is both a break and a transformative axis, a gap and a hinge, the articulated joint between the two wings of the poem.35 We might remember this when reading Boulez’s comments on how Mallarmé’s poetry is both the centre and the absence of his musical work.36 This is generally understood to refer to the fact that, even where the words are largely or completely absent in the music, the structure of the poem still underlies that of the music. But we might also consider it in Mallarmé’s sense that poetry exercises its function by delineating a central absence, using one mode of language to point to its musicalised other. Even the layout of the title of Boulez’s 1962 lecture suggests the same structural scheme: ‘Poetry—​ Centre and Absence—​Music’. In short form, here is a structure of the relation between words and music. It is odd how often the importance of poetry for Boulez’s development has been ignored. The one-​sided caricature of the composer as a very unpoetic mathematician behind the extremes of integral serialism have not only misrepresented both Boulez himself and his musical works, but thereby distorted a central moment in the history of music after Debussy. Before his turn to Mallarmé, Boulez wrote three major works centred on the work of another poet, René Char: Le soleil des eaux (1948), Le visage nuptial (1946, revised in 1951 and again 1988–​89), and Le marteau sans maître (1955). Le marteau, Boulez insisted, was not a setting of Char’s poetry but ‘a

Mallarmé and the edge of language  101 work containing nine pieces connected to three poems of René Char’.37 The solo voice appears in only four of its nine movements, which are arranged as three interlocking cycles, a complex interleaving that builds a musical labyrinth for which the key, Boulez suggested, lies in the final movement. His idea of poetry being both at the centre of the musical work but often absent from it, is played out in several ways. The vocal setting of ‘l’Artisanat furieux’ (movement 3) is preceded and later followed by purely instrumental movements related to it –​‘avant l’Artisanat furieux’ (movement 1) and ‘après l’Artisanat furieux’ (movement 7). Similarly, the vocal setting of ‘Bourreaux de solitude’ (movement 6)  has no less than three ‘Commentaires’, two that precede it (movements 2 and 4) and one that comes after it (movement 6). The central movement of the work, a vocal setting of ‘Bel edifice et les pressentiments’ (movement 5) is mirrored at the end of the cycle by its ‘Double’ (movement 9). Boulez describes how, in this final movement, the voice moves from language to wordless vocalise: once the last words of the poem have been pronounced, the voice –​now humming –​merges into the instrumental ensemble, giving up its own particular endowment: the capacity to articulate words; it withdraws into anonymity, whilst the flute, on the other hand [ . . . ] comes to the fore and takes on the vocal role, so to speak [ . . . ] the poem is the centre of the music, but it is absent from the music.38

The word ‘anonymity’ will readily confirm the prejudice that aesthetic modernism has to do with a de-​humanised kind of expression, a displacement if not a destruction of the subject. It is true that we are confronted here with an un-​writing of a certain kind of subjectivity since the language through which the latter is constructed is here deconstructed. But ‘anonymous’ might perhaps be better understood as ‘a-​nominative’. One of the consequences of Boulez’s atonal, athematic, and arhythmic music is its refusal of names. It is not the voice that is silenced here –​indeed, it goes on outlining a melodic fullness long after it gives up on words –​but the insistence that the voice should signify through language. The refusal of the voice to be the servant of language is, at the same time, an embrace of what is musical in the voice outside of language. As Boulez points out in his note, the (alto) flute, which had hitherto turned arabesques around the (alto) voice like an aerial mime artist, now comes to the fore.

102  Saying nothing This music thus makes explicit the constitutive gap/​overlap of sens and son. When the voice sings ‘bouche fermée’ in the closing section of the final movement, it is hard not to hear an echo of the wordless voices of Debussy’s Sirènes. Just as in Debussy, this appears less as a pre-​linguistic voice than one that emerges after language. Divested of words, this is not a voice that cannot speak, but one that chooses to keep silent, to shed its veils of poetic language and hold itself in mute nudity. It is like a reversal of the Faun’s decision to throw away his flute; having let words go, the composer of Le marteau takes up the flute once more. The sense of a newly found acoustic space is underpinned by the introduction, for the first time in the piece, of the long low resonance of deep tam-​tam and gongs (from b. 100) –​a sound world that massively exceeds the chamber-​size ensemble heard thus far and opens up a kind of sonic abyss above which the solo flute, in the closing bars of the entire work, turns its solitary but self-​sufficient arabesques (see Example 3.6). An exploration of the same constitutive tension defines Pli selon pli. Its first movement, Don, opens with a massive but momentary orchestral hit (fff). In the resonance that follows, the soprano delivers a single line from Mallarmé’s Don du poème, ‘I bring you the child of an Idumean night’ (Je t’apporte l’enfant d’une nuit d’Idumée!). After this annunciation, the music falls into a kind of wordless abyss of instrumental textures in which four different orchestral groups operate without precise temporal alignment with each other. Boulez drew here on Mallarmé’s idea of the mobile book, in which the order of unbound pages remained undetermined, but the result is also close to that of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, with its idea of shipwreck and drowning played out in syntactical structure. All the precision and technological brilliance of the modern symphony orchestra is here dissolved, like a ship slowly breaking apart as it sinks to the bottom of the sea; the opening fortissimo hit, in retrospect, thus seems like the snapping of the ship’s mast. It is, however, in the three ‘Improvisations sur Mallarmé’, which form the central movements of the work, that we might hear the echo of Debussy most closely. The first is a setting of ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd-​hui’, a poem that explores the agony of the blank white page, of failing to speak, of not having brought to presence, not having sung, by means of its central image of the swan imprisoned on a frozen lake. It presents a wintry landscape of inarticulation, a haunted wasteland ‘of flights that never flew’, captured by the image of the swan’s feathers frozen into the ice. While the memory of a lost plenitude persists, the poem is unable to break free any more than the swan, and so must remain in ‘the useless exile of the swan’ (‘Que vêt parmi

Example 3.6  Pierre Boulez, Le marteau sans maître, Movement 9, ‘Bel édifice et les pressentiments’, Double, bb. 157–​67. © Copyright 1957 by Universal Edition (London) Ltd., London/​UE34133

104  Saying nothing l’exil inutile le Cygne’); the closing line draws once again on the acoustic pun of cygne/​signe (swan/​sign). Boulez sets Mallarmé’s text in a relatively straightforward linear fashion but with the voice constantly decorated and registrally disjunct, never far from the ecstatic vocalise of the nightingale in Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol. The resonating sounds of the original instrumentation (soprano, harp, vibraphone, bells, and four percussionists) is preserved in the later orchestral expansion. The transformative axis of the sonnet form is audibly expanded through a much slower tempo after the volta. The axis of the poetic form here is a hinge between what was sung and what is left unsung, just as Mallarmé’s Eventail hinges on the axis of the visible and invisible. Boulez marks this relation of words and wordlessness by the way in which the voice relates to the vibraphone, just as, in the final movement of Le Marteau, the wordless (alto) flute takes off from the alto voice, which then falls into wordless vocalise. In ‘Le vierge’ the verse structure is clearly marked by instrumental interludes after each verse, but the vibraphone here seems to play the role of the voice’s instrumental double, momentarily quitting the largely percussive/​resonant function of the instrumental group to outline long melodic arches. In the second of the instrumental interludes, which marks the volta, the melodic line is shared between vibraphone, harp, and bells. The re-​entry of the soprano for the first tercet is again followed by the wordless melodic response of the vibraphone (more agitated now) before the second tercet begins with the frozen and muted quality of the ‘fantôme’. As the voice now becomes more angular, the vibraphone for the first time ‘sings’ in counterpoint with it, a slow melodic ‘ghost’ of the soprano that picks out its key notes (see Example 3.7). The soprano delivers the penultimate word of the text (‘inutile’) with violent force (fff) before disappearing on ‘cygne’, a word that is all but inaudible and lost against the fortissimo chord in the vibraphone and harp. Not only is the voice piano but the second syllable is written merely as a grace-​note stem without any note-​head –​a notational ploy that marks the sign disappearing into silence (see Example 3.8). The movement ends with the low harp and tam-​tam disappearing into indistinguishable quiet noise, except for the briefest and faintest of melodic laments in the bells (the falling third, B-​G♯, pianissimo, sounds like a quotation from Webern). The second ‘Improvisation sur Mallarmé’ is based on ‘Une dentelle s’abolit’, another poem about poetry,39 and the manner in which the merely visible material object disappears in the ‘supreme game’ (jeu supreme) of poetry. Just like Mallarmé’s oft-​quoted line about ‘the absence of all flowers’, here

Mallarmé and the edge of language  105 Example 3.7  Pierre Boulez, Pli selon pli (Portrait de Mallarmé) for Soprano and Orchestra. ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui’, bb. 64–​70. © Copyright 1977 by Universal Edition (London) Ltd., London/​UE31747

we have ‘the eternal absence of a bed’ dissolved by the ‘unanimous white affray’ of the lace tracery of poetic writing. Here the volta leads to the poet who, ‘gilded by his dreams’, a ‘musician of nothingness’, gives birth to poetry from music alone, from the belly of the ‘sleeping mandolin’. Boulez follows Mallarmé in his play with asymmetrical forms and sounds –​witness the resonance created through internal rhymes: the guilding (se dore) of the poet in dreams resonates with the same sound as the sleeping (dort) of the mandolin (mandore). Such are the sonic games of this ‘musician of nothingness’.

106  Saying nothing Example 3.8  Pierre Boulez, Pli selon pli (Portrait de Mallarmé) for Soprano and Orchestra. ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui’, bb. 71–​77. © Copyright 1977 by Universal Edition (London) Ltd., London/​UE31747

Mallarmé and the edge of language  107 Boulez foregrounds the gap between words and music to parallel the poem’s own play between reality and poetic transformation, and between mere words and what appears through their constellation. While the solo soprano delivers the lines of the poem in slow lyrical lines, always restrained, though sometimes taking off in delicate, lace-​like melismas (such as ‘se dore’ and ‘musicien’), the instrumental music is characterised by patterns of attack and resonant decay, to make an endlessly turning kaleidoscopic background of the same group of resonant instruments (piano, vibraphone, glockenspiel, crotales, tubular bells, harp, maracas). The long, slow lines of the voice flatten out the rhythm of the poem and divest it of the attack of consonants, a function which here seems to pass to the instrumental ensemble. The vocal lines become enlaced with the instrumental resonance that makes gaps between them, and the whole moves so slowly that it becomes a pattern without forward motion; it doubles back on itself like lace-​making, a mere ‘stitching in the air’.40 As Pearson puts it: There is a silent world of matter, and there is an alphabet [ . . . ] Literature is actually just letters, the letters with which we ‘accomplish’ our world –​that is to say, etymologically, with which we ‘fill’ our world and ‘fulfil’ our role as conscious human beings. And at the heart of this ‘accomplissement’ is the ‘pli’: the fold of dark lace that is writing.41

A tracery that traces its own disappearance is an apt image for both poem and musical work. Full-​bodied tones disappear into mere grace notes in ‘Une dentelle’, just like the ending of ‘Le vierge’. Beneath the soprano’s thread-​like lines, the instrumental group produces a constant rolling texture of grace-​ note roulades, spread chords and trills. One can hear a similar effect at the end of a Boulez work written 25 years later –​Répons (1981–​84) –​but perhaps the effect is also not so different to the rolling waves of piano accompaniment found in countless Fauré mélodies more than half a century earlier. As so often in Mallarmé’s poems, ‘La dentelle’ reflects on both writing and the writer –​the solitude of writing and the delirium of the creative imagination, but also the impossible and recurrent task of transposing the immediacy of experience into language, the gap between a childlike purity of vision and the merely imitative work of the grown man, between ‘the pure eyes’ and ‘the habitable head’ which must contain and articulate their vision.

108  Saying nothing Boulez often underlined that he learned more from writers, particularly those who ‘worked on language itself ’, rather than other composers. In addition to René Char, he cites Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Joyce.42 These are writers who, like ‘L’artisanat furieux’ (Char), are makers of language, hammering out language and re-​forging it in acts of hard manual labour. But of course, this remaking is achieved by a hammer without a master (sans maître) and without metre (sans mètre),43 that is to say, without the ordering rule of inherited grammars. This creative re-​forging is without a master in the same way that the ship of language, sunk in Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, is without a master. In Mallarmé a shipwreck, in Char ‘Le poème pulvérisé’,44 a term Boulez often used for his own musical language. And the constellation which this shipwreck of language makes visible might recall René Char’s image of poetry as La parole en archipel: words as a patterning in the infinity of the ocean like the tiny islands of some vast archipelago, or the pinpricks of light that form a constellation in the night sky.

Empty words ‘Placet Futile’, the middle song of Debussy’s Trois Poèmes, differs from the two outer songs in its ironic treatment of historically-​distanced stylistic materials.45 Nevertheless, it too has to do with the movement of air and offers a fascinating reflection on the wider theme of the set. Mallarmé’s poem can be read not merely as the futile petition of the lover who speaks without hope of success, but also as a meditation on the petition of language to ‘la Musique’ (Mallarmé’s capitalised form refers to his ideal of the silent musicality of everything).46 Debussy’s song takes up this petition but reframed in the context of ‘la musique’ (the actual, sonorous kind). Mallarmé’s mute and untouchable ‘Princesse’ is distanced by means of archaic imagery and a highly stylised poetic language, to which Debussy responds with an eighteenth-​century menuet (doux et gracieux) whose harmonic language inclines to a pre-​ modern modality. ‘La Musique’/​la Princesse keeps her silence: her gaze is closed to the petitioning poet (‘sur moi je sais ton regard clos tombé’) –​a self-​ containment reflected in passages of parallel chords that merely circle around themselves. The built-​in intensification of the sonnet form is underlined here by each tercet beginning with the imperative ‘Nommez nous . . .’; Debussy’s music responds (bb. 20–​23) by taking the vocal part to the peak of its intensity and urgency, rising from a low D to a threefold repetition of a high G to F

Mallarmé and the edge of language  109 Example 3.9  Claude Debussy, ‘Placet futile’, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, bb. 19–​28

(see Example 3.9). This is underpinned with a crescendo, and a slight acceleration in tempo, with the whole tercet delivered without a break to create an expression of desire, in and of language, to reach across the gap that separates it from its object. If that sounds very much like the figure of the Faun in Mallarmé’s L’après-​midi d’un faune, the reference is further underlined by what happens next.

110  Saying nothing Debussy cuts off the urgency of the singing voice with a sudden ritardando and diminuendo (marked with an arresting double slash in the score) before returning, equally abruptly, to the calm of the opening material, now slipped a semitone into G♭ (b. 24), for the setting of the second tercet. Where the first tercet was given, breathlessly, in a mere four bars, for the second Debussy takes an expansive ten bars (five of them at a slower tempo). The second line provokes two extraordinary bars, the like of which have not been heard in this song before –​a contained pentatonic space on G♭, built over an open fifth in the bass, complete with ‘flute’ trills and ending with a rapid, evanescent upward gesture that literally disappears into silence. In Mallarmé’s L’après-​ midi d’un faune the flute is music, and here too it provides a sonic correlate of the poet’s dream of the intimacy with ‘la Princesse’ for which he petitions. Momentarily, the wasted breath of his futile words becomes the fulfilled breath of the flute’s musical plenitude (signalled by the appearance of pentatonic harmony here). By means of this threshold, the song reaches the final line of the poem. Once again, Debussy’s music exceeds the cultivated absence of the words: the vocal line rises to a long upper E♮ (pp) for the middle syllable of the final word (sourires) –​recalling the sustained E♭ with which the voice closes ‘Soupir’ –​and thus delivers an aural image of the presence for which the words petition. The piano, meanwhile, echoes the voice’s pentatonic ascent in a series of grace-​note figures (pp, rapide et léger), anticipating the figure which begins the next song and underlining musically the poetic link between ‘Amour ailé d’un éventail’ in the last tercet of Placet Futile and the setting of Éventail which follows. Preoccupied with thin air and cultivating the edges of silence, Debussy’s Mallarmé songs offer intriguing examples of the capacity of music ‘to say nothing’. In this, they are clearly part of a wider movement, explored so acutely by Katherine Bergeron as the ‘unsinging of the mélodie française’47 in Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, and Reynaldo Hahn, ‘a repertoire that appeared to have almost nothing to say’.48 If poetry was liberated by music, it is equally clear that music was liberated by the poetry it had itself set free. In one sense, as Bergeron shows, this was manifest in a retreat from traditional expressive ‘content’ in song –​not just a paring down of heated emotional lines to a cool, simple and declamatory style, but thereby a kind of emptying out of the voice itself to something quieter, less demonstrative, purer in tone; in short, as Bergeron has it, a music presque sans voix.49 Paradoxically, as poetry became more musical, the vocal line of the French mélodie became more like speech.

Mallarmé and the edge of language  111 This is a very particular version of the aesthetic of ‘saying nothing’, and one that appears to run counter to the increasing emphasis on sonority, colour and gesture in instrumental music. But the simplicity of the pared down voice is not a renunciation of the melodic and the musical in favour of speech and language, a renunciation of singing in favour of saying; it is, rather, the singing voice’s complement to the new poetry’s manner of framing a plenitude by pointing beyond itself. The pared down voice does not foreground the signifying function of the words, it highlights what they do not say –​the saying nothing which they perform. Expressive reticence, as Jankélévitch suggests, was a way out of the noisy attempt to make music say something, the better to foreground the act of saying itself. One of Fauré’s earliest songs offers a version of such a ‘Placet futile’. His setting of Gautier’s ‘Serenade Toscana’ (Op.  3, no.  2)  narrates a scene in which a lover awakes his mistress to serenade her from the street below, but the song he sings is all about his muteness, the lack of a voice with which to sing to her. In ‘Le parfum impérrissable’ (1897), Bergeron finds a deliberate refusal of songfulness as ‘a sign of the “not saying” that defined Fauré’s mute subject’, in the same way that, in Fauré’s later cycle, La chanson d’Ève, Eve’s ‘dying wish was also to be silenced, to reclaim the bliss of a wordless Paradise’.50 The relays are complex here. It was Symbolist poetry, after all, that enabled music to break through to a new attitude to its own soundworld, but earlier it was music that had inspired poetry to free itself from its own conventions: as Bergeron notes, in Verlaine’s manifesto, ‘De la musique avant toute chose’ (the first line of his Art poétique of 1874), poetry was ‘liberated by music to say nothing at all’.51 And what was it in music that Verlaine sought for poetry? Above all, something that disappears into thin air, something ‘plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air/​ sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose’.52 The ideal of a literature that could free itself from representation –​and, in that sense, be about nothing –​has a long provenance. In 1852, Flaubert dreamed of writing ‘a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the inner force of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air –​a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible’.53 Nearly a century later, Paul Valéry echoes something of Flaubert’s sentiments when, writing about Mallarmé, he asks what it is that poems tell us: ‘They tell us, perhaps, that they have nothing to tell us; that, by the very means which usually tell us something, they are exercising a quite different function. They act on us like a chord of music.’54 The so-​called

112  Saying nothing musicalisation of language at the heart of Symbolist poetry involved a radical repurposing of language, a disruption within literature of the function of everyday words in order to make them say something different by revealing their own edges, but the relation between a musicalised poetry and actual music was complex. If such poetry already moves to the edge of language, what is the result of it being brought into contact with music as song? What happens when the poetry of Baudelaire, Banville, Verlaine, and Mallarmé is set by a composer like Debussy who, in parallel to the literary project of Symbolism, sought ways to set music against itself, to loosen the grammar in order to recapture the sense? Susan Youens has pointed to ‘Debussy’s increasing doubt that any composer could set poetry to music without a perceptible gulf between the two worlds of ordered word and ordered sound’.55 On this she cites a comment by Paul Dukas: ‘Do not fool yourself, poems cannot be set to music [ . . . ] Poetry and music do not mix; they never merge.’56 We might both agree and disagree; the fact that words and music do not merge is surely key to the value of song. In Debussy’s hands, certainly, song shows itself as ‘as a means of deconstruction’, as in Lawrence Kramer’s remark about the German Lied, that it ‘seeks to differ from the text by continually deferring a full resemblance to it’.57 Debussy’s Mallarmé songs thus give us occasion to reapproach the relationship between words and music and to address a problem Elizabeth McCombie lamented some years ago, that ‘in both disciplines, writing about the meetings of text and music has largely been beset by a naïve mimetic model of the inter-​art relationship’.58 They provoke a rethinking about how, rather than one art confirming the substance of the other (music expressing, accompanying, heightening the sense of the words) quite the opposite occurs –​that song stages a dynamism between words and music in which the apparent postulation of meaning is continually refracted by the other in an infinite displacement of signification. Peter Dayan, in his discussion of the relation between Mallarmé’s poetry and Debussy’s music, sums it up thus: Crudely put, from the poet’s point of view, art is not meaning, therefore it must be music. But music without meaning would be unarticulated; therefore it could not be written. What is needed is a dynamic that allows for the constant articulated vanishing of meaning. For that, both music and poetry

Mallarmé and the edge of language  113 are necessary, so that each can look toward the other and project thither that vanishing.59

For Dayan, the critique of representation in both poetry and music underlines the essentially fictive nature of art –​witness Debussy’s famous statement that ‘art is the most beautiful deception’.60 But art does not reveal itself as fiction as a kind of salutary moral. Neither music nor poetry is merely a wilful lie, but rather the wise lie of a self-​aware and ironic art. Both are fictions (aesthetic lies) in order to delineate the boundaries of all making and speaking. By opening up gaps within itself, art makes its own inadequacy a kind of springboard into what is not articulated. The ‘nothing’ that is said is thus neither content nor the absence of content, but a threshold, a margin which is itself vividly articulate of the unsaid. Song is articulate, therefore, because of its articulated nature, its jointing of the gap between words and music. In the face of a tradition of song analyses that show how music reinforces the sense of the words, we might listen instead for the gaps that open up between the two –​above all, in the oscillation between the absence implied by words and the presence promised by music. This is complex, because it is already a feature of both poetry and music taken separately, as David Code has shown in his analysis of the relation between Mallarmé’s eclogue L’après-​midi d’un faune and Debussy’s orchestral Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faune. Mallarmé’s poem is precisely about the (in)capacity of poetic language to (re)capture presence. The faun –​half man/​half beast, the bifurcation of the sensual and rational –​seeks first to grasp the object of his desire through music, only to discard it in favour of speech. But, as Code underlines, the crux of the poem is ‘a singular moment of irresolvable conflict between speech and writing’. The climax of the faun’s desire in and of language is both a moment of maximal material richness and a point of collapse and failure, a moment Code locates, in line 78 of the poem, on the word ‘Tresaille!’ (Quiver!), whose effect is strikingly similar to that of ‘Vertige!’ in Éventail.61 The tension at the heart of Mallarmé’s Faune resurfaces in other poetic interests pursued by Debussy. The faun’s music is, after all, played on his flute or pan-​pipes, the same instrument that appears as the ‘Flûte de Pan’ in the Chansons de Bilitis where it is referred to as a syrinx. Debussy’s piece for solo flute, Syrinx, was written as incidental music in 1913, the same year as the

114  Saying nothing Mallarmé songs. Originally called ‘Flûte de Pan’, it is a piece that foregrounds the same unmeasured freedom heard in the solo flute at the start of the Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faune. Ovid’s story of the origin of Pan’s flute is apposite here, since it too is a story about desire for what has been lost, about music as a compensation for what cannot be grasped, and about the power of music to revoke absence. The story tells of how the nymph Syrinx, pursued by Pan, is transformed by river nymphs into a stand of water reeds. The frustrated god cuts down the reeds and makes from them a set of pipes. It is a myth about how music compensates for the absent object of (language’s) desire, but which at the same time is sounded only through the absence of the desired presence –​the cutting of the reeds means that Syrinx is forever absent. Before the age of recording, the absence of which songs tell (no matter what their words) is countered by the bodily presence of the singer. After the onset of sound recording, a development contemporary with Debussy’s work, this tension is heightened rather than lessened, as the intimacy of recording seems to make present, in the closeness of its aural presence, a (singing) body that is palpably absent. The proximity of the wordless voice of Syrinx and that of the sirène has never been closer. In ‘Le tombeau des Naiades’, the third and last of the Bilitis songs, the poet (Pierre Louÿs) depicts a wintry scene in which the satyrs and nymphs are long gone and the pond is frozen over. While the music begins by accentuating this emptiness, it also stages a late efflorescence of which the poem gives no hint. At the recollection that the frozen pond is the place where the naiads used to laugh, the music takes a sudden turn to F♯ major and the vocal line reaches its highest point with the only melismatic passage in the whole song: in this way, music recalls the presence of what the poem says is absent. Writing on Debussy’s setting of Verlaine’s ‘Mandoline’ (Fêtes Galantes), Carolyn Abbate points to a very particular case of how singing revokes the absence described in the words: ‘Since the poem alludes to human serenades past and silenced, and since any and all songs produce real human music making in their performance, making a song out of this poem must resurrect the very singing it has dismissed as lost, giving it present life as if time had been run backwards.’62 From that perspective, it is perhaps not insignificant that Debussy’s first published song, ‘Nuits d’étoiles’, is a musical response to a poem inspired by a piece of music (Banville’s ‘La dernière pensée de Weber’),63 another song about song, in which the piano accompaniment imitates the strumming chords of the ‘sad lyre’ of the poem.64

Mallarmé and the edge of language  115 This is why Debussy’s musical interest, to borrow two phrases from Jankélévitch, lies not only in ‘le pianissimo sonore’ but also in ‘la matière vibrante’.65 The difference between Debussy and his younger contemporary Igor Stravinsky is that whereas the latter’s music is defined by the physicality of striking, the percussive articulation of sound and rhythm, Debussy’s interest lies in the afterlife of sounds as resonance –​hence the importance of the performance direction laissez vibrer, a listening for presence in absence which joins Debussy to Boulez and Murail. And here too lies an explanation as to why Debussy’s career was marked by such a huge corpus of unfinished and unrealised theatre projects,66 because his art is concerned equally with the urge to embody, to make appear, as with its failure –​that is to say, with the displacement of the kind of material appearance that the theatre requires. The one opera he did complete is famously about staging ‘nothing’ and its climax is marked by silence, non-​event, and absence. His early work on Pelléas overlapped with the completion of the Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faune, a project which, as David Code points out, had its genesis in several layers of failed theatrical versions,67 beginning in 1865 with a verse drama on the model of Théodore de Banville’s Diane au Bois, the very same that Debussy was trying to turn into an opera twenty years later –​a project he eventually abandoned because, according to Arthur Wenk, he had yet to master a musical language that would match the ‘emptiness’ of Banville’s poem.68 If Mallarmé and Debussy both wrestled with the presentation of something characterised by its absence (as nothing, silence, gap, blank space), it is hardly surprising that the language of criticism has struggled to do it justice. The production of presence,69 in a medium essentially evanescent like music, confounds the oppositions of language. Witness how Jankélévitch, in his attempt to delineate Debussy’s music, anticipates later French thinkers in his effusive sequence of logical contradictions: ‘by means of the presence of absence, which is present absence, absent presence, the presence of music, a multi-​present presence, the presence of presence itself becomes evasive; the fact of presence becomes a glimpse; prose becomes poetry’.70 Here, surely, is a philosopher who does listen to music. But he is not alone: in trying to rethink our being-​in-​the-​world as relational and dynamic, a century of philosophers have reached for similar complex formulations –​ witness the use of multiply-​hyphenated composite terms in Heidegger, Merleau-​Ponty, Derrida, Nancy, and Marion. In each case, there is an attempt to use language to point to what escapes language, to break out of the kind of

116  Saying nothing reified, thing-​based schema to which language constricts us –​in short, to become more musical. It is not coincidental that music becomes of more interest to philosophy as philosophy reaches for a more musical kind of thought and language, which is to say, one more concerned with process and relations, than with fragmentation and atomisation. At the heart of this sea-​change is the shift from language as saying and telling, naming and stating, to a use of language which draws attention to the act of appearing.

4 Coming to presence Apparition (Stéphane Mallarmé)

Apparition1

La lune s’attristait. Des séraphins en pleurs

The moon grew sad. Seraphim in tears, dreaming,

Rêvant, l’archet aux doigts, dans le calme des fleurs

bows poised, amid the stillness of the steaming

Vaporeuses, tiraient de mourantes violes

blossoms, derived from moribund violas

De blancs sanglots glissant sur l’azur des corolles

white sobs that slid across azure corollas –​

 –​C’était le jour béni de ton premier baiser.

it was the blessed day of your first kiss.

Ma songerie aimant à me martyriser

Daydreams that took delight tormenting me

S’enivrait savamment du parfum de tristesse

grew wisely drunk on scents of sorrow, free

Que même sans regret et sans déboire laisse

from pang or taste of anything amiss,

La cueillaison d’un Rêve au coeur qui l’a cuelli.

left for the reaping heart by the reaped Reverie.

J’errais donc, l’oeil rivé sur le pavé vieilli

My eyes stared down at the old pavement while

Quand avec du soleil aux cheveux, dans la rue

I roamed, when, with hair sunlit, with a smile

Et dans le soir, tu m’es en riant apparue

you appeared in the street and in the night;

Et j’ai cru voir la fée au chapeau de clarté

I thought I saw the fairy capped with light

Qui jadis sur mes beaux sommeils d’enfant gâté

who through my spoiled-​child’s sleep in former days

After Debussy. Julian Johnson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066826.001.0001

120 Appearing Passait, laissant toujours de ses mains mal fermées

used to pass, while her half-​closed hands always

Neiger de blancs bouquets d’étoiles parfumées.

dropped snows of scented stars in white bouquets.

Apparition Written in 1884, nearly thirty years before the Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Apparition’ is the only other song by Debussy with a text by Mallarmé. An early work, composed when the composer was just 21 and unpublished until after his death, ‘Apparition’ nevertheless embodies a definitive theme of Debussy’s music. In foregrounding the act of coming to presence, it is one of Debussy’s most emblematic and powerful statements of an aesthetics of appearing. From the dreamlike insubstantiality of its opening bars to a series of insistently emphatic lyrical gestures, ‘Apparition’ summons and then embodies presence with epiphanic intensity. It does so by means of an act of memory that breaks through the musical present: ‘It was the blessed day of your first kiss!’ (bb. 13–​15) is marked by the voice cascading down from a high A♭ and a similarly operatic gesture in the piano, displacing the allusive and ambivalent harmony of the opening with the first authentic perfect cadence of the song (in G♭ major).2 This moment begins a process of gradually recalling presence: a thrumming triplet accompaniment moves from the declamatory tone of recollection to a fullness of voice almost over-​determined for a mélodie, underpinned with a sense of harmonic desire and direction that builds to a second epiphanic moment –​‘when, with the sun in your hair, in the street, and in the evening, laughing, you appeared to me’. Debussy sets the phrase ‘Tu m’es en riant apparue’ tumbling from a high A♭ but then departs from Mallarmé’s text by repeating the word ‘apparue’, taking the voice to a climactic high C before letting it fall back in melismatic release. The appearance of presence is thus affirmed with maximal vocal intensity before an unexpected and momentary move, from G♭ to D major (b. 48), catches the fleeting figure of the fairy –​a childhood vision of half-​seen presence.3 The falling snow of stars slipping through her careless hands are heard in the descending grace-​note figure, given four times, over alternating G♭ and F♭ major triads. The ephemeral lightness of this momentary

Coming to presence  121 vision closes the song by framing, at a distance, the earlier over-​brimming fullness of presence. It is well known that Debussy wrote this song for the singer Marie Vasnier. Margaret Cobb calls her the composer’s ‘first great love’ and cites her as the inspiration for most of his early songs, twenty-​five of which he dedicated to her.4 Debussy’s demand in ‘Apparition’ for the singer’s embodied jouissance was no doubt a way of choreographing through musical performance a desire that exceeded his music. And ‘the fairy capped with light’ was surely herself the dedicatee of the volume of thirteen songs he gave Madame Vasnier in 1885 before leaving for Rome.5 All this might seem a world away from the empty scene of ‘Soupir’ (1913) and yet, despite the gap of three decades, there are some striking musical and structural parallels.6 Indeed, one might hear ‘Soupir’ as a late reflection upon the earlier song, for all that its reticence contrasts so strongly with the effusiveness of ‘Apparition’. Beyond both the parallels and differences, what binds these songs together is their approach to the same theme –​the appearing of the beloved. Except, of course, in ‘Soupir’ the beloved does not appear; or at least, the words stage an absence even while the sonorous ending of the music makes good its promise of presence. We could draw an obvious conclusion:  the 21-​year-​old composer, in love with the beautiful soprano he cannot have, writes a song which nevertheless conjures her bodily presence; three decades later, the 51-​year-​old (locked into a now unhappy marriage with another soprano he had courted from her first marriage) recalls wistfully a fullness of presence he no longer experiences. One might line up the songs against Debussy’s biography in that way, but to what end? The music presents something far more contradictory and of much greater interest. There is no simple trajectory here from lyrical fullness to declamatory sparseness, and neither biography (youthful effusion to middle-​age reserve) nor style history (romantic expression to modernist detachment) provides an adequate account. Just as Mallarmé’s poetry is located on the border between the evocation of presence and absence, so too is Debussy’s music; the early works are no less concerned with an aesthetics of absence than the later works. From this point of view, Debussy’s settings of Apparition and Soupir, written thirty years apart, bookend a corpus of songs with a constantly recurring theme: the cultivation of emptiness as the flipside of an ecstatic moment of appearing. Mallarmé composed these two poems within a few months of each other, suggesting a close kinship in their exploration of different sides of the same theme;7 that Debussy set them thirty years apart betokens less a sense of separation and difference than a sense of

122 Appearing return. Indeed, such an idea is reinforced by the intriguing suggestion that, at the same time as he was working on the Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, Debussy was also sketching out a new setting of Apparition. The evidence is a notebook from 1913, now sadly lost, containing sketches for both Soupir and a new version of Apparition.8 One could read the whole of Debussy’s work in terms of his gradual transformation of the enactment of appearing, moving from the presentation of a realised and fulsome presence to a fragile sense of appearing that flickers between presence and absence. His works repeatedly stage the act of appearing itself, a trajectory that defines both the musical material and the formal process. In relation to his early orchestral work, Printemps (1887), an essay in appearing, he wrote: ‘I would like to express the slow, laborious birth of beings and things in nature, then the mounting florescence and finally a burst of joy at being reborn to a new life, as it were.’9 A more complex enactment of appearing is already evident in the cantata La damoiselle élue, completed two years later in 1889, Debussy’s most extensive work to date, lasting around twenty minutes and scored for two soprano soloists, female chorus, and orchestra. A curiously archaic piece it was, nevertheless, the work of relative youth,10 the third of Debussy’s envois written in Rome. The entire piece is structured around the preparation of an arrival that does not take place, the summoning of someone who does not appear. It is made up of a succession of interleaved preparatory gestures: the orchestra prepares the arrival of the chorus, which sets up the arrival of the narrator. Together they prepare for the arrival of the Damozel who herself waits for the Beloved to appear. Each successive arrival is a new step in a process of expectation, a wave-​like series of preparations, fold upon fold. Moving from past-​tense narration, in the declamatory style of the chorus, to the present-​tense expectation of the Damozel’s lyricism, the music is shaped by a sonorous and melodic expansion towards the threshold of arrival, only to collapse without fulfilment. And yet, although the Beloved never arrives, his presence is powerfully evoked by the voice of the Damozel. When it is finally heard, her voice is itself a kind of realised presence: as the text has it, ‘Her voice was like the voice the stars had when they sang together’. She begins ‘doux et simplement’, her calm, syllabic setting, with its closed ambit of modal pitches, recalling the presence of the Beloved as he was on earth. But its rising contour, unfolding in a series of waves, outlines her anticipation of his arrival. The restrained beginning gives way to a richness of voice, orchestration, harmony, and melody that reaches an operatic intensity for the line ‘ensemble, moi et lui’. The voice,

Coming to presence  123 momentarily, remembers: it restores lost presence, reunites what is broken, before giving way once more to the empty present. The Damozel’s final, unaccompanied line is: ‘All of this will be when he comes’ (Tout ceci sera quand il viendra), to which the chorus add a blank stage direction: ‘She falls silent’ (Elle se tut). The strings offer a brief consolation and the chorus return with a wordless ‘ah’ that seems to echo the last syllable of the narrator’s ‘pleura’. The voice, however, is singularly lacking in one of the most famous musical explorations of appearing, Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faune (1894), a lack all the more pointed given the centrality of the voice to Mallarmé’s poem. Where Mallarmé muses on the capacity of music and poetry to make lost presence (re)appear, siding with the voice (poetry) over music (the discarded flute) only to concede that the fullness of presence is what continually eludes language, Debussy’s Prélude takes a different turn. The music of the flute is precisely a prelude to appearance, the framing gesture that both anticipates presence and follows its departure. In between, the central section of Debussy’s ternary form stages a moment of appearing, ‘shocking’ in its plenitude; the D♭ major tonality, the achingly slow unison melody with its central leap upward of a compound 4th, heard first in a wind choir and then, until this point withheld, with the full tone of unison strings –​all this adds up to a coming to presence for which Mallarmé’s Faun longs but cannot grasp. It is a powerful gap that was brought out in Nijinsky’s choreography of the piece in 1912. Despite Debussy’s negative assessment, the ballet captures something essential about this play between music and language, presence and absence. The infamous ending, as the faun climbs back to the solitude of his rock, holding a scarf dropped by one of the nymphs, offers a telling commentary. What is this scarf if not a veil (voile)? The artist ventures out into the world in search of presence, but cannot grasp the object of his desire (because it is ungraspable). Though presence was conjured, briefly, in all its over-​abundant richness, afterwards there is only a trace –​a mere veil. The much-​discussed final gesture of Nijinsky’s faun –​an angular jerking of the body simulating masturbation –​anticipates Derrida writing on Rousseau.11 A year after the Prélude à l’après-​ midi d’un faune, Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed Debussy’s new ballet score, Jeux (1913). Just as a fascinating comparison emerges across three decades between ‘Apparition’ (1884) and ‘Soupir’ (1913), a similar one can be found, across two decades, between the Prélude (1894) and Jeux (1913). There is a strange parallelism between their scenarios. In the Prélude, the faun pursues two nymphs; in Jeux, a young male tennis player pursues two young women. The later work, similarly, hinges on

124 Appearing the arrival of (almost) nothing. In Jeux, the curtain rises on an empty park. A tennis ball falls on stage; a young man appears but then disappears. The ‘two timid and curious girls’ appear, and so on. The scenario is a framing of ‘nothing’, a lightness of being that the ballet as a whole will play out, positioning it as a wry twentieth-​century take on Watteau’s fêtes, which had preoccupied Debussy since his Verlaine settings in the 1880s. Like the nymphs in Mallarmé’s L’après-​midi d’un faune, like the sirens and water-​snakes in Klimt’s paintings, the two young girls are self-​sufficient, wrapped up in themselves. The young man watches them dance. He dances with each of them before all three dance together. A triple kiss ‘mingles them in one ecstasy’. A tennis ball falls at their feet; they run away into the depths of the nocturnal park. Debussy’s music serves this scenario only in the most general of ways; the extended passages of music between stage instructions highlight not material actions as such, but the vast gap between these and the infinite play of appearing and disappearing heard in the music. Such an idea might equally sum up Debussy’s earlier anti-​symphony, La mer (1903–​05), a work he first called Trois esquisses symphoniques. On the one hand, since this work still has a foot in the tradition of the nineteenth-​ century symphony, both the first and last movements end with what seem like affirmative acts of arrival, with a brass chorale signalling a definitive moment of appearance.12 On the other, nothing could be further from the acts of symphonic affirmation in Mahler with which La mer is broadly contemporary. Debussy’s work deploys all the outward material of a symphony –​a full orchestra; a series of connected movements; processes of exposition, development, and return; recurrent motifs; and a structural weight accorded to the finale –​and yet it seems to do so to an opposite end. The recurrence of motifs might suggest symphonic technique but they work quite differently here; as Mark DeVoto points out, Debussy’s practice ‘is as far as it could be from the Austro-​German tradition of motivic development’.13 The use of a full orchestra might seem to suggest symphonic music, but often produces the same bewilderment Roger Nichols found in Jeux: ‘So much solid, material presence to produce sounds that are ethereal, evanescent, questioning.’14 Time and again, across the three movements of La mer, moments of climactic arrival turn out to be empty and short-​lived, while far more striking are the unprepared acts of appearing. Compare, for example, in ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’, the brash and collapsing fifths motif at b. 76 which marks the climax of the whole of the first section, and the astonishing theme scored for divisi cellos (b. 84) which arises out of the nothingness that follows it.15

Coming to presence  125 This focus on the process of appearing itself, rather than the substance of what appears, shapes a whole tradition of music ‘after Debussy’. It is the central theme, for instance, of Kaija Saariaho’s opera L’amour de loin (2000). The entire opera is structured around the idea of traversing the space designated by the French term Outremer –​literally, overseas –​in order to come to presence. In the medieval period in which the opera is set, the term designated the crusader states, including Tripoli, which is the home of the opera’s heroine, Clémence, hence her line: ‘I am the poet’s Outremer, and the poet is my Outremer’. But the yearning across distance of the songs of the troubadour Jaufré Rudel, transposed by Amin Maalouf ’s libretto, is strung out over a musical soundscape which, from the beginning, already sounds the fullness of presence for which the entire ‘action’ longs. Jaufré’s opening scene thematises the essential absence at the heart of words: ‘My own words call only to other words, my verses call only to other verses.’ It is nevertheless through language that his desire is not only expressed but made. It is the distant beloved, as described by the Pilgrim, with whom Jaufré falls in love; or rather, he transposes his pre-​existing but objectless desire onto the idea described by the Pilgrim. Words not only express his desire but provoke it: ‘Speak again, friend, speak to me of her’, Jaufré begs the Pilgrim. In Act 2, Clémence will similarly be enchanted by one of Jaufré’s songs, related to her by the Pilgrim. The gap, the distance between them, is crucial to this sparking of desire between words and music. ‘Troubadour, I am not beautiful’, sings Clémence, ‘except in the mirror of your words’. Jaufré’s decision, in Act 3, to journey to Tripoli to see Clémence for himself, seals his fate. The sea-​journey to full presence is necessarily the closing of the gap and therefore a death. His journey, in the middle of the third act of this five-​act opera, divides the work like a central mirror. In order to travel across the sea Jaufré must quit his tower of language and enter into the broad expanse of the language-​less sea.16 In this liminal and wordless space the Pilgrim dreams and sees, through the dreaming of music, his distant beloved (who appears through the presence of her rapturous vocal lines). But by the time Jaufré arrives in Tripoli he is critically ill. The parallels with Tristan are obvious enough, only here it is he that has journeyed across the sea to her, though it is she who will again sing a concluding Liebestod over his dying body. The central problem of the opera –​to come to presence or to love from afar, to close the expansive sea of music or maintain the distance of language –​is played out in the sustained final monologue of Clémence: presence is affirmed in the

126 Appearing containment of a drawn-​out resonance, but which nevertheless withdraws into the distance. What changes ‘after Debussy’? Since all art, before any question of saying or signification, of meaning or representation, has to do with a fundamental act of making appear, what is the distinctive change enacted within aesthetic modernism around 1900? It is perhaps caught in the observation of Jankélévitch that while we cannot know things in themselves, in their substance, we can perhaps know them through the manner of their appearance.17 ‘What is becoming if not the dimension by which hidden being appears and continually reveals itself? And what is the name of that which at the same time becomes and tends towards appearance (apparence) if not appearing (apparition)?’18 Apparition is a dynamic motion, the advent of one being to another (l’avènement de l’être à un autre être). Language, Jankélévitch goes on, misleads and betrays us because language always wants substantives –​ even verbs, which imply substantives as their subjects. But the process to which Jankélévitch points is without substantives: ‘it is the advent-​to-​the-​ other which is itself the only substance’.19 The same idea is later central to the thought of Jean-​Luc Nancy: ‘Presence is nowhere other than in “coming to presence.” We do not have access to a thing or a state, but only to a coming. We have access to an access.’20 Music ‘after Debussy’ offers an exemplary case of coming to presence, of unfolding appearing and disappearing, rather than the representation of substantive linguistic objects. Modernism more generally is shaped by the insistence that the object of an artwork is not an object (‘this is not a pipe’, as René Magritte writes on his painting of a pipe), not a thing that appears, but a way of foregrounding the act and manner of appearance itself: the miracle of appearing at all. A lean to realism in the nineteenth century, and a dominant mode of ‘reading’ art as communication and the carrying of messages, had tended to obscure this. In music that was manifest, above all, in the aesthetics of expression by which music came to be seen as the vehicle for the communication and arousal of emotions. Just as Mallarmé rejected this model of poetry, and Merleau-​Ponty and Heidegger and Bergson insisted on a different function of language to the Gerede of everyday speech, so music after Debussy insists on a different function for music. Jankélévitch’s opposition of apparence and apparition is mirrored in the distinction, underlined by Martin Seel, that aesthetic perception ‘is concerned not with some of its objects’ appearances [Erscheinungen] but with their process of appearing [Erscheinen]’. By the same token, he insists, ‘aesthetic perception is attentiveness to this appearing’.21 Music does this

Coming to presence  127 especially well because it presents no objects as such; since nothing visible appears, the focus is necessarily directed towards the process, on the movement of coming to presence itself. This is precisely ‘the condition of music’ to which Walter Pater famously suggested ‘all art aspires’. But of course, within its own conditions, music does seem to present objects –​from the stable and recurring theme or motif to the material solidity of the orchestra; from the events of musical narratives to the emotions identified by listeners –​and it is precisely those objects which music ‘after Debussy’ seems to gently dissolve and deconstruct. The opaque label ‘non-​functional’, so often used about Debussy’s harmony, is wonderfully revealing: things do not work the way they used to here. But in gently refusing an earlier functionality, Debussy’s chords stop being things (objects to be ordered in a process of construction) and become the veils by which no-​thing appears. This is equally true of Debussy’s orchestration. In music ‘after Debussy’, philosophy is met by a kind of aesthetic practice that foregrounds the act of appearing, of becoming present rather than the familiar tasks ascribed to an art of mimetic representation or the expression of emotions. As Seel puts it: concentration on the momentary appearing of things is always at the same time an attentiveness to the situation of perception of their appearing –​and thus reflection on the immediate presence in which this perception is executed. Aesthetic attentiveness to what happens in the external world is thus an attentiveness to ourselves too: to the moment here and now. In addition, aesthetic attentiveness to the objects of art is frequently an attentiveness to situations in which we do not find ourselves and perhaps never will: to a moment now and never.22

Contra Plato, this has nothing to do with the appearing of an idea or a truth in sensuous form. As Seel summarises it bluntly: ‘The basic concept of appearing is not the appearing of something, but appearing, period.’23 This comes close to the way in which a good deal of music after Debussy works, presenting not objects but the process of coming to presence –​the act of appearing itself. In this respect, there is a direct line running between Debussy’s lifelong fascination with the phenomenon of ‘apparition’ and composers’ exploration of sonic ‘spectra’ in the later twentieth century. But this focus on appearing rather than things is also central to an intellectual tradition that links Bergson through to Jean-​Luc Nancy, in which the ‘fetishism

128 Appearing of presence’, Derrida insists, gives way to a movement, to ‘the continuous advent of presence’. In words that pre-​empt later formulations of Nancy, Derrida continues: ‘One must give an active and dynamic meaning to this word. It is presence at work, in the process of presenting itself. This presence is not a state but the becoming-​present of presence.’24 It is this insistence on thinking presence as a temporal process that throws a line between music ‘after Debussy’ and the reflexive turn of deconstruction:  ‘the presence of the present’, argues Derrida, begins ‘from the fold of the return [ . . . ] from the movement of repetition’.25 Boulez doubtless knew nothing of Derrida when he composed Pli selon pli, but his own musical écriture triangulates the language work of both Derrida and Mallarmé. Only in the fold of return, in repetition, does presence appear –​which is to say, only in the poetic act of remaking, of rewriting, and the aesthetic act of rehearing. All three (poet, composer, and philosopher) mount a critique of the metaphysics of presence. But music necessarily does this differently, because it is not caught between the sign and the idea of presence it confers, nor is it thinkable outside of the time of its own temporal unfolding. And while all music is temporal, not all music foregrounds the ‘fold of the return’ in the same way.

Present absence Jankélévitch’s formulation of music as both ‘present absence’ and ‘absent presence’26 points to a quality of Debussy’s music foregrounded in his song settings of Paul Verlaine’s poetry. Debussy wrote twenty songs on poems by Verlaine, eleven of them drawn from Fêtes galantes (1869).27 His fascination with these poems is often assumed to belong to a specific period of his work but, because many of the early songs were not published during Debussy’s lifetime and those that were often appeared several years after their composition, the prolonged extent of his engagement with them is often missed. Two published sets of three songs each, Fêtes galantes I and Fêtes galantes II, appeared in 1903 and 1904, suggesting these are relatively mature works. In fact, not only was the first a publication of songs written in 1891–​92 but, even then, these were new versions of poems originally set in 1882. At that time, Debussy had conceived them as part of a group of five songs he had also titled Fêtes galantes.28 In other words, rather than two sets published a year apart, there are really three sets of Fêtes galantes, each written approximately

Coming to presence  129 a decade apart –​1882, 1891–​92, and 1904. Although there were no more song settings of Verlaine after 1904, there were unrealised plans in later years (1913–​15) for an opéra-​ballet titled Fêtes galantes29 and suggestions that the characters of the commedia dell’arte, so ubiquitous in Verlaine’s poetry, still haunt the late instrumental sonatas.30 In short, the elusive figures of Verlaine’s nocturnal landscapes flicker in and out of Debussy’s entire output. Unpublished in Debussy’s lifetime, Fêtes galantes pour Madame Vasnier (1882) consists of five settings of Verlaine’s poetry which interleave presence and absence. ‘En sourdine’ and ‘Clair de lune’ (the second and fourth of the set) explore sensuous presence as a kind of ecstatic union of the lyrical subject and an absent beloved through a merging of the body with the containing landscape. By contrast, ‘Pantomime’, ‘Mandoline’, and ‘Fantoches’ (songs 1, 3 and 5) are detached and ironic, deploying a historicised musical style to evoke the commedia characters of Verlaine’s poems as distant and alienated figures. Where the two slower songs (nos.2 and 4) create a musical space of quiet interiority and plenitude, the framing songs present fleeting glimpses of multiple characters in swiftly moving and fragmented scenes. Long before Schoenberg turned to the commedia figures in Pierrot Lunaire (1912) or Stravinsky in Petrushka (1911), Debussy had repeatedly explored their uncanny displacements of subjectivity. Carolyn Abbate has drawn attention, in the case of ‘Mandoline’, to how the whole song is framed by the gesture of the piano in the first and last bars –​to all intents and purposes, the mimetic representation of a single plucked note on the mandolin. Like the opening and closing of quotation marks, the piano figure marks the content of the song as an indirect statement –​one made in the absence of the speaker. But the device points to a whole series of moves by which both poem and song stage a sense of distance. As Abbate has it: Verlaine’s Fêtes galantes are ekphrases of landscapes by Watteau. Both paintings and poems deal with the same series of images: courtiers in a garden, talking, singing, and playing, or listening to music. In ‘Mandoline’ Verlaine adopted an ironic voice that reflects the belated mood of Watteau’s iconography: these are not real shepherds and shepherdesses, but ‘givers of serenades’ and ‘pretty listeners’ playacting at pastoral identities, who talk in an eighteenth-​century aristocratic garden far removed from prelapsarian Arcadia.31

How does Debussy evoke this sense of ‘human serenades past and silenced’ in a real and present song? As Abbate points out, ‘making a song

130 Appearing out of this poem must resurrect the very singing it has dismissed as lost’. On one level, she suggests, Debussy ignores this in a song in which ‘innocence is everywhere’, but at the same time both song and singer are clearly framed through devices of ironic distancing. After the words run out, the voice continues with wordless vocalise across a rapidly spiralling series of modulations before the song closes with the ‘plucked’ string. Debussy’s song, Abbate concludes, ‘captures in real time at least two imaginary times: the absent past, when simple serenades were heard all the time, and the present of dead and silent gardens’.32 Compared to the odd-​numbered songs, with their fleeting appearing and disappearing of masked figures, the calm spaciousness of the even-​numbered songs, ‘En sourdine’ and ‘Clair de lune’, delivers a sense of ecstatic presence. Verlaine’s En sourdine is a version of the topic of the union of lovers with the closed landscape which contains them. But while the progression of the first four stanzas offers an early version of Debussy’s musical enactment of the dynamics of appearing, the fifth stanza has to find a musical corollary for the poignant reversal of the last couplet of Verlaine’s poem: ‘The voice of our despair /​The nightingale will sing’ (Voix de notre désespoir /​Le rossignol chantera). All five of these early settings remained unpublished during Debussy’s lifetime so, in 1903, when he finally saw the publication of Fêtes galantes I, there was no hint of any relation to songs composed twenty years earlier. But the songs published in 1903 were not only written much earlier, in 1891–​92, but included revisitings of three of the texts he had set back in 1882 as Fêtes galantes pour Madame Vasnier. The omissions and new ordering are both significant. Where the earlier collection interleaved two songs of ecstatic presence between three songs of alienated absence, Fêtes galantes I reverses this pattern: ‘Fantoches’, the only commedia song to be retained, is now framed by ‘En sourdine’ and ‘Clair de lune’.33 ‘Fantoches’ is the least changed. Debussy removes the earlier text repetitions and passages of vocalise at the end of stanzas 1 and 3 and replaces them with simpler passages of ‘la-​la-​la’ (a distant echo of the now absent ‘Mandoline’). The other two songs, however, are essentially completely new versions which nevertheless retain some features of the earlier settings. The conclusion of those scholars who have made detailed studies of both settings is essentially that the later ones demonstrate Debussy’s development as a composer.34 This is uncontroversial enough, but the relation between the two is more interesting than a progressive narrative alone suggests, not least in

Coming to presence  131 terms of what changes and what remains. The rewriting of ‘En sourdine’ is particularly telling. Although it is the earlier version that is marked ‘dans une sonorité très voilée’, it is the later song that is far more veiled. Where, in 1882, the opening vocal line glides down like a languorous sigh from its initial high F♯, ten years later the centre of gravity has definitively shifted; no longer the light, high soprano of Marie Vasnier, the later song is written for a darker toned mezzo who begins the song by declaiming the opening line on a single note, a low D♯ (ten years passing, it seems, is marked by a fall of a minor tenth). Where the structure and word-​setting in the first version is conventional, the later one is far more asymmetric and without the rests in the vocal line that had earlier separated each phrase. The syncopated rhythm of the accompaniment is common to both but whereas, in 1882, it is confined to the repeated right-​hand chords, in the later version it generates the piano’s arabesque figure starting on the high G♯ which, in the closing bars, will be identified with the voice of the nightingale. This high G♯ was already heard in the 1882 version, picked out by the left hand in b. 2. In a similar fashion, the semiquaver-​triplet figure that characterises the arabesque of the later song is a contraction of the triplet motif of the earlier one (b. 2, right hand; see Examples 4.1a and 4.1b). But, as David Code points out, the harmony is quite different: the 1891 version opens over a clear statement of the “Tristan” chord (in b. 5, in the exact position in which it appears at the start of Wagner’s opera; in b. 1, an octave higher).35 The key of Debussy’s 1892 song is ostensibly B major but the repeated G♯ is like a spinning coin that might resolve either way. Unlike Wagner’s resolution through chromatic ascent, Debussy’s goes the other way –​turning the G♯ into the triplet ornament that begins the arabesque, descending past B major (b. 6) to the dark sonority of D♯ minor, timed with the arrival on the final syllable of ‘notre amour’ in b. 8. The broader shape of the two versions naturally shows some commonalities. The later version shares with the first a sense of rising motion through the middle section (stanzas 3 and 4), having in common the triplet rhythms and ostinato figures of the accompaniment and a broad sense of ascent in the vocal line. But it is in Debussy’s treatment of the final couplet of Verlaine’s poem that the two versions differ most profoundly. In the 1892 version the voice makes a gradual ascent from its low D♮ (‘laissons-​nous persuader’, b. 26) to the high point of the vocal line so far, the E♯ in b. 31. After a re-​ascent through bb. 33–​35, this E♯ acts as a long-​range leading tone for the high F♯ reserved for the climactic couplet of the final stanza –​‘Voix de notre désespoir, /​

Example 4.1(a)  Claude Debussy, ‘En sourdine’ (1882), bb. 1–​10

Example 4.1(b)  Claude Debussy, ‘En sourdine’ (1892), Fêtes galantes I, bb. 1–​9

Coming to presence  133 Example 4.2  Claude Debussy, ‘En sourdine’ (1892), Fêtes galantes I, bb. 29–​43

Le rossignol chantera’ (b. 36). Only in this final descending phrase of the song (marked doux et expressif) does Debussy allow a lyrical intensity which, in 1882, had been present from the very start of the song (beginning on the same high F♯). What in 1882 was a pervasive lyrical excess is now withheld until the very end of the song (see Example 4.2). But here, precisely at the end,

134 Appearing it is already a sign of what is lost and no longer present –​an absence marked by the mournful singing of the nightingale which was, we now realise, present from the very beginning. There is no need to repeat the line of text. The force of this gesture is underlined by the fact that it returns at the end of the third and final song of Fêtes galantes I. The new version of ‘Clair de lune’, like that of ‘En sourdine’, has a desolate quality not present in the earlier one. For all the delicate gamelan-​like patterns in the piano, the mournful countermelodies in the middle of the texture (in bb. 9ff. and again at bb. 13ff.) are like the mute voices of the ‘paysages tristes’ of which the poem speaks. If Verlaine’s exquisitely dissonant image, of revellers who sing of love but in the minor key and who do not seem to believe in their own happiness, is not quite matched in Debussy’s first setting, it defines the entire mood of the later one. For all the calm continuity conferred by the regularity of the accompanimental figure, Debussy’s control of harmonic inflection allows for a poignant sense of distance throughout the song. The setting of ‘Ils n’ont pas de croire à leur bonheur’ (bb. 17–​18) takes the mezzo voice to the highpoint of the song thus far, on the upper F♯, not just once but four times. And it is to this same F♯ that the voice rises in the closing lines. Three times in a row (in bb. 23, 24, and 25) a richly elaborated V7 of B major promises the fullness of presence for which the song desires and which ‘makes the birds dream in the trees and the fountains sob in ecstasy.’ The shift to B♭ major (b. 26) strains for transcendence but, instead, delivers an enharmonic turn to the darkness of D♯ minor (b. 27), just as the voice reaches its climactic F♯ (pianissimo). The link to the parallel moment in ‘En sourdine’ is powerfully made: both lines reach the height of their longing only to collapse back to emptiness (see Example 4.3). This retreat from presence is pursued further in the mournfully empty Fêtes galantes II. The third and final song of that collection, ‘Colloque sentimental’, contains a lengthy quotation from ‘En sourdine’.36 In an extended passage, the later song has the piano recall the song of the nightingale from the earlier one, while the voice delivers a dialogue about past presence and present absence. At the rising of the vocal line for ‘Ah! les beau jours de bonheur indicible’ (Those beautiful days of inexpressible happiness) the voice seems to want to rise towards the same climactic F♯ once more (though here it would be G♭b). The line rises slowly from E𝄫 to E♭ to F♭ (bb. 35–​37) as if it were pushing against the weight of the past. But it reaches no higher; in place of the former brightness of the F♯ it remains on F♭ for ‘indicible’ (unsayable) while the mournful song of the nightingale laments in the piano (see Example 4.4).

Coming to presence  135 Example 4.3  Claude Debussy, ‘Clair de lune’ (1892), Fêtes galantes I, bb. 17–​32

No wonder Katherine Bergeron talks of ‘unsinging’; it is as if, in these songs, the voice renounces the very presence it should confer. Appearing does not take place where there is too much saying; the noise of signifying obscures presence. Which is why saying nothing, holding oneself silent, is a precondition for mute presence to appear. In Act 4.ii of Debussy’s opera, after Pelléas’s passionate affirmation of finding, in Mélisande, all the beauty of the world, he suddenly stops and asks: ‘Where are you? I can’t hear your breathing anymore.’ She replies, unaccompanied:  ‘That’s because I’m

136 Appearing Example 4.3 Continued

looking at you’ (C’est parce que je te regarde). The final syllable is timed with a lateral shift in the harmony and a rich return of orchestral tone. At face value, her answer is obscure. How does her looking at him account for his sense that he can no longer see her? The answer lies in the presence afforded by the music that displaces the apparent absence. In the intensity of the gaze, of an epiphanic encounter with the world, there is ‘no-​thing’ to be seen because everything is seen. Debussy’s music flickers across the threshold between the rapturous fullness of Pelléas’s music a moment earlier, to the near silence of

Coming to presence  137 Example 4.4  Claude Debussy, ‘Colloque sentimental’, Fêtes galantes II, bb.  33–​39

Mélisande’s, tracing the move across the threshold between embodied desire for the particular and an immersive sense of totality. This is Debussy’s fragile inversion of ‘the All’ of Isolde’s Liebestod. Epiphany comes from the Greek epiphainō, to appear. More specifically its two etymological roots carry the sense of shining upon: it is not enough simply to shine, there has to be a surface, an object, an other, to shine upon. When Pelléas truly sees and truly hears Mélisande, he sees the whole of which she is part. The particularity of art functions in the same way: its materiality makes something immaterial become visible, audible, fungible. It makes present. Something similar is reflected in the stylistic shift between ‘Apparition’ and ‘Soupir’, or the early and later settings of Verlaine –​a shift from attempting to embody appearing, in an epiphanic moment of fulsome sonic presence, to a later position in which appearing is manifest as luminous emptiness and voluminous silence. Pelléas is caught between the two; he flickers across a threshold where Mélisande comes to meet him from the other side. It brings us back to Mallarmé’s rapturous account of Manet’s Le linge in which he found the objects dissolved into light and air, anticipating

138 Appearing Monet, whose series of haystack paintings provide a good example of how particularity becomes the surface, the material instant/​instance, that refracts back light and air –​the necessary surface for the ‘shining upon’ of the epiphaneia.37 The haystack caught in different lights highlights a sense of the incompleteness of immediacy; the painting, and the aesthetic encounter it offers, ‘redeems’ the fleeting moment. It is the idea at the centre of Proust’s recherche, that ‘one minute freed from the order of time has recreated in us, in order to feel it, the man freed from the order of time.’38 But where the process of appearing is necessarily a temporal one, the epiphanic moment seems to suspend time. A point in time, it also fills time and, for a moment, redeems what is lost as presence pours itself out in time. Where tonal practice is shaped around a metaphysics of desire –​of longing for the fulfilment of directed time, the appearance of a presence not yet arrived (the fate of Tristan) –​Debussy quietly inverts this logic, suspending the restlessness of tonal lack, in order for Pelléas to finally hear the fragile voice of Mélisande (‘like a bird from far away’). This notion of the moment would become definitive for music after Debussy. Stockhausen’s idea of ‘moment form’ was traced back by Eimert and others to Debussy’s Jeux.39 Kaija Saariaho thematises the idea in her Quatre instants for soprano and orchestra of 2002. But isn’t all this talk of appearing and coming to presence simply a naïve reassertion of what Derrida castigates as the metaphysics of presence? It is the central problematic he locates in his critique of Rousseau, in the very essay in which Rousseau contrasts writing’s lack with the presence of speech, an essay powerfully derived from his idea of music. In ‘The Voice That Keeps Silent’, Derrida has in his sights one of the most powerful vehicles of music’s appearing –​the human voice –​and, in particular, the ‘apparent transcendence’ by which the voice appears to make the signified ‘immediately present to the act of expression’.40 The immediacy and self-​presence of the voice, for Derrida, masks the gap that always exists between signifier and signified. But Derrida is writing about speech and writing, not about music. His primary target is the idea that speech embodies a presence to which writing can only be secondary and supplementary. But music is not speech, even when it deploys the human voice, because it does not assert the world through language, even when it sets words. It may seem facile to point out that Derrida, as all philosophers must necessarily do, pursues a question about absence and presence in language through the medium of language. It is striking, once again, that he ignores

Coming to presence  139 the question of absence and presence in the medium of music. So my question here is how music thinks through this question about language and music, presence and absence, from the other side. How does music reflect on the relationship between sense, language, and presence? My contention is that it has always done so but that, in the broad period of modernity, it does so with particular urgency. As an instrumental and abstract use of language became more central to the processes of modernity, so the role and status of music grew as a compensation for the loss of presence incurred by that use of language.41 Derrida’s critique of Rousseau constantly misses the opportunity to think about music. He may be right, that ‘The speech that Rousseau raised above writing is speech as it should be or rather as it should have been’, but then strangely ignores the fact that, in the age of Rousseau, music was already fulfilling a role as the compensation for speech ‘as it should have been’ –​literally, in opera and song, figuratively in the instrumental music which imitated it. The extraordinary rise in the status of music from the late eighteenth century onwards is surely not disconnected from the crisis in language, as Derrida locates in it Rousseau, that ‘We are dispossessed of the longed-​for presence in the gesture of language by which we attempt to seize it’.42 For Derrida, contra Rousseau, speech can lay no more claim to presence than writing since ‘the phonic signifier is as conventional as the graphic’.43 The spoken word has no more direct relation to what it designates than the written word; both denote a gap and mark an absence. ‘The structure of the sign is determined by the trace or track of that which is forever absent. This other is of course never to be found in its full being.’44 But music is not a sign and it does not signify. To be sure, it can signify, but a semiotic function is the least sophisticated and least musical of its operations because it is based on the imitation of non-​musical systems. In declining to signify music proceeds by a logic of sense without names and, for that reason, its presentation of presence and absence is different to that of language. Of course, music is no stranger to marking absence (as every love song underlines) but there are no ‘signs’ in music that are not at the same time some kind of sonic presence. Even in the barest works, concerned solely with traces of emptiness, music still has to sound. Which is why Jankélévitch’s formulation of music as a ‘present absence’ is an apt way of understanding music’s difference to the ‘absent presence’ of language. Where signs point

140 Appearing to something absent, musical sounds are defined by their constitutive act of coming to presence, their appearing and subsequent disappearing. But, at the same time, music is not a collection of separate and unrelated sounds. In music, the fragile mortality of each sound is recouped (redeemed, even) in the dynamic unfolding of relations (constellations) into which it is bound. The illusion of music is to keep this apparently infinite process in play –​as line, melody, harmony, pulse, rhythm, musical form. Sixty years before the formulations of Derrida, Debussy’s music richly explores the definitive gap between sound and sign, music and language. It does so neither metaphorically nor by some accidental parallel to the sophistication of Derrida’s later linguistic compositions. Debussy’s music is not just ‘a bit like’ Derrida’s philosophy; it offers a precisely differentiated counterpoint to that philosophy. Debussy’s highly articulate music approaches the same problems as does Derrida’s philosophy but from the other side of the equation, a thinking through sound that reconfigures a central aporia of language –​the appearing of presence through signs that betoken absence. Such an idea goes back to an ancient myth of art’s origin –​Pliny’s account of Dibutades, the Corinthian maid, who quite literally traced the outline of the shadow of her beloved so that, when he was gone, his presence would be preserved in the trace.45 But art is also different to such a mere tracing: it is, as Jankélévitch insists, not just the mark of an absent presence but also the bodying forth of a present absence. The absent presence (of the beloved, the landscape, the still life) may be traced by the artwork, but it is also displaced, replaced, and embodied by the force of the artwork’s presence. This is why art ‘flickers’ between absence and presence; the fold of the return, as Derrida insists, is everything. Music does something similar but also rather different, a difference signalled in the myth of Pan and Syrinx. Ovid’s story is about music as a compensation for the object of desire that cannot be grasped. Pan’s reed flute, made from the body of the transformed Syrinx, momentarily seems to restore her presence (just as the musician’s playing of the bone flute, in Mahler’s early cantata, Das klagende Lied, allows the voice of the murdered brother to sound once again). Between Mallarmé’s faun and Debussy’s faun something similar is played out. The poet’s version casts ‘mere’ piping aside for the sexualised thrill of materialised speech, but even at its climactic point it fails to grasp the plenitude of music that Debussy’s Prélude will later make manifest by not speaking.46 When the music is over, it leaves behind not just a trace, but one that is repeatable.

Coming to presence  141

Evanescence Music, more than most, is the art of disappearing. It is always, to borrow Mallarmé’s phrase, a ‘dispersion volatile’.47 Musical sounds appear from within things (bodies, instruments, speakers) only to disperse into thin air. Mallarmé’s aerial metaphor for the poem, as a disturbance of the air by a fan or a wing, is equally apt for music. Taken literally, music is a shaping of the air, a patterning of sound waves, a play of vibrations, but also the perturbation of mind and body they occasion. It is no thing. The material substance of instruments, speakers, voices, and scores, are merely amplifiers, traces, and representations of a pattern, a set of intervals, a constellation that eludes the grasp. So the proper object of musical attention is not exactly nothing, but (in Derrida’s words) ‘the way in which this nothing itself is determined by disappearing’.48 While it lasts, the act of musical listening oscillates between the listener and the listened to, the sensuous materials and their patterning, the vibrating body of the music and that of the listener. And then it is gone, but not without leaving a trace. Struck and plucked sounds are shaped by a moment of attack followed by a process of decay; a visible action is followed by an invisible resonance. Sounds produced by the breath or the movement of a bow have the supernatural quality of appearing to reverse this temporal curve; not only can the voice or the violin grow in amplitude after its onset, heard ‘in concert’ with others it seems to have the capacity to sound infinitely. Music takes place between these two extremes, between the percussive attack with almost no resonance and the sustained tone with apparently no attack. All the musical complexities of rhythm, pitch, timbre, and harmony, take place within this space. Music after Debussy foregrounds this character of being a ‘vision fugitive’ (to borrow a phrase from Prokofiev). In place of apparently solid musical objects (the tonic triad, the theme, the closed phrase, the brass chorale), this music presents sonic forms that are fleeting, momentary, and elusive. Debussy may have later shied away from the epiphanic intensity of presence staged in his early setting of Mallarmé’s Apparition, but he never lost interest in conjuring the presence, in the musical play of sound and silence, of ‘the fairy capped with light’ –​witness not just the evanescent figures of ‘Éventail’ but all the fairy creatures of the Piano Preludes, both aerial and aquatic (Puck, the fairies who are ‘exquisite dancers’, Ondine), figures that Jankélévitch refers to as ‘Mélisandes of tulle, of muslin and mist’.49 Debussy’s music is often characterised by this art of evanescent disappearance, from the shy nymphs

142 Appearing of the Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faune, to their later instantiations as the two girls in Jeux, from the half-​seen, half-​heard sirènes of the Nocturnes to the already-​departed naiads of the Chansons de Bilitis and, of course, Mélisande. These elusive beings of extraordinary lightness allow Debussy to present material that flickers between presence and absence, foregrounding art’s capacity to make the irreal appear and disappear. The perfect complement to the immaterial and insubstantial art of music, fairy creatures provide the veils (voiles) by means of which art deranges the merely empirical. Debussy undoubtedly enjoyed the childlike aspect of this fairy topic which became the means for one of the defining paradoxes of his music –​its sophisticated naïvety. Unlike most operatic heroines, Mélisande makes no entry in her first scene; when the curtain rises, she is already sitting by the edge of the well in the forest. Her first words, in reply to Golaud’s advances, are given ‘presque sans voix’,50 and are a definitive statement of her resistance to being physically present to Golaud: ‘Ne me touchez pas! Ne me touchez pas!’. Her speech delineates her as a creature in flight: ‘Je me suis enfuie! . . . enfuie . . . enfuie . . .’. Evanescent like music itself, Mélisande defines herself as being lost, whereas the all-​too-​solid Golaud has no trouble naming himself and proudly setting out his provenance. Everything about Mélisande is ‘nue’ in the way that Jean-​ Luc Nancy says art itself is ‘nue’. Even her distinctive theme, a little arabesque floated over the accompaniment of off-​beat quavers in divisi strings, seems to emphasise absence, since her melody is literally absent on the principal beats of the bar. Jankélévitch offers a beautiful way of hearing the fugitive Mélisande who, ‘in her flight, traces beyond the horizon a mystery of absence which presence has dislodged’.51 Before any question of shared compositional techniques or soundworlds, it is this evanescent play of presence and absence that binds Debussy most closely to his younger contemporary, Maurice Ravel. It is perhaps no surprise that the water fairy Ondine, before appearing in Debussy’s Préludes (Book 2) had already been given elusive form in Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit (1908). ‘Ecoute! –​Ecoute! –​C’est moi’, begins the text by Aloysius Bertrand, quoted by Ravel at the front of the score. An announcement of auditory appearance, it provokes in Ravel a world of strange and half-​heard sounds, delineating the elusive and unreal presence/​absence of Ondine. The same sense of a character that does not quite appear before disappearing is explored in ‘Scarbo’, a fantastical figure of the night, producing in Ravel’s music a study in vanishing and the dynamics of (dis)appearing. The famous repeated note motif

Coming to presence  143 is un-​pianistic and unmusical –​a kind of hyper-​energy, a tremor rather than a thing, a physical urgency followed by silence. The same elusiveness of nocturnal landscapes is found too in the fluttering of moths in ‘Noctuelles’, the first of the five Miroirs, 1904–​05, a piece which anticipates Ligeti in its ungraspable mobile textures. This evanescent music, which rarely rises above a dynamic of pianissimo, is often ‘groundless’. Ravel’s moths are the thin excuse for a mute music of ungraspable delicacy. Their circling is self-​sufficient, unrelated to human purpose, hence inexpressive in any affective sense. One might analyse this piece, but only to show how the music slips through the fingers of any firm structure; it works, instead, by means of a logic of continuous transformation applied to small (generally one-​bar) units whose musical paragraphs, such as they are, disappear in evanescent gestures (see bb. 7–​9, 19–​20,  36). In ‘Oiseaux Tristes’, the following piece of Miroirs, the repeated note motif that would later be the source of the energy of ‘Scarbo’ is here presented as a kind of radical emptiness (utterly without energy where the later piece is massively energised). The changing harmonic ‘light’ serves here to emphasise the lack of discourse, presenting instead simply the same object constantly re-​lit. The arabesque figure is a mute kind of saying, concerned with its own evanescence rather than making statements. So too in the next piece, ‘Une barque sur l’océan’, the lack of any ‘object’ makes for a wash of light and colour, a carefully shaped flow of rising and falling intensities through the control of texture, register, and harmony. In place of anything resembling musical material in a Germanic sense (or indeed ideas of subjective agency or argument) there is only the play of self-​contained and sensual repetitions. ‘Alborada del gracioso’, a dialogue between lovers parting in the morning, is a song of disappearing. ‘La vallée des cloches’ once again focuses on the radical bareness of a single pitch –​the absence of any subjective expressive voice that is the sound of bells. Elsewhere, the evanescent quality of this repertoire has to do with its cultivation of a definitive lightness of touch. Fauré’s ‘La fée aux chansons’, Op. 27, no. 2 (1882), thematises a quality that pervades many of his songs in which poignancy of feeling is in direct proportion to lightness of touch. ‘Our love is a light thing/​like the fragrances that the wind takes’, insists the singer in ‘Notre amour’, Op. 23, no. 2 (c.1879), only to concede at the end that ‘our love is an eternal thing’. The simple arpeggiated accompaniment figure (leggieramente), a hallmark of Fauré’s mélodies, suggests an ephemeral lightness tangential to the subtlety of its harmonic inflections: ‘What is told to

144 Appearing the night, evaporates with the dawn’, as Armand Silvestre’s text has it in the song that follows it, ‘Le secret’, Op. 23, no. 3 (1881). If Fauré’s music has sometimes been overlooked it is perhaps because it is, par excellence, a music that stages its own evanescence. Few composers have matched Fauré in the art of disappearance –​witness the way in which, in the Barcarolles for piano, small repetitive motifs are constantly in a state of dissolving –​Nos. 7 in D minor (1905) and 8 in D♭ major (1906) provide rich examples. The G minor Barcarolle, No.11 (1913) is a study in musical entropy, a piece concerned with its own dissolution and collapse. While ‘lightness’ often has to do with a deliberate lack of definition in the musical substance (in terms of tonality, metre, orchestration), it sometimes also has to do with playing at the edge of audibility. As a pianist, Debussy was noted for his expertise in playing extremely quietly, at the borders of sound and silence,52 and it is not hard to find plenty of examples, in both his piano music and orchestral works, of passages which similarly cultivate the edges of the audible. He was by no means alone in this, of course; his younger Austrian contemporary, Anton Webern, defined a whole new soundscape for music in the exploration of shades of quiet, an aspect of modern music that continued on through Morton Feldman to the present. But it is not a static condition (lightness or near-​silence) that we are concerned with here, so much as a dynamic process –​the process of disappearing captured by the idea of evanescence. A host of synonyms underlines the same idea of a motion from solidity to aerial vanishing: evaporation, disintegration, dissipation, dissolution, as well as ebbing, fading, receding, waning. But this motion is also, typically, rapid, sudden, and definitive. It suggests a brief gesture which frames the quality of silence that follows –​a resonance, scent, tremor of what has departed. From Monet to Van Gogh, the vibrancy of light itself is often made the object of painting, one in which objects are dissipated into light. Just as the hard new materials of the nineteenth-​century urban landscape enabled a whole new use of glass, so the solidity of tonal grammar and symphony orchestras gave way to a new play of sonic lightness. In music, of course, this is also a play with time. ‘After Debussy’, the materiality and particularity of the musical object finds itself in a symbiotic relation with its own evanescent, fugitive and ephemeral character. So the ‘impressionism’ of this art is not to do with the inherently insubstantial or immaterial, but precisely the flight between the two, with showing the evanescent quality of the concrete moment. Francesco Spampinato, discussing the writings of Jankélévitch, puts it thus: ‘Music, the art of time par excellence, that dies at the same moment as

Coming to presence  145 it is born, has always fascinated by its ambiguous oscillation at the threshold of existence.’53 What is left behind by evanescent presence? A trace, a scent, a rearrangement of the scene, a disturbance in the air, a resonance. Steven Rings discusses Debussy’s ‘Des pas sur la neige’ in terms of its presentation of ‘traces of a past subjective presence on (or in) the landscape’, in which we hear ‘not a process unfolding in time before our ears, a subject trudging in the here and now, but instead the record of that act –​a frozen landscape marked off by rhythmic footprints’.54 As with all Debussy’s pieces with titles, the extra-​musical reference is the thinnest of veils that makes something appear. It is not that the prelude depicts footsteps in the snow, but foregrounds the presentation of musical traces –​not simply to present them but, as Rings demonstrates, in order to reflect musically upon memory, absence and rekindled presence. Jankélévitch refers to this piece as ‘a long meditation on the vestiges of departed presence’.55 A century after Debussy, his evocation of elusive fairy figures reappears in the disembodied flash of electronic sounds across a performance space. Otherworldly, iridescent, aerial, or aquatic, the ungraspable forms of electronic music weave in and out of the ‘real’ world of acoustic instruments and singers. Jonathan Harvey’s Advaya (1994) for solo cello and electronics, for example, is made on the sonic threshold between the acoustic instrument and electronic transformations of its sound, a dialogue between ‘real’ and ‘irreal’ which flickers constantly between the two. One of the many affordances of electronic technology was the capacity to both amplify evanescent sounds –​ to make more audible the details of its vanishing –​but also to reverse the envelope of decay and thus to reverse time. Tristan Murail’s Le partage des eaux (also from 1994) begins from the ‘simplest’ of sonic events, a two-​chord hit derived from a recording of a wave breaking on a shore and its backwash. But the simple moment is acoustically highly complex and allowed to resonate in the silence that follows. Repeatedly it re-​emerges, not just because the resonance is prolonged but because its sonic space, the decay of the evanescent sound, is expanded into the duration of the whole piece. Murail’s earlier Sillages (1985) –​‘wakes’, as in the wake of a boat –​is similarly a piece concerned with traces, tracks, presences passing into absences. Writing of Saariaho’s orchestral diptych, Du cristal . . . à la fumée (1990), Daniel March comments ‘immediately, we are invited to hear this work as a remainder: a remainder of the fire that gave genesis to . . . à la fumée . . . as the earlier work’s supplement’.56 In Saariaho’s later work, Cendres (1998) for three instruments, March hears a resonance of Derrida’s essay of the same title;

146 Appearing both show a similar fascination with the idea of traces, remnants of a disappearing presence. A poem reveals the world, Mallarmé insists, ‘not to bestow these things on us but to deprive us of them, an idea that Jankélévitch finds embodied in the second movement of Debussy’s Ibéria –​a piece, he suggests, that ‘is possibly the most troubling music anyone has ever written’, because it makes us listen to the silence.57

5  Mirrors Reflection Monet’s Régates à Argenteuil (Figure 5.1) divides into two halves. A literal reading understands these as the reflection in the lower half of the painting (the surface of the river) of the real objects depicted in the upper half (the sailing boats, trees, buildings, and sky). But, of course, the river is no less real than the sky and, taken as a whole, the painting is suffused with the same blue that barely distinguishes between the appearance of water and air. The distinction between the two spaces (which allows us to know ‘which way up’ the painting should go) is achieved by the rendering of the objects as relatively solid and their reflections as broken, with gaps turning solid colour blocks (like the white of the sails) into fragmented horizontal lines. On the one hand, Monet’s painting allows us to read it in a realist manner (it depicts the broken effect of reflections on the moving surface of the water); on the other, it presents a quite radical reordering of the ‘real’ (in the almost abstract play of the ‘reflected’ lower half). Taken together, the painting presents the substance of the ‘real’ and the insubstantiality of its reflection as two facets of the same thing. Indeed, the absence of hard outlines blurs the distinction between one and the other. Just as, in Mallarmé’s account of the ballet dancer, it is through the movement of the dancer’s veils (voiles) that the dance appears, so too, it is through the reflection of the boats’ sails (voiles) that the river appears. Just as, in Maeterlinck, a patterning of words allows the gaps between them to emerge, so too does the patterning of objects here allow something other to take place. The insubstantial play of reflected forms and colours is, on the one hand, a kind of ‘nothing’ compared to the real objects above the water, but the painting gives both equal weight and brings both into a new relation. The Impressionists’ fascination with reflections might be taken as part of a wider enquiry into ways of seeing and knowing the world. It is the act of seeing, the participation of the viewer in the appearing of the world, that is the concern of the painting, not the representation of its objects. This is

After Debussy. Julian Johnson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066826.001.0001

148 Appearing

Figure 5.1  Claude Monet, Régates à Argenteuil (1872)

made explicit in another of Monet’s studies of reflections on the surface of the water –​Sur les bords de Seine à Bennecourt (1868) (see Figure 5.2). The figure in the foreground is herself contemplating the scene before her, so that the painting is less the depiction of a river view than a study in the act of contemplative perception. We are not simply looking at a landscape, but the act of viewing a landscape. The reflective self-​consciousness of this is highlighted by the way in which Monet has echoed the foreground figure and boat with a group of figures and another boat on the opposite shore of the river. One might even say that having three figures rather than one across the river underlines our own presence positioned just behind the foregrounded woman in the striped dress. The composition of this painting is more complex than Régates à Argenteuil. Instead of the division of the canvas into two halves, the reflective surface of the water here fills the central space, with ‘real’ objects in the vertical space above and below it and framed on the left-​hand side by the solid and darker mass of the two trees. The execution, however, is less radical –​ the reflected images are presented as a smooth surface without the choppy, broken quality found in the later painting. Nevertheless, a remarkable thing takes place. While some of the real objects are not reflected in the surface of the water (those in the foreground), others only become visible by means

Mirrors  149

Figure 5.2  Claude Monet, Sur les bords de Seine à Bennecourt (1868)

of the reflection. In the surface of the water seen beneath the foliage of the trees we see the whole of the large white house in reflection, though its ‘real’ image is largely obscured by the foliage. To the left, we see the reflection of another house whose ‘real’ form is completely obscured. The reflection has, quite literally, made the invisible visible –​so too with the sky, which is largely absent from the painting of the ‘real’ (other than fragments of blue between the leaves of the tree) but abundantly present in the reflection, complete with white clouds that cannot be seen except here. As Mallarmé might have said, rendering objects in their hard ‘thingness’ obscures the view of the whole; only in the spaces, the gaps, the no-​thingness of the reflection, do we get a vision of the ‘eternal blue’ of the sky. Monet’s painting is a painting about looking, exploring the way the world appears when viewed from a certain attitude. It is, in that sense, a painting about painting. The contemplation of the relation between the physical objects of sight and the embodied act of perception is that of visual art itself. It is also a philosophical exploration that anticipates Maurice Merleau-​Ponty’s

150 Appearing critique of Cartesian optics in favour of embodied perception. The business of art, as Paul Klee later underlined, ‘is not to reproduce the visible but to make visible’ –​to make appear not some ‘thing’ that hides behind the surfaces of objects like some supernatural or metaphysical presence, but a way of seeing things. Mallarmé’s constellation is just this: the stars were always there, they become a constellation when we find in their spacing a certain kind of pattern. Art takes place when the hard objects of the world enter into a new kind of relation with the viewer. Music has played with the metaphor of reflection for hundreds of years –​ from the reflective symmetry of ascent and descent, to motivic inversions and retrogrades and the fascination with palindromic forms, through to the possibilities of electro-​acoustic music to invert harmonic spectra or reverse the decay of sounds. Debussy’s interest in the idea undoubtedly begins with the poetry he set. Arthur Wenk discusses reflective symmetries in ‘La mort des amants’ (Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire, 1887), which ‘incorporates the principle of reflection into every element of the music’.1 A stronger case, perhaps, is the Verlaine setting, ‘L’ombre des arbres’ (Ariettes oubliées, 1885). In the poem, the trees are literally reflected in the water, the lover’s drowned hopes are metaphorically embodied in the weeping foliage. The reader is both immersed and reflected in the landscape as a whole. But reflection is also present at the sonic and timbral level in the play of certain sounds in the poem, to which Debussy responds, such that, as Wenk suggests, ‘Debussy’s setting of the poem contains fully as many mirrors as Verlaine’s text’.2 Around the musical interval of a tritone, Debussy establishes from the start a definitive axis of tonal symmetry to mirror the poetic symmetries –​the traveller reflected by the bird, the tree by the river. But the larger movement of the poem is that only in the irreal space of the reflection does the real come to self-​ awareness. Only in the doubling of the mirror image does self-​consciousness recognise itself. As Nicholas Reyland has explored in relation to the music of Lutosławski, the reflected image is one of Foucault’s prime examples of a heterotopic space –​not a utopia (an unreal place) but a real space that nevertheless acts as a counter-​site for the everyday.3 The garden is another, and the space of the boat at sea is a third. If visual art, poetry, and music ‘after Debussy’ have often cultivated these heterotopic spaces that is surely because they are emblematic of the space of artworks themselves, as sites in which culture can be ‘at the same time, represented, contested, and reversed’.4 But, as my brief examples from painting and song already suggest, the reflected image is not

Mirrors  151 a static, utopian other space. It is, rather, a dynamic space that moves against the apparently ‘real’, in order to put both in a kind of vibration that displaces the common-​sense view of real/​unreal. In this, such artworks anticipate the trajectory of deconstruction whose instinct is to open out towards another space. As Leonard Lawlor writes, ‘not oriented by the value of presence, this matrix or terrain, this plane or land, is not an enclosure. It looks like no place that has ever been inhabited before. When one engages in a deconstruction, one is dismantling in the name of this unnameable place.’5 But the reflective plane of artworks does not dismantle in order to quit one world for another; neither Monet’s painting of a view from the riverbank, nor Verlaine’s contemplation of the reflective surface of the river, invites us to quit the bank to plunge into the water. Rather, artworks set in motion a movement, to and fro, between the two that leaves both changed.6 As Jankélévitch puts it: The world itself which the water reflects is not another world, it is our world in reverse, a duplicated illusion of the world the right way up. The world in a mirror is not the world itself, but its double and dream image! In the immobile sea Debussy discovered a double inversion of this world, a submerged cathedral, an underwater city perhaps, like that of Ys.7

How does music set up such heterotopic spaces through reflection? In the first instance, as we have already seen, music plays across the threshold of real and irreal just like poetry and visual art. The fondness for titles of a music that, at the same time, distances itself from representation, is a way of drawing attention to this aspect. Take the case of Ravel’s Jeux d’eau. As an epigraph at the head of the piece, Ravel quotes a line from Henri de Régnier’s poem, ‘Fête d’eau’: ‘Dieu fluvial riant de l’eau qui le chatouille’. Steven Huebner suggests that it may have been inscribed on the manuscript by Regnier himself.8 The poem, from an anthology of Régnier’s poems, published in 1902, titled La cité des eaux, refers to the Latona fountain in the park at Versailles. As Huebner shows, the sonnet moves from the activity of the fountain to the calm pool beneath it, an axis located at the formal divide of the poem: ‘The hinge of the sonnet becomes the deep silence that follows at dusk, as the waters flatten into a mirror that reflects the cypress and yew, mute surrogates for the fountains.’9 Huebner is in no doubt that Ravel’s piece draws on the representational aspects of the poem: ‘Ravel’s Jeux d’eau is manifestly about the real sound of the Latona fountain, complete with mimetic effects that trace upward

152 Appearing surges of water and vertiginous cascades.’ But at the same time the piece is constructed to point beyond itself, as where ‘the fluid evaporation on an unstable chord that seems to ask the listener to “complete” the sound in her mind’s ear’. He goes on: To bridge sound and silence in this way validates the latter as engendering an aesthetic experience on its own terms, an invitation to reach beyond the articulating frame of sounding music. Régnier’s fountains structure his experience in the first part of ‘Fête d’eau,’ but the truly moving moment occurs in silence as the trees become the unheard echo of Latona’s waters.10

Fauré’s two song cycles, Mirages, Op. 113 (1919) and L’horizon chimérique (1921) signal their heterotopic sights within their titles. Both sets of four songs are ‘after Debussy’ in a literal way. Indeed, one might read the first as a homage to the younger composer who, at the age of 55, had just pre-​ deceased the older one (then aged 72), while at the same time being a critical self-​reflection upon his legacy. Both late works, these song cycles hinge on a poignant tension between the undiminished tug of distant horizons and the calm acceptance of one’s dwelling place. I discuss L’horizon chimérique in Chapter 9, but many of the themes explored below, in Mirages, return in the later set. The first of the four songs of Mirages is ‘Cygne sur l’eau’, the archetypal image of mirror reflection in late nineteenth-​century French poetry.11 The swan is a mute, speechless presence, caught in his own reflection. On the one hand, Renée de Brimont’s poem presents the swan as the smooth gliding of a dream-​like thought, a poetic impulse towards unknown horizons; on the other, the poet counsels himself to stay here, to maintain the clarity of thought as undisturbed as the calm reflection of swan in the limpid waters of the lake. The poem thus warns against journeying towards the illusions of distant and unknown horizons (‘Renoncez, beau cygne chimérique, A ce voyage lent vers de troubles destins’). The distant promise of ‘perfumed bays’ and ‘immortal islands’ would all be perilous reefs. The obvious conclusion is that the choice of text reflects that this song cycle is the work of an older composer, a definitively conservative one at that, disinclined to venture to distant horizons. From this perspective, it is a neat historical fact that, as Fauré set the line ‘Nul miracle chinois, nulle estrange Amérique, /​Ne vous accueilleront en des havres certains’, his much younger compatriot Edgard Varèse (then 25) had not only been living in the USA for the past four years but had recently begun work on

Mirrors  153 his orchestral work Amériques, a piece whose title, in the composer’s words, had to do with ‘discoveries –​new worlds on earth, in the sky, or in the minds of men’ –​precisely the new horizons that the poet of ‘Cygne sur l’eau’ counsels against. Varèse’s opening out of a new world of ‘organised sound’ could hardly be more different from Fauré’s turn inwards to the contained space reflected in the surface of his musical lake. And yet the poem juxtaposes thoughts that cleave a free space, proceeding in darkness towards the unknown, with the counsel to remain on these lakes which mirror ‘these clouds, flowers, stars and eyes’. Fauré’s poignant expression of the tug between the two is found in the tension between the apparent simplicity of the setting, with its oddly minimal texture, and the disquieting complexity of the harmonic colouring. The latter moves by a constant re-​harmonising of each scale degree and the four distinct sections are marked by four different accompaniment patterns (crotchets, semiquavers, quavers, crotchets). The second song, ‘Reflets dans l’eau’, continues the theme of mirror reflection. Here, the reflective surface of the water is a kind of threshold to a different world. It is the past that appears, tempting the poet to make one further voyage (the idea that haunted the first song, and will later haunt the last song of L’horizon chimérique). In the third stanza the poet moves from merely reflecting his own melancholic self to suddenly seeing himself as part of a wider whole. The contemplation of the past, however, is also a temptation to slip into the deep pool of the past. The astonishing ending of the last verse (‘if I slip’) has the voice answered by repeated ‘echoing’ sonorities in the piano, its different harmony presenting the ‘other reality’ suggested by the pool’s mirror, a different space to the one which returns for the final three lines. If I slip, the cold water closes around me and I am reabsorbed into the waters of the past. This is the temptation of the depths which the mirrored surface both conceals and offers, hence the silence of the final verse, ‘froide et sereine’. Fauré’s mesmeric accompaniment and the narrow range of the vocal line makes for a peculiar stasis. Until the third verse the song is largely diatonic but then becomes increasingly chromatic, a deepening of the vision in the pool of past desire. The seductive repetition of the accompaniment continues beneath the telling of the singer, with ripples of greater intensity achieved through harmony and the rhythm of the vocal line. The play of calm objective exterior and the inward vision externalised in the mirror creates a chiasmic intertwining of inner and outer worlds, the singer’s line and the piano’s depth. The water/​past draws one in, until the amazing change in the final stanza: ‘si

154 Appearing je glisse’ is unaccompanied, but followed by the piano in triplets. The elaboration of a repeated figure based on the dyad B–​C♯ in A major acts as a kind of siren call, like the beckoning of a deathly calm, before slipping flatwards to end with the heterotopic space of the piano’s mirror. The third song, ‘Jardin nocturne’, has the same quality of mesmeric seduction as the previous song, but the poem suggests no resistance to it –​only that ‘I know your peace’ and ‘I hear/​listen to the kiss singing from the lips of the night’. A host of key poetic topics are assembled here –​night, garden, silence, moon, veils, distance, fountain, foliage, the sound of water, scent. The ‘jardin muet’ is not strictly a silent garden, as most translations have it, but a speechless one –​a garden that holds itself in silence, like the vocal line which, for all the capacity of the singer, is often confined to a monotone. The narrow ambit of the line is marked by falling thirds and a kind of weary, self-​enclosed quality. It is the subtle melody in the right hand of the piano that seems to offer something more songlike, the voiceless piano sounding the speechless song of the mute garden. Beneath it, the oscillating pattern of the accompaniment produces a sense of the gentle pulsing of time, the breathing in and out of a self-​contained time that ‘goes’ nowhere. It makes for an impersonal foil to the melancholy of the voice, with its wavering between moments of rising desire and collapse. ‘Danseuse’, the fourth and last of the Mirages, is an astonishing song. Fauré’s repetitive rhythm is limping, based on variants of a single repeating pattern that makes for a curiously restricted motion, a little contained figure within a stasis. The poem urges the sister to dance to free herself, to take flight, ‘unleashed by Eros’. The second stanza, with its references to a vase and fresco, seems to locate the poem in an ancient Greek scene as a ghost of the past. But the music wants to tug this figure into the present, hence the gradual enlivening of the music, turning to quavers in the third stanza: take flight, light the flame, it seems to urge. But it comes to nothing and disappears, leaving the figure as no more than a ‘vaine danseuse!’. It is impossible to discuss the idea of reflection in this cultural milieu without encountering the extraordinary phenomenon of Monet’s paintings, made in his own jardin muet at Giverny, of water lilies (nymphéas) –​ around 250 in total, painted across the last three decades of his life. The often vast canvasses remain, a century on, some of the most powerfully immersive works of visual art, in which not only is the distinction between flower and reflection, water and sky blurred, but with it the separation of the viewer and the profusion of colour and forms presented on the canvas. The sense

Mirrors  155 of a heterotopic space, and of a reflective surface that draws one in, explored in the poetry and music of Monet’s contemporaries, is made manifestly visible here. The vast scale of the largest canvasses effectively present to the viewer a picture without borders. They come close to blurring the difference between the framed painting, with clearly demarcated boundaries, and the experience of unbounded space in nature, not just on account of their size but also because these paintings are neither structured to the edges of the canvas, nor drawn to converge on the eye of the viewer. The movement of the eye and the body of the viewer is built into these huge spaces –​it is necessary to stand back in order to move through the whole, while at the same time one is drawn in to the particular, creating a constant to-​and-​fro motion of particularity and whole. The flat expansiveness, like a rich but self-​contained harmonic space in Debussy, Messiaen, or Saariaho, both immerses the viewer and suspends linear motion. Instead, what takes place in the introversive space of the work is a kind of infinite invention through permutation, both within each of these paintings and across multiple ones. It is curious how this restoration of visual and spatial plenitude seems to anticipate photographic images of outer space captured by astronomy a century later. Taken together, Monet’s water lily paintings constitute an astonishing recherche. Like Cézanne’s fascination with Mont St. Victoire in his later years, Monet’s devotion to a single idea, to the elaboration and exploration of the particularity of his own environment, is less about representation than the act of seeing itself, an exploration of chiasmic being through the particularity of the world. It is easy to say that his approach is ‘musical’, as a way of designating that his concern is with the free play of colour and form and texture more than with representation; it is easy too to collapse these pictures back into a generic idea of impressionism by which Debussy and Monet are both closed down. But far more interesting, and more productive, is the reverse –​ asking what it is that is made visible in Monet’s paintings that gives us access to something at the heart of Debussy’s music.12 Something similar happens here as in the case of literary Symbolism. Just as music needed poetry to become more musical, in order to enable music to do so, so too did the visual arts explore before music a quality of music that was only finally emancipated in the twentieth century –​witness the concerns of the French spectralists, nearly a century later. In Saariaho’s Nymphéa (1987) for string quartet and electronics (subtitled Jardin secret III), and its later complete rewriting for string orchestra as

156 Appearing Nymphéa Reflection (2001), the composer takes up this relation in a deliberate way. There is no question of representation here, nor of any reference to the work of Monet, other than the resonance of the title and Saariaho’s programme note, which refers to the image of the symmetric structure of a water lily, yielding as it floats on the water, transforming. Different interpretations of the same image in different dimensions; a one-​dimensional surface with its colours, shapes, and, on the other hand, different materials that can be sensed, forms, dimensions, a white water lily feeding from the underwater mud.13

What the musical works have in common with Monet’s canvasses is an intense fascination with colour, texture, light, and their infinitely variegated play within a contained space. Nymphéa Reflection comprises six short movements, all concerned with the constant transformation of a single sound mass. The third movement, ‘Dolcissimo’, for example, opens up a cloud of sounds all contained within its fundamental, like a flock of birds, or the shimmering of tiny insects caught in the light –​contained, multifarious, ungraspable. The listener is not asked to follow any musical argument here, but only to attend to the music taking place, an activity that induces a sense of wonder. Its slow shape-​shifting of sound leads to the fourth movement, ‘Lento expressivo’. Such a marking might suggest a lyrical subject, but it is the natural wonder of its soundscape that elicits this lyrical intensity (as in Bartók). There is no voice here, no ‘line’ in any conventional sense; instead, the music moves more like a slow breathing in and out, a rocking of presence and absence. In the sixth and final movement, ‘Misterioso’, the string players whisper fragments of a poem by Arseny Tarkovsky. One hears voices but on the very edge of speech, crossing the liminal space between a mysterious sound of nature and the world of human discourse, blurring the sonic and the semantic. The effect of asking the string players to use their voice, rather than singers as such, is to make more palpable this interchange of speech and music, sound and discourse.14

Threshold Matisse’s La fenêtre ouverte à Collioure (1905) is not a painting of boats in a harbour; it is a painting of the act of seeing boats in a harbour (see Figure 5.3).

Mirrors  157

Figure 5.3  Henri Matisse, La fenêtre ouverte à Collioure (1905)

The open window framing the view foregrounds the viewing of the painter and the viewer. The frame that surrounds this picture, as it hangs in a gallery, foregrounds what the painting already declares, that art is itself a framing, the making of a threshold between the act of perception that goes out to the world and the world that comes to meet it. As Christopher Butler points out, rather than the viewpoint vanishing into the distance, nature seems to flow through the window into the bright room –​this is as much a case of an access onto the world as the world, flowing back towards us, finding access into.15 Matisse’s painting is thrice framed:  once by the frame in which the painting is placed, once more by the open double doors, and a third time by the foliage on the veranda. As Butler has shown, the paintings from Matisse’s summers in Collioure (1905 and 1907) focus on the materiality of painting, on ‘the use of a pure high-​keyed oil paint’, on brushstroke, the canvas, the act of painting itself.16 Like other Collioure pictures (Woman at the Window, The Siesta, Woman in Japanese Robe by the Water) this painting ‘focuses our attention on the surface of the canvas, and so threatens to give primacy to its

158 Appearing own articulation, over the attempt to see it as the record of an empirical perception’.17 The open window draws attention not only to the meeting of the world and our perception of it, but also to the act of painting as a remaking of the world precisely through its re-​perception. Matisse’s painting forms one example of a whole genre of ‘open window’ pictures whose central concern is this threshold between two spaces, a threshold that marks a dynamic passing from one space to the other but in both directions at the same time.18 Such a threshold is not a line one crosses or where one thing definitively becomes another, but rather the chiasmic site of a coming to presence, an access (Nancy), an exchange or intertwining (Merleau-​Ponty). The mirror reflection of artworks, in which the reflected content is a transformed version of its other (or vice-​versa), is a way of foregrounding this idea of the threshold. Reflections in visual art, like echoes in music, are ways of defining a point of cross-​over or transformation. Literature, visual art and music around 1900 were very often concerned with such liminal spaces –​ coastlines, riverbanks, horizons, twilight, the edges of dream –​witness all those paintings of the water’s edge, by the river, on the beach, bathers, children playing on the sand or in the waves. Where does a highly industrialised and highly linguistic society look for its re-​creation? It looks to the a-​ linguistic borders of water, sky, earth. As Seurat captured in Une baignarde à Asnières (1884), the pleasure of the holiday is to be a free body again, in the sunshine, on the grass, by the water. As so often in beach paintings, the human figure is caught in silhouette against the water, the fluid mediating space between earth and sky. In Monet’s Femme à l’ombrelle tournée vers la gauche (1886), the artist’s wife Camille has her feet on the ground, but her position on the horizon and the low viewpoint of the painter, looking up to the figure silhouetted against the brightness of the sky, makes her belong more to the air than to the earth (see Figure 5.4). The same blurring of human figures and elements is found in Monet’s beach paintings. Since Proust’s fictional artist, Elstir, is generally understood to be modelled on Monet, it is perhaps no surprise that the whole of Proust’s novel A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (1919), set in the fictional coastal resort of Balbec, has this same liminal aspect. Proust’s Balbec was itself modelled on the Normandy town of Cabourg, where he spent many summers, including that of 1911 when Debussy was on holiday in the adjacent resort of Houlgate.19 Debussy’s coastal song ‘De grève’ (one of the Proses lyriques, songs to his own prose texts) is an earlier work from 1893 but has something of the same quality of Proust’s novel with its mock drama of the busy daylight world, the waves of the sea like young

Mirrors  159

Figure 5.4  Claude Monet, Femme à l’ombrelle tournée vers la gauche (1886)

girls coming out of school, versus the silent wonder of the nocturnal, playing across the threshold between land and sea, day and night (marked by the ‘Plus lent’ section from b. 40). Around 1900, there are two distinct modalities of this concern with liminality. On the one hand, there is the border that is constantly traversed –​the tidal margin of land and sea, exchanged between the elements of earth and water in the rhythm of the tides, being both and neither. On the other, there is the border that is a threshold –​the sacred region that one must cross in order to leave one space to enter another –​the outside into the inside, in the case of the threshold of the house or the temple. Crossing such a threshold suggests a linear transformation by which the music gives access to a new kind of space. This is a definitive idea of musical form in Mahler, Webern, and Schoenberg.20 In Debussy, and the tradition of music that comes after him, however, the threshold works more like the first –​a perpetual to-​and-​fro, like the tides, a flickering of presence and absence, a constant sparking across the gap between words and music, visible and invisible. The two models could

160 Appearing not be more different. One proposes a linear and irreversible transformation, the other acknowledges that this move is not final or complete, that being human is necessarily to move constantly between the two. This is perhaps a decisive difference between the (German) idealism of Mahler or Schoenberg and the (French) materiality of their contemporary Debussy. In adapting Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande in order to make his opera, one of the scenes that Debussy cut was the opening scene of the play. The serving women (the same who silently enter Mélisande’s chamber in the final scene of the play) have come to wash the threshold of the castle and have to ask the porter to open the huge old wooden door (a form of vantail). The porter is not sure he can open the door, or even that it has ever been opened (‘Elle ne s’ouvre jamais’). It does eventually open but makes a huge noise as it does so (‘Comme elle crie! /​elle eveillera tout le monde’) –​a noise like the scream that signals a breaking through between two worlds (like that of Kundry, in Wagner’s Parsifal). The pain of crossing the threshold, of coming to see things properly, is key to the drama. But the castle gate opens to the brightness of the world outside, as the sun rises over the infinite expanse of the sea and this, too, is part of the drama. Before Golaud encounters Mélisande at the water’s edge, water is already everywhere:  ‘Pour all the water of the flood; you will never accomplish it’, says the porter (Versez toute l’eau du deluge; vous n’en viendrez jamais à bout). The threshold is a key idea throughout Maeterlinck’s play. In another scene (Act 2.iv) not set by Debussy, Arkel explains why Pelléas should not leave –​not just because of his father’s ill health or the unrest in the kingdom. Why go, he asks, since Marcellus is already dead? One’s duty is rarely found in the rush of travel and activity. It is better to wait for others on the threshold, he counsels, and let them enter as they pass, which they do all the time (‘Il vaut mieux les attendre sur le seuil et les faire entrer au moment ou ils passent; et ils passent tous les jours’). Romanticism and Modernism not only share a fascination with the threshold, but cultivate the space either side of it. The idea of a transcendent art, a transformative and transportative art, necessarily has to do with this movement between and across different states, conditions, and ways of being. But whereas, in Romanticism, the narrative of the musical work often has to do with the drawn-​out struggle to approach and effect such a transformation, in a metaphysical modernism the entire focus of the work is often the threshold of transformation. The difference is neatly heard in the contrast between Mahler and Webern; where Mahler symphonies stage a quest narrative towards the place where transformation may finally take place, Webern’s

Mirrors  161 miniatures focus themselves exclusively on this axial moment (consider, for example, the difference between Mahler’s First Symphony and Webern’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 10). The musical miniature often locates itself in this liminal space; Webern’s Lieder, no less than Schumann’s, tend to cultivate this place of exchange. The early mélodies of Fauré and Debussy similarly draw on a romantic poetry whose central topic is the mingling of soul and nature. The recurrent imagery of ‘Seule’, Op. 3, no. 1, a setting of Théophile Gautier, is that that of movement across the edges between things: everything in nature shares a chiasmic boundary with the rest of the world (except the languishing poet) –​the sea with the shore, the flower with the dawn, the wind with the trees, the still water with the moonlight, the dome of the church and the blue sky. Following romantic poetry’s fascination with liminal space –​one that continues through literary modernism –​songs are frequently located at the edge of water, the edge of night or sleep, or straining towards a horizon. But the same fascination is at the centre of the work of spectral composers in the latter part of the twentieth century; indeed, the very notion of spectralism hinges on crossing, to-​and-​fro, the perceptual thresholds of sonic material –​between acoustic and electronic sounds, timbre and harmony, fundamental and overtone.21 Writing about his work L’Esprit des dunes (1994) Tristan Murail comments that here ‘the same melodic, harmonic and electronic elements are apprehended under continually renewed angles’ such that the piece opens up ‘sonic landscapes at the border between reality and irreality’.22 The same sense of moving between the two is at the heart of two ‘water pieces’ from the same period, Le partage des eaux (1995–​96) and Bois flotté (1996), both of which elaborate the exchange between acoustic instruments and the computer analysis of natural sounds –​with one shaping the other just as a piece of driftwood (bois flotté) is shaped by the sea in which it floats. But this is a longstanding concern; the title of two pieces for piano from 1971–​72, Estuaire, similarly draws attention to the idea of margins and interchange between sonic materials. Murail’s note for this work talks about a memory of his birthplace in Le Havre, situated on the estuary of the river Seine, ‘where the fresh waters of the river mix with the salt waters of the sea’.23 The second movement is titled ‘Au mélange des eaux’. The recurrent terms of discourse about this repertoire have to do with the play of ambiguity produced by the fluidity of sounds in process rather than as fixed objects. It is not the opposition of acoustic and synthetic sounds that shapes this music, but an exploration of their relation, the hinge between them and their constant mixture (mélange) and intermingling. In the case

162 Appearing of Gondwana (1980), for example, Murail underlines that his interest was in ‘the harnessing of transitional phrases and the thresholds between two states, that’s to say in a liminal writing (écriture liminale)’.24 An early work for ondes martenot and piano, Les miroirs étendus (1971), signals that the fascination with a kind of border-​crossing between sound sources is conceived in terms of the transformative potential of the mirror reflection. The piano is not an ondes martenot, but the relation of one to the other sets up rich possibilities of materials that are alike but different. The piano offers a familiar mooring to the space and soundworld of the concert hall and a tradition of tempered musical discourse, while the untempered fluidity of the ondes martenot, like open water, tempts it out to wider spaces. Nearly forty years later, Murail’s fascination with the same idea is embodied in his three Reflections/​Reflets (2013 and 2017) for orchestra –​the double title is itself a play on this idea of sameness and difference. Murail has compared these pieces to the model of Debussy’s Nocturnes, each exploring a highly particular soundworld. The first, Spleen, is relatively dark and might be compared with the single-​minded concern with Debussy’s Nuages. The second, High Voltage/​Haute Tension, by contrast, is concerned with an explosive energy; Murail has related it to the idea of a genre of ‘firework’ music, and thus might perhaps find its double not only in Debussy’s Fêtes, but also the piano prelude ‘Feux d’artifice’. The third, published in 2017 and titled Vents et marées/​Tidal winds, rounds out the parallel with a nod to Debussy’s Sirènes. The mirror is a kind of threshold; on the other side, so to speak, there appears another space, one which inverts the ‘reality’ of the onlooker (the mirror was Foucault’s prime example of a heterotopic space). But by the same token, the threshold is a kind of mirror. If it marks a boundary, it also suggests a crossing and thus entry into a new space. Music has often lent itself to this sense, since the ‘real’ concrete presence of an acoustic sound is always edged by the threshold of silence. Murail’s Au-​delà du mur du son (1972) for orchestra, like several works by Jonathan Harvey –​From Silence (1988), Birdconcerto with Pianosong (2001), Death of Light, Light of Death (1998) –​ plays with this idea of edge and beyond. Such an idea has first to do with the phenomenology of listening but frequently takes on a metaphysical overtone in Harvey, as for Messiaen –​in works like Éclairs sur l’au-​delà (1991) –​or indeed for Webern (witness his use of mirror forms in his settings of the poetry of Hildegard Jone).25 Murail’s sense of mirror-​double is similarly found in several works by Kaija Saariaho, not just in the reworked and expanded pieces, such as Nymphéa (1987) and Nymphéa Reflection (2001) but in the

Mirrors  163 pairing of two works in Du cristal . . . à la fumée (1990), two pieces presented as an orchestral diptych, bridged by a solo cello. The ellipsis in the title points to the gap between the two which is also their hinge, a bridge between something solid and something aerial (the second piece uses an electronically-​ modified alto flute and solo cello). Risto Nieminen describes it thus: ‘The bridge is a looking-​glass in which the two aspects of the overall work are reflected. Not symmetrically, but as two separate worlds, one in front of the mirror and the other behind it –​through the looking glass. The laws that order the two universes are different, governed by a different logic.’26 As Jean-​Luc Hervé noted, in his discussion of Gérard Grisey’s Vortex temporum (1996), the idea of the threshold was proposed by Grisey in the 1980s as a kind of definition of ‘the concept of a liminal music –​that is to say placed on a threshold’.27 Grisey’s final work before his untimely death was Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (1996–​98) (Four songs for crossing the threshold) –​note the active verb underlining that this denotes not some static, metaphysical other but rather a kind of doing, a working at and on the threshold. Formed from a series of meditations on the threshold between life and death, these pieces distance themselves from the ‘events’ usually articulated by structural divisions. The opening prelude begins with white noise and the sound of breathing; only gradually does a voice coalesce and augment to a huge intensity before its collapse and fall back to silence (like a massively expanded version of Mallarmé’s/​ Debussy’s ‘Soupir’). Across the piece as a whole the voice moves constantly between loss and recovery, appearing from and disappearing back to a noise of non-​being, outside of human life and language. The strange scratching sounds of the instrumental interludes suggest the noise of insects in the accrued dust of time, as if to mark the erasure of the voice. Time and again, lines fall and bright energy collapses downwards –​in the prelude but also too in the fourth movement, La mort de la voix. D’après Erinna, and through to the final berceuse.28 This fascination with the threshold between states, and the mirror as a transformative threshold, thus defines a central focus of art and music ‘after Debussy’. It takes us back to Mallarmé’s faun, himself half-​man and half-​beast, caught –​like the poet –​between music and language as ways of taking hold of the world. The famous opening of Debussy’s musical response to Mallarmé’s poem, is generally discussed as embodying the sensuality of a sultry afternoon. But, more precisely, what it does is to state, in unambiguous form, the gentle oscillation between two spaces of being, its gentle rocking

164 Appearing motion between C♯ and G♮ connecting, through chromatic slippage, two harmonic worlds (see Example 5.1). This is a kind of musical archetype of liminal movement; it anticipates the gentle oscillations of the sea at the start of Sirènes, or the threshold moment in the first movement of La mer, where the cor anglais and two solo cellos rock equally gently across the tritone, poised between two harmonic worlds.29 The opening bars of the Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faune set out a musical equivalent not just to Mallarmé’s play between music and language, but also to the space demarcated by the two hands of Rodin’s La cathédrale. The flute proposes one sensuous form, the other instruments, led by the horn, another. Between them is the famous bar of silence, an empty space holding the two ‘hands’ together by the tension of their separation. The flute solo rocks between two pitches (C♯ to G♮) but also between the whole-​tone space and the ‘arrival’ at an E major space (b. 3). The flute alternates with the horn, and the horn itself rocks between two spaces –​the C♯ chord in b. 4 and the B♭ chord. The bar of silence is followed by a kind of mirror inversion: the horn theme is extended, but leads back to the opening flute (now over a D major chord). The oscillation between two worlds could not be clearer. As a summons for the appearing of desired presence, the flute here anticipates a more direct enactment in Ravel’s ‘La Flûte enchantée’, the second song of Shéhérazade (1903).30 From the absence of night and sleep, Ravel’s flute summons the appearance of the full orchestra, overflowing in its sensual rush of colour. An undetermined desire without object, it breaks off rather than ends in this understated, reticent and momentary piece. If, in the third Example 5.1  Claude Debussy, Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faune, bb. 1–​6

Mirrors  165 song of Ravel’s triptych, ‘L’indifferent’, the sonorous richness of the orchestral music is the desired body, it nevertheless remains as ungraspable and impermanent as the young stranger who passes by: ‘On my doorstep your lips sing in a remote and mysterious dialect like music out of tune.’ (Ta lèvre chante sur le pas de ma porte /​une langue inconnue et charmante /​comme une musique fausse . . .). Once again, the music positions us on a threshold (here, a doorstep) between two worlds –​between the interiority of the subject and the rich, remote and mysterious world that passes by on the other side. And just as the nymphs evade the grasp of the faun, so the indifferent stranger is not to be possessed –​‘from my threshold I see you moving away’ (de mon seuil je te vois t’éloigner). The voice of the stranger strikes the ear just as Pelléas hears the voice of Mélisande, like a bird from a far-​off place. Such is the threshold between music and language, between the understanding of the linguistic mind and the sonorous sense of the musical body. For a certain kind of philosophy, the edges of language are the edges of the world –​the edges of what can be said and thus what can be known and thought. For the medieval cartographer, the edges of the known world were declared finis terrae –​the precipitous ends of the flat earth to which no one could journey beyond and return. The two ideas come together wonderfully in Umberto Eco’s fictional medieval library in The Name of the Rose.31 For such a worldview, the edge of language is not so much a threshold –​a border or margin implying another space that comes to meet it –​but a dead-​end, a barrier beyond which there is nothing. The medieval map thus draws the ends of the earth and of language alike as a place of monsters, of madness and death. Which brings us back to the myth of the sirens. The ancient fear of the sirens is that they lure the listener off the linguistic map altogether, and into the dark abyss of the wordless. But all the music to which we have been listening says otherwise. It says that, with music, we move across thresholds and between worlds. In the face of the repressive anxiety of that which is other to language, music offers a sonorous release into other ways of being.

Echo In 1911, a year before the premiere of the ballets of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé and Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faune, the Ballets Russes staged Alexander Tcherepnin’s Narcisse et Echo, in an adaptation of Ovid’s story by Léon Bakst with choreography by Michel Fokine. Tcherepnin’s score is

166 Appearing full of echoes and pre-​echoes of other composer’s scores, in what Paulo de Castro calls a ‘rich intertextual web of allusions’.32 Among those references was the use of a wordless chorus as the voice of nature, recalling the female voices of Debussy’s Sirènes and anticipating the mixed chorus of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé. The myth of Narcissus is readily evoked in relation to the self-​absorption of art at the fin de siècle, most obviously in the case of Aestheticism and art’s preference for its own self-​contained beauty to an exploration of a world beyond itself. John William Waterhouse’s iconic Echo and Narcissus (1903) provides a knowing visual allegory of such an idea. But the larger idea, of a transformation of perceived reality through the reflective transformation of the artwork, is more radical. The echo supplies a sonic equivalent to the idea, though it is one less readily amenable to musical treatment than is the mirror reflection in painting. Echo ‘effects’ aside, music’s auditory parallel to the altered reflection is the altered reprise (making a spatial relation temporal); the ornamented double in baroque keyboard music, or the da capo aria in vocal music, both offer historical examples. The increasing avoidance of repetition in nineteenth-​ century modernism, however, tended to displace this idea from new musical practice. By 1900, Schoenberg’s idea of developing variation encapsulates the central technique of a musical prose that elaborates itself entirely from within the creative subject, in a constantly dynamic trajectory, rather than being made in the encounter with pre-​given material. Painting with a broad brush, here then is a striking distinction between the ‘French’ turn around 1900 and the tradition of Austro-​German musical form-​building. In the music of Debussy and his contemporaries, not only is the (vertical) exploration of mirror-​like symmetry increasingly important, but so too the idea of (horizontal) return.33 It is, once again, in later electro-​acoustic music that this idea comes into its own, as the transformed return of musical material arrives from a quite different sound source, moreover, from an acousmatic source that seems to stand outside the acoustic space of the ‘real’ performers. In Boulez’s Dialogue de l’ombre double (1985), a solo clarinet occupies the centre of the performance space. From here it generates a dialogue with its own shadow (a pre-​recorded clarinet), spatialised across six speakers placed around the edges of the hall, with the audience located in the space between the two. The form of the piece is an alternation between six ‘strophes’ played by the acoustic clarinet and the pre-​recorded clarinet heard over the speakers. But it is of course in the dialogue between the two, in the proliferating multiple voices, that the music emerges as a constant flickering between

Mirrors  167 real and irreal, presence and echo, such that the borders between them are criss-​crossed continuously in both directions. This is a music that not only makes palpable the crossing of thresholds, but –​to borrow a resonant phrase of Jean-​Luc Nancy –​of ‘being singular plural’.34 The idea had earlier been explored in Répons (1981–​84) –​an extensive work for ensemble and electronics and a key work in the development of real-​ time computer transformation of acoustic instruments. Here, an acoustic ensemble of twenty-​four musicians is located in the centre of the space, with six soloists placed in a ring around the outer edges of the space (cimbalom, piano 1, xylophone/​glockenspiel, harp, vibraphone, piano 2/​synthesizer). Beyond them is a further ring of speakers which feed in the electro-​acoustic transformation of the soloists. The piece is an elaborate and extended exploration of moving between different sound worlds and the dialogue between them, of blurring the distinctions between acoustic ‘origin’ and electronically transformed ‘echo’. In the haunting closing section, the rolling arpeggio figures of the soloists echo out into the otherwise empty space like waves of reflected images –​a sonic parallel to the proliferating mirrors of sky and water in Monet’s largest Nymphéas canvasses. Although a tape-​piece rather than a live interaction of acoustic and electronic sounds, Jonathan Harvey’s Mortuos plango, vivos voco (1980) remains a kind of touchstone of this musical exchange between different soundworlds –​ the apparently ‘real’ and substantive tone of the boy’s voice on the one hand, and that of the bell on the other, but with both intermingled by means of electronic transformation so that voice and bell sounds become part of a larger whole. In doing so, what is past (as echo) is recalled into the present through a kind of reversal of sonic decay, blurring the sense of past and present, sound and silence, attack and resonance. The title of the piece is taken from the Latin inscription on the great bell of Winchester cathedral, a recording of which provided part of the sonic material for the work: ‘I lament the dead, I call the living’. It is fitting that perhaps Harvey’s best known work should underline this idea, of sound as an interchange across the threshold of life and death itself, an idée fixe that shapes his music as a whole –​not simply as a matter of personal belief, but as something inscribed into the very fabric of his musical materials. Bell sounds are perhaps the archetypal musical sound-​image of resonance, echo, and decay –​a marker of both spatial distance and the sonic fullness that distance transforms. They echo through a century of music ‘after Debussy’,35 from Debussy’s ‘Cloches à travers les feuilles’ and Ravel’s ‘La vallée des cloches’ to Messiaen’s Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum

168 Appearing and Boulez’s Répons, from Varèse’s Déserts to Risset’s Sud, Harvey’s Mortuous plango to Grisey’s Vortex temporum. For Adriana Cavarero, the nymph Echo introduces into speech a moment of distance that creates the resonance of music. As she put it: ‘Echo makes the musicality of language sing.’36 But this loosening up of language through resonance also loosens its semantic precision: ‘the revocalization is thus a desemanticization’.37 It is thus in this distancing or gapping of language in which music comes into its own. As Jessica Wiskus has shown, Merleau-​ Ponty found something similar in Cézanne’s fascination with the principle of ‘non-​coincidence’. Whereas, in the Cartesian worldview the visual intelligence surveys the world with pan-​optic vision, without any dislocation between seeing and the viewed object, Cézanne and the art that comes after him opens up a gap of non-​coincidence. The wider significance of all those Monet water paintings is similarly found in how their foregrounding of reflection breaks up the fixed solidity of things. Or again, as Bachelard underlines in relation to writers like Poe and Rodenbach, the reflective properties of still water come to define the oeuvres of writers fascinated by the unsettling and unstable phenomenon of imprecise doubling.38 It would be nearly a century later before philosophy was able to open up, within language, such a play of différance. In music, of course, the threshold of transformation takes place within the temporal unfolding of the piece. In Mahler, the Adornian suspension holds up the linear progress of the piece in order to deliver an outcome that, until that point, was not forthcoming. In his unlikely twin, Anton Webern, what was temporal becomes definitively spatial, as the threshold becomes an axis of reflective symmetry –​vertically, in terms of the intervallic and registral spacing of pitches, and horizontally, in terms of palindromic structures on every level from row forms to the structure of complete movements.39 But in this, the transformed image of reflection is also a metaphor for the alchemy of art itself. Spampinato quotes Pierre Bonnard on this process of transfiguration: ‘I have all my subjects to hand. I go to see them, I take notes. And then I return home. And before painting, I reflect, I dream.’40 Debussy made a similar comment in an interview in Rome in 1914 that in the presence of the sea, his creativity was paralysed; in order to write, one needs distance.41 La mer is related to the sea not because such music imitates directly what is visible in nature, but because it transposes what is invisible in nature –​that is to say, movement, tone, the constellation that arises between things. The ellipses at the end of the titles to the Piano Preludes are there to remind us

Mirrors  169 of this –​that without the distance, the absence, the fold of return, art does not take place. Bernard quotes a description from 1875 of the gap between the orchestral pit and the stage in the Wagnerian opera house as ‘a mystical abyss which separates the ideal world from the real world’.42 The transformation enacted on stage is thus inscribed into the spatial division between the stage and the orchestral pit, and thus the space between words (and the Apolline world of forms they construct) and music (understood famously by Nietzsche in terms of its Dionysian and wordless flux). For Mallarmé, the task of poetry was precisely to undo the fixity of a world defined through language and to effect a ‘dispersion volatile’. Poetry should dissolve the fixity of a linguistic world and take flight from it. This fundamentally deconstructive urge lies at the heart of Mallarmé’s work, albeit to replace the ‘thing’ with a dematerialised ‘idea’. Music is different in this respect; music does not negate the object in order to replace it with the idea (a muteness which Mallarmé, the poet, sees as a lack). But, contra Mallarmé, this is precisely music’s value –​it loosens the materiality of the world not in order to negate it, but to reconfigure our relationship to it. Music is of course the art of evanescence, the very model of the dispersion volatile of Mallarmé’s poetry; just like the latter, its goal is also ‘to transpose a fact of nature into a vibratory near-​disappearance’.43 For Proust, and therefore for Merleau-​Ponty who comes to music through Proust, music nevertheless embodies a ‘sensible idea’. In the last few pages of ‘The intertwining –​The chiasm’, in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-​ Ponty discusses Proust’s notion of the musical idea. As Jessica Wiskus underlines, Merleau-​Ponty finds there ‘a model for the ontological shift that [he] seeks to articulate through the philosophy of the flesh’.44 The sensible idea, like the musical idea, is not waiting for some linguistic clarification or explication. As Wiskus comments: ‘Their shadow –​their depth –​is constitutive.’45 She continues: ‘the musical idea is a “negativity that is not nothing” for, through this divergence or negativity, the fact that there is an unpresentable comes to presence’.46 The musical or sensible idea is ‘not the positing of a content, but the opening of a dimension that can never again be closed [not a] “positive thought” [but] “negativity or absence circumscribed” ’.47 What might a philosophy be like, Merleau-​Ponty asks himself, that might do something similar, ‘in the same sense of music, that, speaking not at all, says everything’?48 Merleau-​Ponty’s rhetorical question looks back to Mallarmé and forwards, by just a few years, to Derrida: all three treat language negatively in

170 Appearing order to show that its operations do not add up to a metaphysical closure but rather open out and point beyond its own limits. At the same time, their contemporaries explored, in painting and music, the agrammatical materiality and particularity of art to challenge the generality of language from the other direction. This moves in the opposite direction to signification as a kind of will-​to-​truth. As Brian Kane underlines, the determination to close the ‘horrifying’ abyss between thought and reality constitutes, as its agent, the signifying subject, thus establishing a closed circle of subjectivity and signification.49 Bergson had identified this problem a century earlier, showing how the language of science as a will-​to-​power contrasts with the experience of the durée as a kind of openness to the world. And by that time, of course, Mallarmé had already allowed the poet/​mariner to be shipwrecked and to sink precisely into this abyss between the things made by language and the wide ocean that lies beyond, around and within them. The resonance of Mallarmé and Bergson a century later in the work of Michel Serres and Jean-​Luc Nancy might be heard to parallel that between Debussy and Ravel around 1900 with that of Grisey, Murail, and Saariaho around 2000. What is new ‘after Debussy’ is the foregrounding, across music and the arts, of a gentle unloosening of the linguistic fixity of the world. The disorientation of things, via the cover of painting a reflection in water, or the poetic alibi of the mirror, is similarly found in a musical tradition that opens up the ungraspable space of resonance –​the echo that comes back, after the substance of the sound. The interaction between the two constitutes a kind of ‘dialogue with the shadow double’ which is constitutive of the act of listening to the world.

6 Taking place The clouds pass slowly across the sky beneath the moon, numerous clouds, neither too heavy nor too light: the clouds. That’s all.1

Listening to landscape Imagine a music that sounds like daydreaming  –​a music that repeatedly turns over the same unarticulated thought without it ever becoming explicit, a faint stirring of the mind by some movement felt within the body, that presses briefly forward only to then disappear as unremarkably as it came, leaving behind a faint but inexplicable melancholy. Listening to the first movement of Debussy’s Nocturnes one thinks of clouds only because the title tells you so. It is a good title, to be sure, allowing the listener more easily to accept a music that turns over without apparent purpose, and that drifts across the horizon of the listener’s perception with undirected nonchalance. The largely unchanging rhythmic pattern, and the essentially monochrome orchestral palette, make a curiously impersonal frame for the occasional return of the mournful little figure in the cor anglais, like a half-​remembered but unspoken regret (Example 6.1). Such music does not say; it takes place. It is communicative, but it does not convey information or communicate extraneous content. It does not pass messages, tell stories, express emotions, or represent things, events, or states of mind. That we nevertheless ‘freight’ it with such tasks is a sign of how far our linguistic culture refuses to tolerate music’s resistance to the communicative function of language. We insist, instead, that music should be a form of expression –​the self-​expression of the composer, the performer, the listener, or else the expression of ideas of philosophy, religion, history, or society, or the narrating of stories. Even the romantics, who insisted music was somehow ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ language, at the same time framed it as a higher kind of communication –​mysterious, but a language nevertheless.

After Debussy. Julian Johnson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066826.001.0001

172 Appearing Example 6.1  Claude Debussy, ‘Nuages’, Nocturnes, bb. 1–​9

Music after Debussy distances itself from this idea and, by ‘saying nothing’, enhances music’s capacity for a communion of presence. From this viewpoint, listening to music is less like watching a film or reading a novel and more like contemplating a landscape. But for all that such an aesthetic is now over a century old, it still seems shocking in the face of an essentially linguistic expectation that music should bear some expressive message. Georg Friedrich Haas’s Concerto Grosso No. 1, for four alphorns and orchestra (2014) elaborates an extraordinary landscape over its thirty-​ minute duration, derived from the haunting tone of the (valveless) alphorns which are, of course, confined to the natural overtone series. Their dialogue with the orchestra expands the ‘inside’ of the sound of the instrument in a delicate, atmospheric, and richly sonorous space that immerses the listener in a way that might be compared to the contemplation of landscape (at its UK premiere at the BBC Proms in July 2018, it was programmed alongside Strauss’s Eine Alpensinfone). And yet, one critic noted, after that performance, the lack of ‘any meaningful development’ in the work, while another commented that the composer’s ‘expressive aims remain opaque’ and that ‘the whole work retains an impenetrable aura of abstraction’.2 It would be no less of an anachronism to berate Bach for failing to employ an electric bass.

Taking place  173 Landscape has no intention to impart a message. It is not a form of communication by which A says x to B so that B understands x. Which is not to say landscape cannot be read or interpreted –​the geologist, geographer, historian, hunter, farmer, traveller, surveyor, planner, builder will all read features of the landscape as signs and traces useful to their own specific projects. But the rise of landscape as a scene of aesthetic experience parallels the rise in the status of an autonomous music –​music without words, but also without obvious function. Both have to do with what Kant identified as a ‘formal purposiveness without a purpose’; both were coterminous, in western modernity, with the process of industrialisation and the dominance of instrumental reason on which it was based. Ideas of preserving wild space for their own sake –​as in the establishing of national parks –​go hand in hand with the public art gallery; both are protected spaces for the cultivation of a contemplative ‘for-​itself ’ view of the world, a countervailing way of being to the means–​end logic of industrial capitalism. A more recent material and phenomenological turn opens up common ground between the perception of landscape and that of art, and both to the idea of language. I develop this parallel here, arguing that Debussy stands at the beginning of a musical practice that foregrounds an essentially ecological mode of address in place of one of signification. I am not concerned here with the representation of landscape in music, even though this idea often provides the excuse or cover for a radical kind of music not shaped by prevalent ideas of expression or saying; as Jankélévitch says, in relation to the Piano Preludes, the titles are simply ‘pretexts and alibis’.3 My focus is rather with music that works upon its listeners in comparable ways to the aesthetic perception of landscape. Both provoke a distinctive kind of perception, one that listens not to any particular thing but to listening itself. As Michel Serres says, ‘all grand landscape creates an amphitheatre’ in which looking turns to listening ‘the better to see that it is a question of hearing’.4 Such a quality of attention is intermittent and hard to sustain. In our insistently signifying culture the noisy imperative of interpretation quickly breaks any momentary silence; language abhors a vacuum and breaks in through the smallest gap to make experience mean something. Even if we seek the epiphanic intensity of a radically empirical presence, outside of signification, we fall quickly into ‘making sense’ of it in language. The primary fact (deed) of any culture, is that the world comes to us already written over and inscribed by meaning. But there remains the possibility, however fleeting or partial, that the aesthetic mode of contemplation holds signification at bay

174 Appearing in a bracketing (epoché) of all associative connections or practical concerns. Indeed, art might be considered to be one of the most significant human achievements for this capacity to enhance, expand, and develop such partial moments of radical particularity. If art has a critical capacity, it lies in this ability to resist and hold at bay the instrumental attitude which makes both us and the world instruments of extraneous purposes. Like landscape, its presence is ‘for-​itself ’ and not as a sign for something else. It takes place. It is present to us and thereby makes us present to ourselves. The experience is familiar but rare: in the intensity of being in the larger presence of landscape as of music, there is no need to break the silence. I attend to the slow drift of clouds, the gentle ripple of leaves, the warmth of sunlight, the coolness of the air. The world abundantly is, without speech. It says nothing to me, and it asks nothing of me. In being so absorbed, I too am mute because, for a moment, I too am abundantly present. The words come after. They rush in to fill the withdrawal of presence. They try to retrace a set of steps back to the place of the encounter. It is not that they can recover it, but they are an attempt to bring one back to the edge of the wordless content, the threshold or horizon of the experience. This, then, is a two-​fold process: a flickering between two non-​identical modes of being –​the sensory but mute plenitude of wordless being, and the articulate play of language which strives to demarcate a space beyond itself. The jouissance of this flickering, this intermittent spark between the two, is the business of art –​neither a collapse back to pure materiality, nor a leap into the abstraction of signification, but the articulation of the resonating space between the two. Poetry, as Mallarmé famously insisted to Degas, is made not of ideas, but of words. If it seems to be provoked by nature, it is because it is provoked by what language is not. So poetry is always a threshold between the figurative and the unfigured, the word and the wordless. To become a poet (Mallarmé once more) you immerse yourself in words in order to break your way out of them, to use them against themselves, to make them yield a content that exceeds them, a plenitude predicated on wordlessness. Poetry is a trick, an illusion, arising from a specific configuration of words, of something that is (literally) non-​existent and without substance, merely the space between words, an object implied by the play of light and shade, a negative image. In Jean-​Luc Nancy’s words, ‘art is always the art of not saying it, of exposing that which is not to be said (not an unsayable, but the not-​to-​be-​said of sense) along the edges of all that is exposed, as the sayable itself, and further, as saying itself, as all of saying is its fragmentation’.5 To make a pot, the potter needs/​

Taking place  175 kneads clay. You start with clay and work it between your hands, shaping it above the turning wheel. Of course, the purpose of the pot is not the clay itself, but the empty space (the nothing) that it encloses –​the space that lends itself to repeated refillings and repourings. The shape of pots may differ, but they all define an emptiness, a nothing, that enables their content. How is it, then, that music might work on us like a landscape? How is it that it might ground us rather than transport us elsewhere? How can it work differently to all the saying, doing, making, and re-​making of the sonata, symphony, or fugue, music in which time is forever in flight, evacuating each moment in order to move to another? Matthieu Guillot presents a compelling case for how a certain kind of music occasions a certain kind of listening to the world –​what he calls ‘dialogues with the audible’.6 In his account, the audible is a presence of the material world anterior to music, but which music makes us hear anew by first distancing the world (the aesthetic distance of all art) and then, through sonority, bringing us back to it with renewed focus.7 Musical sound makes us listen differently; it is the aural equivalent of changing our ‘point of view’. Listening to sounds, in Guillot’s account, is the first stage in a larger process of encounter with the world –​‘a meeting that would provide the occasion of the order of a revelation, a primordial discovery of an auditory sumptuousness’.8 As an example of this special kind of listening, Guillot explores the special kind of silence occasioned by landscapes under snow, and a group of musical works that present themselves in a similar way. He listens, for example, to Beat Furrer’s piano piece, Voicelessness. The snow has no voice (1986),9 for the same slow and mute processes one might find in a snow-​covered landscape. Both musical work and landscape foreground, and bring to attention, a similar quality of voicelessness that not only allows silence to take place, but thereby allows (linguistic) space for the world to take place for us.10 The silence of snow is a veil that makes something appear, that draws attention to something that otherwise goes unnoticed. It works in the same way as, for Mallarmé, the veils of the dancer frame the appearing of her movement or, for Debussy, the veils of sound spun by the composer brings to presence something that is not literally there. Music, like the veil, is a ‘material intermediary’ that makes something manifest that would otherwise be neither seen nor heard. Music, like the snow, is ‘a presence which engenders absence: a presence that deprives’.11 What it deprives us of is the familiar look and sound of things; what it affords is the appearance of something that we had stopped seeing or hearing. This is therefore a kind of reversal of the normal relation by which silence is an absence which sound

176 Appearing fills. Debussy’s ‘Voiles’ is not obviously a ‘snow’ piece, but it works in exactly this way: by laying out a blank (blanc) sonic landscape without figure or event, a landscape consisting almost entirely of featureless whole-​tone surface, it frames an absence of differentiation and substance. In this it shows affinity with a quite different piece that declares it is ‘about’ snow –​the The Snow is Dancing (from The Children’s Corner, 1906–​08). Childlike in its fascination for patterns discerned in swirling sameness, this little piano piece focuses on the play of perception itself. It is precisely through reducing the musical material to patterns of sameness and difference (rather than objects, events, or people) that this piece stages appearing itself, joining the phenomenological epoché with the wide-​ eyed wonder of the child. For Guillot, the music of Iannis Xenakis embodies this sense of ‘sonorous presences’ and teaches us how to listen differently. In quoting Michel Serres, to illustrate the effect of this music on the listener, he employs terms familiar from the world of Mallarmé and Debussy. The listener is ‘overwhelmed [accable] beneath the waves [vagues] of noise’ in a ‘shipwreck [naufrage] of perception’ and ‘submerged [englouti] in space, drowned [noyé] in its noise’.12 Xenakis is here heard as a kind of ‘protomusic’, without ego or subject, that is, in the words of Serres, ‘the naked voice of the things of the universe’.13 Guillot hears something similar in the electronic works of Jean-​Claude Risset (1938-​ 2016) to which the sounds of the natural world are central –​such as the four movements of Elementa (1998), Sud (1985), and Avel (1997). To listen afresh to such music, suggests Guillot, requires ‘putting one’s musical culture in parenthesis, in order to recover a certain innocence of the ear’,14 to employ an auditory ‘reduction’ (in the phenomenological sense employed by Schaeffer) to listen for itself not for the communication of messages. ‘Facing the sea, or the elements, there is nothing left but to listen to the ungraspable sonorous phenomenon.’15 Guillot sees a deep connection here between the listening put in play by Risset’s music and the language of Michel Serres trying to frame such an auditory encounter with the world through language, a rapprochement between composer and philosopher that is not simply fortuitous.16 Sud puts in play a mixture of natural, synthetic, and hybrid sounds, moving constantly across the threshold of the real and the irreal. The composer’s own account ties it to sounds of the sea, of birds, and of insects (the earlier concerns, respectively, of Debussy, Messiaen, and Bartók), blurring the boundaries between things to focus on the act of perception itself. This play of acoustic hybridity might recall the fascination, in Mallarmé and Debussy, with the figure of the faun and the siren –​impossible creatures that, as half

Taking place  177 animal/​half human, are unreal but not unimaginable. What, in the iconography of the nineteenth century, draws on mythic or fairy-​tale creatures becomes, in the later twentieth century, an idée fixe of electro-​acoustic music that moves between the physically present ‘acoustic’ musician and her electronic double or shadow (an idea explored in Chapter 5). Was Debussy not strangely prescient of just this in his apparently light-​hearted speculation, in ‘La musique en plein air’ (1901), about ‘a mysterious collaboration of music with the air, the movement of leaves and scent of flowers’?17 It was, after all, an idea that is foregrounded by a number of his titles –​‘Cloches à travers les feuilles’ (Images, Book 2), ‘Les parfums de la nuit’ (Ibéria/​2), ‘Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir’ (Préludes, Book 1). Martin Seel, in his development of an aesthetics of appearing, fixes on the related ideas of flickering and resonating –​qualities of encounter with the natural world which arrest us in particularly intense ways but in which ‘nothing happens’ as such: ‘To look onto a sunlit sea surface in largely calm conditions is also a perception of resonating [ . . . ] we perceive a stirring of light and water that cannot be followed as an orderly movement.’18 The paradox that arises here, however, is that this space in which nothing happens, occasions an experience which is quite the opposite of emptiness:  ‘Here [ . . . ] resonating appears by virtue of the fact that in this emptiness –​or acoustically speaking, in this silence  –​an extraordinary event fullness is perceivable, a fullness that does not reach perception outside of aesthetic attitudes. Even in what is the purportedly empty, therefore, resonating proves to be the presence of a fullness . . . .’19 Music is of course the prime example, among the arts, of a kind of resonating in which nothing ‘occurs’, but it has often been put more deliberately to a signifying function. My argument about music ‘after Debussy’ is that it recovers and re-​foregrounds an idea of music as ‘something occurring in which nothing particular occurs’,20 a focus that Seel himself underlines. But such an emptiness, far from being ‘less’ than music that busily does and says things, seems to afford an extraordinary sense of fullness. Its pleasure, argues Seel, has to do with a kind of ‘self-​surrender’ that momentarily leaves behind ‘the strenuousness of self-​ maintenance’  –​a pleasure in self-​surrender that was the very thing that Adorno and Horkheimer warned was the temptation of the sirens.21 Taking place is central to all three movements of Ibéria (1905–​08) the central triptych of the Images for orchestra. Similarly, all three of the Estampes (1903) for piano are stylised landscapes (‘Pagodes’, ‘Soirée dans Grenade’, ‘Jardins sous la pluie’), as too are the pieces that make up the second book of

178 Appearing Images for piano (1907) (‘Cloches à travers les feuilles’, ‘Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut’, ‘Poissons d’Or’). As the titles suggest, Debussy’s ‘image’ is generally not of some static, unchanging object disconnected to its environment, but precisely the movement within an environment –​the sounding of bells heard across the leaves, the changing light as the moon falls towards the old temple, the falling of the rain upon the garden, the shimmering of the goldfish in the pond. The absence of human figures is key to the effect; there is no human drama here, no expressing or emoting subject. Witness, in ‘Jardins sous la plie’, for example, the erasure of specific identity in the constancy and neutrality of the semiquaver rhythmic figure, a movement of energy without any fixed point or reference. Instead, this music plays with the emerging and disappearing of perceptual patterns, of movement towards and away. In this way, it focuses on the act of perception itself. Like ‘Jeux de vagues’, from La mer, this is a play of forms, sounds, colours, not a saying. A similar pattern, but in slow motion, shapes ‘Pagodes’. Out of the spatial and harmonic containment little melodic forms emerge only to fall away again. The play between the neutrality of the pentatonic and the poignancy of the melodic descent makes for a gentle dissonance whose echo of desire is, at the same time, already fulfilled in the rich sonority. Even when the piece expands it does so without climax since the whole space is self-​ contained (through register, harmony, rhythm) such that, at times, the extended repetitions sound like a kind of proto-​minimalism. The highly textural coda stages a drawn-​out process of disappearing, ending with the full register of the piano keyboard left ringing in the air (laisser vibrer). These pieces involve plenty of movement –​they are not blank canvasses –​witness the play of ‘Poissons d’Or’ (capricieux et souple is the marking at b. 58). But the noisy gestural play of the moment, excused by the alibi of the goldfish, is contained here within a resonant and immersive sonic space. The play between quite different temporalities –​of the gestural present and a suspended, spatialised time –​makes this piece another study of perception itself. The listening subject is not expressed by this music, nor invited to emote to some putative story told through music. Rather, the listener is drawn into a sonic environment, absorbed in the play of momentary and insubstantial events that emerge from, and then quickly subside into, the gently containing background. This is music that embodies Merleau-​Ponty’s idea of reciprocity of perception and ‘ongoing interchange’; or, in David Abram’s words, of an ‘improvised duet between my animal body and the fluid, breathing landscape that it inhabits’.22

Taking place  179 There is common ground here with Messiaen. The appearance of birdsong in Messiaen’s music is, first and foremost, an act of listening to nature, of taking place, of being in a place, and of sound defining a place. This too is a music which says nothing, without (human) intentionality or communication, and without ‘emotional expression’ or ideas (however much the composer over-​writes his scores to say otherwise). But this linguistic silence defines a space which, by stilling the listening body, appears like a kind of garden or landscape in which layered voices affirm a kind of (ornithological) ‘I am’. Indeed, the musical topics of bells, birds, and the resonant sonic spaces they define, echo through music ‘after Debussy’  –​from Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles to Grisey’s Vortex temporum.23

Le jardin clos: Dwelling in music ‘Exaucement’ (Fulfilment), the first song of Fauré’s Le jardin clos (1914), is one of the composer’s simplest but most subtle evocations of dwelling within the space of music. Even the look of the score seems to emphasise ‘les blancs’, the mute spaces framed in Symbolist poetry.24 In the right hand of the piano, the regularity of the falling quaver pattern belies the fact that its harmonic content gently changes with each half-​bar unit (see Example 6.2). It never once repeats itself, while being all the time the same, like the image of the fountain in the nocturnal garden that appears in so many poems and songs of this time. The vocal line is contained within the space outlined by the piano figure, blending the two sonorities in a kind of heterophonic elaboration of the same pitch material. The voice is both immersed in the timbral and harmonic space and also emerges from it –​distinct and articulated, but contained. The piano left hand appears to add a bass-​line but it is one that eschews the normal controlling function of a bass. It produces no firm cadence until the very end, but serves instead to gently offset the arpeggiated figures of the right hand, to keep the harmonic space open-​ended, infinitely variegated in its patterning of light and shade, and gently dissonant in being always slightly oblique to a clear tonal function. In a similar way, the piano makes a subtle metrical counterpoint to the voice in its movement on the weak beats of each bar. Rarely did Fauré find more understated and exquisite form for putting in motion the gap between two things otherwise so intimately close.

180 Appearing Example 6.2  Gabriel Fauré, ‘Exaucement’, Le jardin clos, bb. 1–​9

Van Lerberghe’s poem has to do with the ‘expiry’ of words –​literally, their giving out upon the breath, and, metaphorically, with their failing, leaving only the silent presence of the body. Witness the sudden inflection to the dark interiority of E♭ on the word ‘lèvre’ (lip) in the lines ‘Alors que la parole expire, Sur ta lèvre qui tremble encore’ (As words expire, on your still trembling lip). The muteness of the soul, like that of Fauré’s music, is ‘like a fairy asleep in a secret garden’ (Fée endormie au jardin clos). The second song, ‘Quand tu plonges tes yeux dans mes yeux’, has to do with being present to another through the senses: Quand tu plonges tes yeux dans mes When you sink your eyes in mine, yeux, Je suis toute dans mes yeux. Quand ta bouche dénoue ma bouche, Mon amour n’est que ma bouche. Quand tu frôles mes cheveux, Je n’existe plus qu’en eux. Quand ta main effleure mes seins, J’y monte comme un feu soudain.

I am utterly in my eyes. When your mouth seeks mine, My love is only in my mouth. When you ruffle my hair, I exist nowhere but there. When your hand touches my breasts, I rise up like a sudden fire.

Taking place  181 There is an overlap here with the gaze of the lovers in Pelléas et Mélisande: both have to do with the speechlessness of love, the mute plenitude of being wholly present to oneself. But, here too, the music has to do with the movement of appearing; Fauré’s harmony is constantly moving in unexpected ways, like the ‘tipsy’ flight of the seabirds in L’horizon chimérique. Something similar pervades the third song, ‘La messagère’, which has to do with the ecstatic and erotic coming to presence of dawn in spring. Central to Van Lerberghe’s poem is the image of the threshold, the opening door where night becomes dawn, a mystery underlined by the flatwards shift in the harmony and the stilling of the semiquaver movement in the more introspective middle section. This is a song that anticipates Merleau-​Ponty’s exposition of the idea of the flesh of the world, the material interchange of self and environment. The lips are the threshold of self and other just as the mouth is both a space in which speech moves outwards and the world moves inward, the threshold of the inhaling and exhaling of breath that makes song itself a threshold between subject and world. The fourth song, ‘Je me poserai sur ton coeur’, has to do with the plenitude found within the beloved: ‘I shall rest upon your heart /​like the spring upon the sea.’ Both poem and song cultivate a sense of surface without forms (‘where no flower can ever grow’), drawing attention to breath-​like flowers of light, or like a bird upon the sea, ‘cradling the eternal rhythm of waves and space’ (Et que berce le rythme éternel / Des flots et de l’espace). The fifth song, ‘Dans la nymphée’, centres on the sacred mystery of appearance in the nocturnal garden. Here, too, music anticipates a central idea of Merleau-​Ponty –​ the relation of the visible and the invisible: ‘although your eyes don’t see it, believe in your heart it is there’. This is a song about appearance, about what appears in the secret of the night, through closed eyes. But sometimes, she appears, with her eyes open, she awakes, arises, transforming the garden with her radiance. Fauré’s control of the rise and fall of the vocal line is underpinned by an astonishing sequence of chords: chromatically and vagrantly related triads produce a mute sequence of chords that become, for the voice, the ‘other’ world of the nocturnal garden. The piano makes a sonorous space which the words traverse, but the two remain in related but quite different temporalities –​one of vocal saying and the other of sonorous resonance. And so the cycle goes on. The sixth song, ‘Dans la penombre’, is about the blurring of dream and reality; the seventh, ‘Il m’est cher, amour, le bandeau’, the ecstasy of erotic opening and the blocking out of the visible (by means of blindfold) the better to reveal the invisible (‘​Mes lèvres où mon âme chante/

182 Appearing toute d’extase et de baisers/ S’ouvrent comme une fleur ardente/ au-dessus d’un fleuve embrasé’). The eighth and final song, ‘Inscription sur le sable’, is a rewriting of presence. Her departure leaves only dust behind, except that the image of her face is traced in the stones and among the sand and, as song, resonates in the trace that is the music. The metaphor of the garden as the self-​contained space of the soul is an ancient one. It is also a metaphor for art itself –​an aesthetic space in which the soul might find itself again. The recurrent image of such poetry is that of two lovers in a nocturnal garden –​one that permeates the history of music from Fauré’s ‘Jardin nocturne’ (Mirages) and Messaien’s ‘Jardin du sommeil d’amour’ (Turangalîla Symphony), to Takemitsu’s In an Autumn Garden (1973). ‘My music is like a garden, and I am the gardener’, writes Takemitsu. ‘Listening to my music can be compared with walking through a garden and experiencing the changes in light, pattern and texture.’ In the nocturnal garden of poetry the separate identities of the visual world are displaced by gently interleaved sounds (the splashing of fountains, the movement of leaves on the breeze, the distant sound of the guitar). But in taking such poetry into song, the implied auditory environment is actualised and foregrounded, and the aspects of telling and visual description on which the poem inevitably hinges fall away to the background. The self-​enclosed space of the nocturnal garden thus becomes the ideal metaphor for that of music itself.25 Merleau-​ Ponty’s example of nocturnal space, as one in which looking has to give way to listening, might just as well refer to the case of music: When, for example, the world of clear and articulated objects is abolished, our perceptual being, now cut off from the world, sketches out a spatiality without things. This is what happens at night. The night is not an object in front of me; rather, it envelops me, it penetrates me through all my senses, it suffocates my memories, and it all but effaces my personal identity.26

Fauré’s Le jardin clos marks a concern with the idea of this heterotopic space that runs across his work. Four years earlier he had completed one of his most extensive explorations of this theme in La chanson d’Ève, Op. 95 (1906–​ 10), a cycle of ten songs also based on the poetry of Charles Van Lerberghe (a contemporary of Maeterlinck and one of the most important of the Belgian Symbolists). Lerberghe’s volume of the same title had appeared in 1904 and consisted of some ninety-​six poems. It came to Fauré’s attention in 1906, a year before the poet’s death, but the cycle was not completed until 1910. The

Taking place  183 ten songs add up to an astonishing act of remaking the world through song, of creating an aesthetic garden in which to dwell, and reconnecting saying with being through singing. In the first song, ‘Paradis’, nothing is said. The world simply is. ‘A blue garden blossoms out.’ All that is heard is the sound of nature –​an ‘Immense murmur; which is, however, silence.’ This is the completion of nature before God instructs Eve to go out into the world and to speak, to name the things of the world. For now, the garden listens: ‘The voice is silence but all still listens [ . . . ] until, with the rise of the evening star, Eve sings.’ It is a remarkable song about song itself, about the coming to presence of song, but also about the voice that listens and about a speech that might still come from things themselves. It marks a wider yearning among writers, in the years around 1900, that language might recover some original purity –​witness Karl Kraus, in Vienna, who balanced his caustic critique of journalistic misuse of language with poetry that longed for the purity of the origin (Ursprung). As Katharine Bergeron has explored, Fauré’s vocal style here is remarkably stripped back.27 The score is full of the ‘blancs’ cultivated by Mallarmé and Maeterlinck, of simple intervals, silences, and the cultivation of a pure vocal tone and open, bassless piano chords. From this Ursprung the song gradually blossoms forth (into a rhythmically pulsing E major, a breathing space, and then increasingly more complex harmony and denser rhythmic textures) as all becomes ‘confused and mingled’. It returns to its opening simplicity for the awakening of Eve, a moment entrusted to the wordless voice of the piano. The contrast of the teeming richness of nature and the bare simplicity of a declamatory language structures the song until the final verse, at which point it becomes a song not about speaking but about listening. The whole world listens for the song of Eve; the E major fullness here is not the silence of paradise, nor that of Eve, but the fullness of song, the sounding of one by the other: the resonance of paradise in song. The second song, ‘Prima verba’, celebrates the birth of a language that joins the body to the world, that finds a kind of unity of the materiality of the voice and that of the world, but also a kind of re-​creation of the world through language. Contra Saussure, contra Derrida, contra Bergson, contra Mallarmé, contra Serres –​Lerberghe’s idealised Edenic space in which language brings the world into presence nevertheless expresses, in its profound yearning, the central lack of modernity. That Fauré should respond to it with his most extended song cycle underlines the central role that music was understood to play in this restoration of a broken relation: exactly as Derrida would later

184 Appearing deny, the voice here promises to make present. This quiet rapture defines the tone of the whole cycle. In the third song, ‘Roses ardentes’, the piano’s gently rocking containment of E major opens up a sense of chiasmic exchange between the singing voice of the poet and the fullness of nature: ‘Ardent roses, in the motionless night, tis in you that I sing, and take being.’ I am eternal in the woods, the poet seems to say, I am born again in the deep seas, in its waves and under the sun. It is an astonishing act of reconjuring an imagined primal state of language, when word and world were one, just as the awareness of that gap was reaching a kind of crisis point. The sense of radiant fullness continues through the fourth song, ‘Comme Dieu rayonne’ –​how God radiates through these flowers, how he murmurs in this spring and sings in the birds. There are few such undiluted assertions of the idea that poetry makes present. Where Mallarmé, in L’après-​midi d’un faune, explores the gap between speech and presence, Lerberghe imagines a primal world without any gap. For Fauré, it must have seemed like a statement of what his music had always been wordlessly embodying. ‘L’aube blanche’ and ‘Eau vivante’ mark the opening out to the world of the awakening subject, running out into the world like the breaking out of light and running water. The next song, ‘Veilles-​tu, ma senteur de soleil’ explores presence through the revelation of scent, an evanescent, shimmering, ungraspable song without any of the periodic ‘form’ we associate with nineteenth-​century song but only a constant flow, modulated from within, like a musical elaboration of Bergson’s durée. ‘Dans un parfum de roses blanches’ offers a different take on the same idea, a merging and blurring of the identities of the world that comes and the consciousness that perceives it. The last two songs return to the simplicity of the beginning. ‘Crépuscule’ seems to anticipate that the fullness of this Edenic relation will not last beyond this ‘first day’. Its D major wholeness and simple lines nevertheless contain a premonition of the breaking into chromatic yearning that will follow. It is a striking thought that Fauré’s song cycle is contemporary with that most powerful and violent statement of the expulsion from Edenic wholeness, Schoenberg’s song cycle Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (1909) –​the work with which he definitively marks the move to atonality and whose final song takes place, ‘outside of Eden’s walls’. This seems a world away from Fauré’s gentle premonition. The final song of La chanson d’Ève, ‘O mort, poussière d’étoiles’ is in a rich D♭ major; like Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, also written in 1909, the last two songs of Fauré’s cycle move from D major to D♭ major. This

Taking place  185 is a song of death but death as a return to the totality of the whole, and as a desired dissolution. Schoenberg, via Stefan George’s poetry, inverts a central cultural symbol of the harmony between humankind and the world, and thus between words and things. If at times, in the subsequent reception of Schoenberg’s work across the twentieth century, this ‘explosion in the garden’28 has been taken to be a definitive and irreversible historical moment for the whole of western culture, the persistence of the motif in art, music, and literature across the last hundred years tells a different story. Because the space of the nocturnal garden is a heterotopos, it is not so easily destroyed. Shakespeare and Mozart (respectively in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Le nozze di Figaro) both present the nocturnal garden as a space apart in which the dissonance of human relations is resolved by a process of coming to one’s senses (and thus, coming to self-​presence). But in both cases, it is marked as an aesthetic heterotopia –​the fictional ‘as if ’ of all art –​the space of dream-​illusion defined by music. Ravel evokes a similar space in L’enfant et les sortilèges, a nocturnal theatre in which the dissonant relations of the child and his environment indoors are reconfigured in the music of the night outdoors. ‘How wonderful to find you again, Garden’, sings the child, on his return to a place in which he first has to acknowledge the infantile violence he has perpetrated on nature before the plenitude of forgiveness blooms in the expansion of the closing music. From Fauré and Ravel to Murail and Saariaho, via Messiaen and Takemitsu, what all these pieces have in common is an emphasis on immersion in an extended moment rather than the unfolding of a linear or narrative temporality. As Makis Solomos puts it: ‘To be in sound, to be immersed in sound, enveloped by sound, to travel to the heart of sound, to disappear into the abyss of sound [ . . . ] become the new metaphors, inspiring composers as much as listeners.’29 This paradox is central to new music ‘after Debussy’: this is neither musical minimalism nor an imitation of models of musical temporality from outside the European tradition. This music is highly differentiated in its materials, not lacking in ‘events’ or structural breaks, but nevertheless defined by the elaboration of a globally contained and immersive space. If there is a paradigm shift in musical thought of the twentieth century it surely has to do with the move to thinking about sound as a single substance, endlessly moving and elaborated from within itself, rather than as a set of isolated and atomistic fragments to be reconstituted in acts of composition.

186 Appearing

Landscapes without figures ‘Nothing will have taken place except perhaps the place.’ This line, emerging across the pages of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés by means of its capitalised font, might sum up the effect of listening to landscape. A new sensibility of place, of the contemplation of landscape and being situated within a landscape for its own sake, was coterminous with the rise of the idea of an autonomous music in the late eighteenth century. But what distinguishes Mallarmé or Debussy from this early Romanticism is that, whereas the romantics cultivated an experience of landscape through the experience of the sensitive viewing subject, a century later art explored landscape as the site of a kind of erasure or absorption of the subject. What is striking about works like Debussy’s Nocturnes or La mer is the absence of any autonomous agency standing over and against the landscape.30 This absence of agency is demarcated by a striking absence of voice. Paradoxically, the introduction of actual voices in Sirènes serves only to highlight the absence of the kind of subjective, lyrical or narrative voice which usually articulates symphonic music. The first movement of the Nocturnes (Nuages) similarly refuses any discourse or argument. It simply presents unchanging musical objects that are realigned through a constantly changing kaleidoscopic rotation. This is an art of time, space, colour, repetition, and change –​but never of discourse, argument, or narration. It says nothing in the way that clouds say nothing (see Figure 6.1). Fêtes offers a different take on the same idea –​rhythmically sharp where Nuages is soft-​edged; dynamic and noisy where the first movement is suspended and generally muted –​but Fêtes also avoids a subjective or discursive voice; its material is often mechanical rather than organic, as in the march section for example, and the shadowy figures of its nocturnal landscape are blurred and without identity. The cover image of the first edition of Debussy’s La mer is perhaps more famous than the piece itself (see Figure 6.2). But the image used by Debussy and his publisher is not simply a reproduction of the famous print by Katsushika Hokusai (see Figure 6.3). The original has been cropped (and redrawn) to remove two boats and fishermen that are about to be engulfed by the mighty wave. This erasure of the human figure is not insignificant. It ties in with the reading of Jankélévitch that in La mer ‘the human face has utterly disappeared’.31 Instead, he goes on, we are with ‘the inhuman sea, far from any shores, trees or houses, [that] has ceased to be “landscape”. One hears

Figure 6.1  Claude Monet, Les nymphéas –​Les nuages (1914-​26), detail

Figure 6.2  Claude Debussy, La mer, front cover (Paris: Durand, 1905)

188 Appearing

Figure 6.3  Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1832)

only the noise of amorphous elements, anonymous and unconscious, which have competed with one another since the origin of the world.’32 Perhaps the most disturbing change, and the one that produces all the others, is the erasure of the musical subject, exactly what Debussy does in the music of La mer. The sense of music as the narration of a subject, a communication from the author to the listener, of music as reconfirming, reproducing, and reinforcing a certain kind of subject, is dissolved in music ‘after Debussy’. Erasure does not, however, simply leave a blank, a nihilistic nothing, but works to open up the space left by such an act, like the opening of a window onto the sea (as Mélisande requests in the final act of Debussy’s opera). Debussy’s approach in these orchestral works might thus be compared to what Paul Klee found in the example of Paul Cézanne –​‘not to script with geometric volumes, but rather to deconstruct representation and invent a space of the invisible, of the possible’.33 Compared with the violent deformations of Expressionism, the deconstruction of the integrated subject in Impressionism is overwhelmingly gentle, as a result of which it lent itself readily to being appropriated as merely shoring up the culture of sensibility of the bourgeois subject –​a pleasant antidote to the

Taking place  189 hard edges and instrumental purposiveness of an industrialised society. But music ‘after Debussy’ suggests a more radical reading. Impressionism erases the fixed outlines of things by breaking up line, playing with light, shade, and colour. As Mallarmé does with language, it plays at the edges of things to draw attention to the exchange of perception rather than to the signifying or representation of things. It thereby foregrounds an immersive looking and listening as modes of being, rather than the division of the world into things. It foregrounds the chiasmic plenitude of sensuous knowledge over the lack at the heart of a linguistic knowledge of things. ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’, the opening movement of La mer, deploys a familiar convention  –​beginning from nothing and expanding outwards to acoustic fullness. From Haydn’s Representation of Chaos to Wagner’s Rheingold prelude, from the sunrise in Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé to Jonathan Harvey’s From Silence, this is a basic trope of the evocation of nature. But the quiet radicalism of Debussy’s form is that this is all it does. It does not stage the appearance of something or someone that walks out on stage to speak or to act. Jean Barraqué, in a famous analysis of La mer, aptly describes the opening as ‘a kind of raising of the curtain’34 except here the curtain rises to reveal an empty stage. The opening thirty bars can certainly be understood in terms of a simple harmonic reduction, by which a pentatonic set (F♯–​G♯–​A–​B–​C♯) turns out to function as a prolonged altered dominant of the tonic key of D♭. Far more significant, however, is the gradual emergence of clear orchestral tones out of silence and indistinct noise, and the sense of spatial expansion created by means of register, timbre and rhythm. The low B in the opening bar begins as an almost imperceptible hum, not as distinct musical tone. The addition of the F♯ and G♯ (in the harps and cellos) clarifies tone through articulation and presents the origins of a rhythmic figure definitive for the whole piece –​ the dotted-​note rhythm in the cellos (see Example 6.3). Barraqué refers to this as ‘the call motif ’ –​both a call to presence and of presence. Its dotted rhythm is a basic form of autogenesis –​like the dividing of a cell –​a single explosive moment of self-​production. The emptiness of Debussy’s introduction gives way to a kind of sonic plenitude. Opening over a sustained D♭ pedal, the ensuing section of Debussy’s piece presents no less than five motifs over fifty-​three bars. A familiar formal function is clearly presented as the ambivalent tonal introduction leads to a principal key area and an exposition of motifs, but the familiarity of this plot masks a subtle process of defamiliarisation.

190 Appearing Example 6.3  Claude Debussy, ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’, La mer, bb. 1–​5

The tension between the two is manifest in the way that generations of commentators have struggled with how to understand the articulation of form here. Take for example the build up towards what Roy Howat hears as the first big climax at b. 76 and the appearance of a three-​note motif heard for the first time (see Example 6.4). Howat calls this Motif A, even though it is heard after several others. What is presented here is surely a moment of non-​arrival; the startling thing about Motif A is its emptiness. The stark sequence of parallel fifths, with a rapid after-​echo in the trumpets, is followed immediately by a falling back to the emptiness and indistinct noise of the beginning. The swell and surge of musical waves deliver not human presence, but a falling away  –​ nothing appears. In retrospect, the whole of the preceding section, with its over-​richness of motivic forms and orchestral colours, simply dissipates and arrives nowhere. Except, precisely from this collapse and ensuing emptiness, something utterly unexpected does arrive:  the extraordinary cello theme (see Example 6.5). This act of appearing is unprepared. The B♭ major tonality and the rich sonority of closely scored cellos and unmuted horns appears out of thin air. To be sure, the generative dotted rhythm picks up an earlier idea, though transformed here into a new three-​note figure, ending with an open fifth. But the logic of this moment is primarily neither tonal nor motivic; its principal act is to displace distance with palpable proximity, silencing the earlier wash of multiple orchestral layers to foreground a single gesture of arresting clarity. This is a framed moment of appearing –​a gesture of breaking open –​ and, as such, it cannot really develop. Instead, it generates an extended textural passage, across the next thirty-​eight bars, using the repetitive rocking figure to fashion a series of wave-​like swells. The climax of this collective

Taking place  191 Example 6.4  Claude Debussy, ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’, La mer, bb. 76–​81

presence is followed by an extended process of disintegration –​a fall back towards emptiness and inarticulation. This, in turn, leads to one of the most extraordinary passages not only in this piece, but in the whole of Debussy’s music (see Example 6.6). Roy Howat labels this passage as a ‘transition’, on the basis that its function is to move the music from the end of the preceding section into the ensuing Coda. But to conceive of it purely in terms of its tonal function, as a prolonged dominant, is astonishingly reductive. It turns one of the most arresting moments in the whole piece, a moment defined by a quality of sound like nothing else heard before or after, into a purely abstract function of musical form. To do so surely misses the point of this extended epiphanic moment. The cor anglais (doubled by two solo cellos) moves gently between two musical spaces –​its octave descent accentuates a dominant harmony, its returning ascent suggests a whole-​tone space. The instrument associated with Tristan-​esque absence and longing here hangs tantalisingly on the edge of appearing. It is one of music’s most precise articulations of the sense of a threshold, a liminal shoreline between two different musical spaces. Its promise of appearing is far more intense than the brief, brash and conventional coda that will silence it.

Example 6.5  Claude Debussy, ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’, La mer, bb. 82–​90

Example 6.6  Claude Debussy, ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’, La mer, bb. 121–​25

Taking place  193 Of course, tonally, the coda fulfils the function of this ‘transition’ passage:  D♭ major arrives, marked with brassy statements of the dotted-​note motif in the trumpets and horns, before even the brass are submerged in the noisy turbulence of tremolando strings, cymbal rolls, and tam-​tam. But, for all the coda’s outward trappings of a substantive moment of appearance, nothing appears as such. The brief climactic moment offers instead only the jouissance of an act of appearing itself, without any object, a sense that is reinforced by what follows. After the gap that separates the first and second movements, the nothing that has appeared is the entire insubstantial substance of ‘Jeux de vagues’, one of the most radical movements Debussy ever wrote –​even the title draws our attention not to objects but simply to the purposeless play of changing surfaces. And ‘Jeux de vagues’ begins with a trace of exactly the same sonorities with which the previous movement ended: the sizzle of the cymbal is here transformed into the glitter of glockenspiel, harp and the faintest touch of cymbal itself, articulating the gentle rise and fall of the open fifth in tremolando strings, while the sonority of the cor anglais colours the woodwind chords (see Example 6.7). ‘Jeux de vagues’ not only foregrounds and makes thematic the idea of appearing and disappearing, it does so in a play of forms without human presence of any kind. As signalled in its title, its formal paradigm is play and its material is the ungraspable nature of movement itself. Waves go nowhere, turn in on themselves, are formed from nothing, and collapse back to nothing; they are merely the mobile traces of an invisible and undirected energy. It makes for a quietly shocking quality to this music, a ‘lightness of being’ that could not be further from the noisy discourse of symphonic Example 6.7  Claude Debussy, ‘Jeux de vagues’, La mer, bb. 1–​4

194 Appearing music. Try listening to a few minutes of ‘Jeux de vagues’, for example, after a Bruckner symphony; it’s like the difference between observing the shimmer of light on water one moment, and then the next, feeling the full force of a Titanic-​like ocean liner, cutting through the water on its unstoppable course, its massive weight of steel driven on by rows of noisy engines. The final movement of La mer, ‘Dialogue du vent et de la mer’, exhibits far greater continuity, but with one notable exception: the violent cut off (b. 55) and the unprepared appearance of a new soundworld that follows. This is the first appearance of ‘the call of the sea’ motif which Jankélévitch hears as an explicitly siren voice: ‘Viens à moi’ they seem to sing, he suggests, in ‘a song of seduction which leads us vertiginously, irresistibly into abysmal depths’.35 When the motif returns later in the movement, over a sustained tonic pedal (b. 157), it is accompanied by the ethereal sonority of a high violin harmonic, marking it as a distant and heterotopic space, a promise of ‘somewhere else’ (see Example 6.8(a)). Not inconsequentially, this passage recalls a similar moment in the Act 4 love scene of Pelléas et Mélisande, the singular moment after the half-​heard declaration of love, in which Pelléas describes Mélisande’s voice as one ‘that comes from the end of the world’ (see Example 6.8(b)). In the radical absence of human presence in La mer we hear a call that is half-​human, like that of the sirens, but which calls us out of ourselves to an oceanic whole. As Jankélévitch warns, this is both alluring and also a kind of death –​as Mallarmé’s mariner, sinking to the bottom of the sea after the

Example 6.8(a)  Claude Debussy, ‘Dialogue du vent et de la mer’, La mer, bb.  157–​60

Taking place  195 Example 6.8(b)  Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act 4.iv, bb. 93–​94

shipwreck of language, experiences a kind of death. But the echo of the suspended moment in Pelléas et Mélisande after the declaration of love also marks this sound as a call to plenitude (a voice ‘that comes from the end of the world’), a space that exceeds that of the individual human being which is heard, momentarily, in Debussy’s sounding of a linguistic silence. The landscape without figure, and the unsayable space accessed at the moment the lovers declare their love, seem to border one another in the same sonority. Ecstasis, as Plotinus says, is a reversion back to the One, but, as Heidegger reminds us, it does so by displacing the subject outside of itself. The ‘rapt’ experience of landscape and music converge in this exceeding of the boundaries of the self. This is the flipside of what Jankélévitch sees as the impersonal and even anonymous quality of Debussy’s La mer, its ‘erasure of the human figure’ in a place where ‘there is nothing [here] but the dialogue of the winds and the sea, which is moreover the monologue of the ocean, excluding all anthropomorphism, all reference to the subject’.36 Such a music borders not only the idea of non-​representation, but also of the a-​linguistic world of nature, the ‘nothingness’ of the space where humans are not, the a-​linguistic and uninhabitable space of the ocean. Boulez, writing about his Third Piano Sonata in 1963, picked up on this idea of the objectivity and anonymity of nature (that is to say, a nature without names). Form is becoming autonomous and tending towards an absolute character hitherto unknown; purely personal accident is now rejected as an intrusion. The great works of which I have been speaking –​those of Mallarmé and Joyce –​are the data for a new age in which texts are becoming, as it were, ‘anonymous’, ‘speaking for themselves without any author’s voice’. If

196 Appearing I had to name the motive underlying the work that I have been trying to describe, it would be the search for an ‘anonymity’ of this kind.37

It is not insignificant in this respect that, at one stage, Debussy subtitled his piece ‘Trois esquisses symphoniques’,38 a wonderfully contradictory title that surely signals a sense of non-​identity with the Austro-​German symphony, a deliberate distance from its discursive ambition and formal accomplishment. This is no surprise from a composer who asserted, in 1901, that the symphony was no longer a valid form; it had, Debussy wrote, become anachronistic, formalistic, and constraining; in a word, ‘useless’. Compared to the formal proposition of a symphony, a sketch is incomplete, the result of a few brief movements, defined as much by empty spaces as the lines made with the pen. It is understood to be preparatory –​a momentary appearance that implies being filled out later in more solid form.39 Nevertheless, Debussy’s Trois esquisses symphoniques might be heard to reference the symphony in order to place it under erasure; in doing so, it also places the symphonic subject under erasure. Contemporary with Mahler’s middle-​period symphonies, which wrestle with the legacy of the heroic subject of the nineteenth century, La mer already looks forward to a radical kind of post-​subjectivity. Jankélévitch suggested that ‘in the three movement of La Mer, “musique concrète” had already found its language’40 and that Debussy was already investigating the spatialisation of sound, limited by the concert hall but which the development of electro-​acoustic music would begin to change forty years after his death.41 Listening to ‘Vagues’ (Waves), the third movement of Saariaho’s Oltra mar, or to Tristan Murail’s orchestral work, Sillages (Wakes), it is not hard to hear the echoes of La mer and a shared fascination with elaborating a musical space that blurs the distance between subjective agency and immersive environment. By the same token, one might hear the origins of such a move explored in a song written by Fauré before Debussy was even born. ‘Mai’, Op. 1, no. 2 (c.1862), one of Fauré’s earliest songs, was written when the composer was just 17. Here, the spring ‘demands us’ (nous réclame), and the singer urges you ‘to mix your soul with the countryside’ (de mêler à ton âme, la campagne). Its woods, its shades, its great moonlit nights by the side of sleeping waters, are all thresholds: literally, in Victor Hugo’s text, the paths end where the way begins (le sentier qui finit où le chemin commence). From his earliest song, Fauré embodies the idea of the song as itself a kind of horizon: ‘the horizon by which this world is joined humbly and joyously, like a hem at the edge

Taking place  197 of heaven’s robe’ (L’horizon que ce monde attache humble et joyeux, Comme une lèvre au bas de la robe des cieux). Hugo’s picture is of nature streaming towards us –​it is the stars that look at us, the scents and sounds of the world that are carried by the wind to us. This is a song about listening, not doing. This is the flipside of the linguistic shipwreck and fall to the abyss of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés –​the expansion of a sensual whole that opens up like a constellation in the absence of linguistic division. Debussy’s La mer, no less than Mallarmé’s poem, is also riven with the gaps and spaces that are opened up by the dissolution of grammatical forms that bound together the planks of language. La mer, as Jankélévitch suggests, may well listen to the sirens and allows the drowning of the directed forms of tonality. It too risks an abysmal silence and formlessness but in order to deliver the luminous constellation that appears in the place of old forms. Jean Marnold, reviewing the premiere in 1905, surely sensed this when he described La mer as a music ‘in which one could believe oneself to be skirting vast abysses and staring into the depths of space.’42 The drowning of the tone is also a loss of unitary tonal direction. Debussy’s music moves constantly, but not in the linear manner his contemporaries would have expected. The poetic metaphor of the sea deployed in this collection of three orchestral sketches works perfectly as a kind of ‘legitimation’ for the drowning of the tone he had called for years before. The movement of the waves, as Jankélévitch underlines, offers a perfect formal corollary for Debussy’s musical ‘static movement’, its ‘immobility of the mobile’, explored elsewhere through the image of the fountain. But most of all, it is presented here as a kind of ‘unformed’ movement, disordered and unruly (desordonnée).43 The movement of the waves is not simply random, without any sense at all, but exhibits recurrent, though infinitely varied patterns of rising and falling, of forming and falling apart. ‘The edifice of a [single] second and of labile construction, the wave forms only to fall apart. The ocean is something that falls apart ceaselessly.’44 The absence of sens –​to take up Vincent D’Indy’s criticism of Debussy’s music –​ is precisely the absence of linguistic sense and direction by which the sense of the world is allowed to come to presence. It takes a certain kind of non-​ sense in order to release sense, which is why Debussy’s music makes its tonal relations ‘non-​functional’ in order to foreground a different kind of sense-​making. Once again, this is the real function of the ‘alibi’ of natural forms. Jankélévitch might just as well have been talking about La mer in his

198 Appearing impassioned defence of the sens of Debussy’s music. A landscape without figures is not shaped to the form of human saying. The wind in the plain has no sens; the wind in the plain has no more sens than the clouds in the sky; nor any more sens that the drop of water falling back into the sea amid the play of waves and the rolling of the foam [ . . . ] the song of The Wind in the Plain sings nothing. The wind blows without its trumpet and does not speak to us! What the west wind saw, the west wind does not tell us. It rumbles, it howls, the west wind, but it says nothing.45

But it is precisely this refusal of linguistic sense and the concomitant cultivation of an opening to the landscape outside of language, choosing the sense of the senses over that of syntactical forms, that Debussy’s music, and the idea of music that comes after him, takes as its primary focus. The result is a quite different relation ‘of sentient to sensible’. David Abram quotes a striking passage in which Merleau-​Ponty explores the reciprocity of this relation as being like that ‘between the sleeper and his sleep’: I breathe slowly and deeply to call forth sleep, and suddenly, one might say, my mouth communicates with some immense external lung that calls my breath forth and forces it back. A certain respiratory rhythm, desired by me just a moment ago, becomes my very being, and sleep, intended until then as a signification, turns itself into a situation. Similarly I offer my ear or my gaze with the anticipation of a sensation, and suddenly the sensible catches my ear or my gaze; I deliver over a part of my body, or even my entire body, to this manner of vibrating and of filling space named ‘blue’ or ‘red’.46

7 The art of touch Debussy at the piano How can one forget the suppleness, the caress, the profundity of his touch! At the same time that he slid across the keyboard with such penetrating softness, he gripped it in obtaining accents of an extraordinary expressive power [ . . . ] He played almost always in half-​tones, but with a full and intense sound, without any harshness in the attack, like Chopin [ . . . ] The scale of his nuances went from triple pianissimo to forte, without ever producing disordered sounds in which the subtlety of the harmony would have been lost. Marguerite Long1 I saw him in a tête-​à-​tête with the ivories, with the look, at once absent and determined, of an explorer of the unknown. He loved to let the keys run through his hands like a miser lets his pieces of gold run through his fingers to hear their magical ringing. He questioned the keyboard with a kind of scientific seriousness and curiosity. Under his fingers, the hammer struck the string with care, in the way that the doctor, by means of light taps, studies the reflexes of an organism whose secrets he wants to discover. Debussy was interested in long resonances, and watched for their trajectory in space right up to the vanishing of their last harmonic. Emile Vuillermoz2 He had the appearance of putting the piano to bed. He rocked it, talked to it gently, like a knight to his horse, like a shepherd to his flock, like a thresher to his oxen. Léon-​Paul Fargue3

The first of Debussy’s Douze Études (1915) begins by presenting a familiar five-​finger exercise only to quickly depart from it (see Example 7.1). The

After Debussy. Julian Johnson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066826.001.0001

202 Touching Example 7.1  Claude Debussy, Douze Études, No.1, ‘Pour les cinq doigts’, bb.  1–​15

opening figure, so plain, so familiar, and apparently so naïve, sounds as if it were in quotation marks. Even the performance direction (sagement) provokes an ironic smile: the performer must take care to be restrained. This, after all, promises to be an exercise in regularity, control, and rational order. The title is quite literally in quotation marks: ‘Pour les “cinq doigts” –​ d’après Monsieur Czerny’. Why? Because, of course, the five-​finger exercise is far more than a mere exercise; from Czerny onwards it stands, for all pianists, as shorthand for years of entrainment, hour upon hour of mechanical repetition, a technical ‘Gradus ad Parnassum’ to lead the imperfect body to match the demands of the perfect machine that stands before it. All of this is written into the first bar of Debussy’s Étude. But the listener, who knows nothing of titles and performance markings, is already arrested by the bare simplicity of such anonymous material. Its character of quotation is already dissonant, before the pianist’s right hand reaches over the left (a perverse distribution of labour) to pick out the first A♭. From b. 5, the five-​ finger exercise accelerates rapidly (clearly, no longer sagement) while the

The art of touch  203 dissonant A♭ becomes syncopated and more insistent. The metrical regularity of the opening is thrown first by a bar of 2/​4, then four bars of 6/​16 which Debussy, with further irony, marks as ‘Mouvement de Gigue’. At the same time, the diatonicism of the opening gives way to a proliferating chromatic sequence. The rational order promised in b. 1 now spirals out of control –​like a miniature apprenti sorcier, or a petit marteau sans maître. The restoration of the five-​finger exercise in b. 11, transposed up a fifth and now in the right hand, begins a second rotation of the first ten bars. The dissonant A♭ has turned into a striking figure on F♯. Marked ‘brusquement’, it too is a kind of five-​finger exercise but collapsed into an unregulated grace-​note ­figure –​a strident and capricious gesture, disdainful of the dull regularity of the exercise. A second version of the accelerating scale fragments, now in contrary motion, leads to a more extended version of the Gigue material, marked ‘animé’ in opposition to the initial ‘sagement’. The chromatic movement gives way to a dominant preparation for the structural cadence in C major (b. 28) which closes the first section. The four bars of filled C major space that follow (bb. 28–​31) are the opposite of the careful beginning; constriction here gives way to plenitude –​of texture, register, sonority, and harmony. The restricted scalic movement of the five-​finger exercise opens out to an expansive freedom of arpeggiation (an idea elaborated fully from b. 35). It is as if Debussy has taken the principle of regular motion and transformed it into the material of an undirected and free elaboration. And so the piece goes on. Its capricious character includes a long parenthetical section in C♭ major (bb. 48–​55), frequent fragmentation of the musical surface, and a constant transformation of the five-​note exercise until it collapses into a kind of anarchy (bb. 91–​96). The rapidity of its repetitions here, alternating between white-​note and black-​note versions, turns into a kind of noise, evoking the irrational disorder of works like Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest –​ surely the antithesis of the regular opening of this Étude. And yet this playful tumult leads to a powerful moment of formal recapitulation (b. 97) in which the rational order of C major is restored with exuberant versions of the five-​note figure juxtaposed with the free arpeggiation. Somehow, what started out as the monotonous repetition of a mechanical exercise has been transformed into a moment of jouissance worthy of L’isle joyeuse. The Douze Études foreground the entrainment of the body as pianistic technique but then proceed to take flight in exuberant fantasy –​putting the disciplined body in play in order to reimagine it. The tendency of this music to exceed its own materials arises from the play of the performing body rather

204 Touching than being imposed upon it, its capricious figures provoked by the suggestion of the hands. In this way, Debussy’s Études might be understood as an immanent critique of the rationalised body. It is not coincidental that one often hears in them echoes of Debussy’s fairy music, as found in pieces like La danse de Puck and Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses; both sets of pieces have in common topics of imaginary, idealised, and fantastical bodies.4 But my interest here is not with the body itself so much as the writing of the body. The body is not just written into Debussy’s Études, it is written out, in the sense that it is remade in the act of musical invention. This is a crucial difference because it opposes a closed and static idea (‘the body’) with something dynamic and without limits (‘musical writing’). These pieces, then, are Études transcendentales on two levels: firstly, in that the capricious play is possible only by the pianist mastering and surpassing a physical technique, just as the body of the dancer, paradoxically, is freed through entrainment to let go of the barre and take flight. But secondly, this music exceeds a certain compositional technique that is bound to habitual bodily movements –​hence its unrestrained rush of musical invention and the free proliferation of ideas. The character of this music, as both informelle and corporelle, has a common origin. Debussy’s allusive titles for his piano preludes and orchestral pieces function, as we have seen, as a kind of cover to legitimate the way he stages a whole series of eccentric musical bodies, from the water-​fairy Ondine to Jimbo the elephant, inviting the listener’s body to move variously like fairies, fireworks, fish, leaves, wind, water, mist, rain and snow. The Études use no such poetically allusive references, but their apparently sober titles underline that their material will be the fingers, the hands, and the body of the pianist. This too is a kind of deceit, since their real business is to stage a dialectic between the mechanically entrained body and the writing out of an imaginary body. If the first Étude explicitly references Czerny, elsewhere Debussy evokes an older tradition and looks back two centuries to Couperin’s L’Art de Toucher of 1716. The reference is implied in Debussy’s comments at the head of the score, with its nod to ‘nos vieux Maîtres . . . “nos” admirables clavecinistes’, but also in the eighth Étude, Pour les agréments, and by association in the sixth, Pour les huit doigts, which evokes Couperin’s piéces croisés (in Debussy, the crossing of black and white keys stands in for the hands crossing the two manuals of Couperin’s harpsichord). The study for eight fingers, which closes Book One, acts as a fantastical counterweight to the study for five fingers with which the set opens. Debussy’s performance note, suggesting the

The art of touch  205 thumbs should not be used, probably stems from a misreading of baroque practice (the thumbs were used in baroque technique but did not pass under the fingers as in modern practice).5 The result is a study in four-​note scale fragments whose rapidity begins from the idea of mechanical regularity and precision but turns into something quite different. Compared to the Préludes, with their poetic titles, it is customary to talk about the Études in terms of musical ‘abstraction’, but this is quite the opposite of what this music does. The concern with the movement of the hands is utterly corporeal, just as the result foregrounds sound over grammar, and the listener has first to respond sensuously rather than intellectually. Taken as a whole, Pour les quartes is also a study in varieties of touch –​witness the extraordinary range of performance directions within a single, relatively short piece: dolce, sonore martelé, murmurando, risoluto, balabile e grazioso, sostenuto, scherzandare, marqué, leggiero, con tristezza, lointain, perdendo, volubile, estinto. Such music provokes us to ask some key questions for contemporary musical thought: How can we think this musical body critically, without falling back into a new fetishism of the body –​that is to say, without collapsing the idea of the body into something ahistorical, immediate, essentialised, and inherently fixed? On the one hand, the pendulum swing of the humanities back towards the body is long overdue in musicology. But pendulums pulled too far in one direction tend to lurch back to an extreme in the other. The shift from music to sound studies, from scores to recorded sound, and the wider shift from the composer to the performer, for all their new insights, risk neutralising the extent to which music’s relation to the body is self-​reflexive, critical, and historical. One way forward is to ask a slightly different question: How is the body written musically? There is no English equivalent for écriture; the French has a resonance that the English word ‘writing’ simply does not possess. Fifty years after Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Anglo-​American musicology has not even begun to think through its consequences for music. Indeed, if anything, it has re-​embraced the very phonocentrism that Derrida calls into question. But the consequence of the Grammatology is surely that, just as writing is no mere imitation of speech, musical écriture is not simply a way of remembering or recording a previously composed music, not a representation or expression of some prior idea, but instead a kind of musical thought –​a speculative proposition of the creative mind. Nor is a musical écriture confined to the page on which it is rendered visible. Rather, by

206 Touching means of the relation between writing, the human body, and the production of sound, it puts the body in play, makes the body a player in its speculative thought. Put more simply, musical écriture is a kind of speculative thinking through the body. There are plenty of activities that, in the broadest sense, put the body into play. Rock-​climbing fuses body and mind in a highly speculative activity in which the body is most certainly en jeu (both in play and very much at stake). To live in the world is necessarily to put the body into play, but music offers us a version of this in a very specific form and one in which the writing of music –​as opposed to a completely oral tradition –​plays a very specific role. So we might agree with Mallarmé when he writes that the movement of the dancer is ‘a bodily writing’ (une écriture corporelle) and a ‘poem freed from the apparatus of the writer’ (poëme dégagé de tout appareil du scribe),6 while at the same time insisting that music, in the western tradition, is also a kind of writing in the narrow sense –​as a graphic and scripted art. Its unique mediation of writing and body is central to its role in western culture –​as a critical parallel to the relationship between language and writing, one it imitates in order to reconfigure. Musical écriture thus has to do not with reproducing an existing body, but with bringing a body into play that was not earlier present. In this way, the score may be understood as a space in which real bodies blur with ideal ones, a critical space for the reformulation of bodily being. There are of course no bodies in the score, but the musical page carries the mimetic traces of bodily movement. And being fictional, these traces of the body are also transformations, which is how music allows us to experience impossible bodies (just as we do in dreaming, in ballet, or in CGI film sequences). But how can we read such a musical écriture? To borrow Julia Kristeva’s terms, how does one locate, explore, and think the musical genotext within the musical phenotext? It is, perhaps, firstly, to look for the gaps exhibited in musical scores, the gaps between real and imagined bodies. This is far more complex and subtle than simply a matter of foregrounding sound over sign, or body over grammar. It certainly has to do with what Deleuze calls ‘the logic of sensation’ in his radically material reading of the art of Francis Bacon. But it also has a historical dimension that is often missed. For that reason, we have to look beyond Roland Barthes’ tantalising readings of musical écriture in Schumann.7 For Barthes, music is always a musica practica, the music one plays, ‘a muscular music’ of the body. His astonishing essay on Schumann’s Kreisleriana offers a wonderful example of a discourse on music

The art of touch  207 solely in terms of ‘figures of the body’ –​the body that plays, the body that composes and the body that listens. What does the body do when it enunciates (musically)? And Schumann answers:  my body strikes, my body collects itself, it explodes, it divides, it pricks, or on the contrary and without warning [ . . . ] it stretches out, it weaves [ . . . ] And sometimes –​why not? –​it even speaks, it declaims, it doubles its voice: it speaks but says nothing: for as soon as it is musical, speech –​or its instrumental substitute –​it is no longer linguistic but corporeal; what it says is always and only this: my body puts itself in a state of speech: quasi parlando.8

Much of what Barthes writes would apply equally well to Debussy. What he says about Schumann is borne out by a piece like the fifth of Debussy’s Études. Marked ‘Joyeux et emporté, librement rythmé’, Pour les octaves is an essay in excess and a breathless, over-​reaching energy. The expansiveness of tone and gesture at the opening is produced by the wide stretching of the hands occasioned by the octave, just as the middle section, with its gamelan-​ like hocketing, is the product of a playful alternation of the two hands. Or again, one might hear the last of the Études, Pour les accords, as arising directly from an amplification of a physical rhythm (dum-​dee-​dah, dum-​ dee-​dah) with the hands moving from the middle register, symmetrically outward in wide arching gestures that override any questions of harmonic progression or motivic development. This material is generated by the body and is written out –​worked out –​through the body. Barthes’ approach is through his own bodily engagement with music, with the way in which music is ‘inscribed’ within the performer-​listener and, unsurprisingly, he has little time for a professional musical analysis that seeks ‘to annul the body’.9 But in bracketing out the score, and a reading of the score, in favour of his own bodily responses to the music he plays, Barthes risks merely reproducing the body he brings to the music, rather than giving space for musical écriture to open out a different body. Which brings us back to the same question: how might we read a bodily text within musical scores? How can we read between the genotext of the body and the phenotext of musical notation? How can we distinguish between the structures of musical grammar and the libidinal energy that shapes and fills them? The problem lies partly in the nature of the question, which misses the extent to which the forms of language are already pre-​formed by the libidinal –​the organic

208 Touching rhythms of expansion and contraction, the drive to closure, the insistence on agency. Musical writing and musical bodies are always encountered together: mutually implicated and mutually shaped. Which brings us back to Debussy’s Études, and to questions of musical material and history. Debussy does not simply ‘write the body’ by means of some direct, unmediated access; rather, he engages with the historical legacy of the body as mediated in a practice of piano music. His starting point is not some notion of the natural body, but the cultural body written into the shape and design of the piano, its lexicon of possible gestures, its repertoire, its techniques, and its technical training, which is why the Études reference a history, from the exercises of Clementi,10 Czerny,11 and Hanon,12 to the musical invention of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt. They look back to the L’art de toucher de clavecin of Couperin13 and forward to the Études for piano of Ohana and Ligeti, and those for pianola by Nancarrow. In other words, before the composer writes, the body has already been inscribed –​both into musical materials in general, and into the embodied habitus of instrumental lexicons in particular. It is telling that Merleau-​ Ponty, searching for a metaphor for his idea of embodied knowledge, referred to the intersection between the body of the musician and that of the musical instrument:  ‘The body calls the keyboard to a collection of sonic possibilities, the keyboard calls the body to certain kinds of movement.’14 This mutually-​constitutive relationship is played out, in the history of keyboard music, as a dialectic between mechanical mimesis and recreative fantasy, from the toccatas and fantasias of Froberger and Frescobaldi to the Études of Debussy and Ligeti. It is central to the ‘chiastic’ model at the heart of Roger Moseley’s recent study of keyboards of all kinds as the ‘digital interface’ of play where ‘musical behavior can be materialized, embodied, performed, and communicated.’15 It is not hard to demonstrate this corporeal logic in Debussy. The second Étude, Pour les tierces, is built on the close relationship between the structure of the hand and interval of a third. Conjunct movement in thirds provides another kind of five-​finger exercise and Debussy starts with the familiar fingering pattern (1 and 3, 2 and 4, 3 and 5) and a clear nod to Chopin’s study in thirds (Op. 25, no. 6). Where Chopin is brightly extrovert, Debussy prefers a more introverted ‘mumurando’ texture (exemplified from b. 18). The circular figure of his study is a product of the hands’ motion rather than any harmonic logic and makes for a piece without musical narrative or drama (indeed, a piece almost without events). Like a gently rolling landscape without

The art of touch  209 the punctuation of any figure, Debussy cultivates a sustained undulation that arises from the simple movement of the hand: the sense of containment is underlined by the sustained use of the middle register and the perfect symmetry of the two hands, always at ease, without stretching, without difficult leaps or sudden changes of direction. It is surely no coincidence that this study of a ‘body-​at-​ease’ produces, so readily, a central musical topos of the pastoral. Nowhere in Debussy’s Études is this historically-​mediated body more palpably foregrounded than in No.8, Pour les agréments –​not so much because Debussy references the French Baroque, but because this piece takes as its musical material the idea of bodily comportment itself. Its topos is a set of musical figures equivalent to a set of bodily manners or figures of speech. The musical ornament, like a figure of speech, is understood as a decorative embellishment –​a mode of presentation, not the content of what is said. But Debussy makes the ornament the substance, foregrounding a lexicon of bodily gestures and musical manners. Witness the pleasure of a sequence of elongated appoggiaturas in the opening six bars (see Example 7.2): Debussy’s music is often described as ‘sensuous’, a word that closes down a wealth of detail it should open up. This passage is a good example, nevertheless, of what such a term attempts to designate. It is the diversion of

Example 7.2  Claude Debussy, Douze Études, No.8, Pour les agréments, bb. 1–​6

210 Touching something functional into a non-​functional use that lies behind the pleasure of this music and why one might speak properly about the erotic body in Debussy’s music. The sequence of ornaments are non-​functional movements of the body –​their indolent repetition is entirely about pleasure. Something similar can be heard in Pour les arpèges composes (see Example 7.3). The function of an arpeggio, accentuating through rhythmic means the dynamism of the underlying harmony, is side-​stepped here. Surface movement once again serves to emphasise the absence of any functional movement; circling arpeggio patterns, elaborated entirely for their own sake, create a study in touch, texture, and sonority –​putting in play, in sympathetic vibration, the body of the piano, the pianist, and the listener. Rodin’s sculpture of two hands is both the product of the intelligence of the hands, the thinking of the sculptor’s body through his hands, and at the same time a palpable embodiment of the idea. A sculpture that were simply ‘of two hands’ would be a far lesser work than Rodin’s, which has to do with the intelligence of touch itself, the subtle, infinitely sophisticated but mute communication of touch, its affirmation of self-​presence through that of another. In a similar sense, piano music is ‘about’ the intelligence of the hands, and therefore of touch. But the idea is as old as playing instruments at all; it is enshrined, for example, in the idea of the toccata. This can be forgotten in a musical tradition Example 7.3  Claude Debussy, Douze Études, No.11, Pour les arpèges composés, bb.  1–​6

The art of touch  211 that takes on a more discursive focus –​witness the foundational gap between the pleasure of touch in a Bach keyboard prelude and the working out of a discursive idea in its ensuing fugue. All piano music, written for the touch-​ sensitive keyboard, is an elaboration of this tension, but it is one foregrounded in music ‘after Debussy’ (notwithstanding that this idea was richly elaborated before Debussy –​in Chopin and Liszt most obviously). If rehearing this music suggests a rethinking of the unfolding of music since Debussy, it thus equally provokes a reapproach to a tradition of music before Debussy.16 One might discuss a piece like ‘Brouillards’, the first of Debussy’s Préludes, Book 2, in terms of poetic representation,17 or else to show its harmonic structure,18 but isn’t it really ‘about’ the hands at the keyboard –​the autogenesis of sound from the movement of the hands? Isn’t ‘Brouillards’ merely the pretext (Jankélévitch) for the self-​sufficient movement of the hands that blurs the black-​and-​white landscape of the keyboard? The idea of bitonality here is surely secondary to the repetition of two habitual figures of the hand –​ the simple triad in the left hand, and the downward arpeggio in the right hand (see Example 7.4). Both move laterally, stepwise, up and down the keyboard –​a gentle oscillation of the same repeated figure. Only much later does this apparently ‘subjectless’ play become the underlay for the barest of melodic appearances (bb. 18–​20). From this perspective, Debussy’s music is always, first and foremost, Pour le piano –​to cite one of the oddest titles of a collection of pieces for the piano, and one that signals a direct engagement with the materiality of the instrument. Stripped of any poetic or representational allusion, or any marker of grand formal ambition (such as Sonata or Fugue), the three movements of Pour le piano (Prelude, Sarabande, Toccata) signal a look back to L’art de toucher of Couperin and his contemporaries –​an art of touch, but also an art of the keys (les touches). As in the later Études, the historical model is also a pretext for a kind of unfettered play, released from any pressure to narrate, express, or say. Both the initial ‘Prélude’ and the closing ‘Toccata’ are elaborated from the hands and the hands’ memory of learned patterns, like a painter laying down a series of colours and shapes before deciding what to do with them. In all three pieces, the baroque model becomes a foil for Debussy’s own textural and harmonic modernisms, a play of history within the hands themselves that is, at the same time, a kind of celebration of the pleasure of playing the piano.19 Debussy’s piano music shows such concerns on every page. If he is certainly the inheritor of an increasing tendency of nineteenth-​century piano

212 Touching Example 7.4  Claude Debussy, ‘Brouillards’, Préludes, Livre II, no. 1, bb. 1–​6

music towards non-​discursive pieces, he also marks the beginning of a century in which this approach takes centre stage –​from Ravel’s Jeux d’eau20 to the Études of György Ligeti, from Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path to the piano music of Steve Reich. From Luciano Berio’s series of fourteen Sequenze for solo instruments (1958–​2004) to Helmut Lachenmann’s exploration of a musique concrète instrumentale, the engagement of the body of the musician with that of the instrument becomes the central material of the piece.21

Bathers In his discussion of the art of Pierre Bonnard, under the heading ‘Toile, Voile, Peau’ (Canvas, Veil, Skin),22 Michel Serres focuses on Bonnard’s nudes. Bonnard, he suggests, renders the skin of his models in such a way so as to

The art of touch  213 privilege a sense of touch over sight, using the visible surface (of the canvas or the skin) to render something invisible. Ranging across paintings from the 1890s through to the 1930s, he begins with Le Peignoir (1892), pointing out how the repetitive half-​moon motifs on the woman’s gown recalls the contemporary repetition of little motifs in the piano writing of Fauré and Debussy. Both were manifestations of the japonisme of the 1890s and both produce a similar effect of something ‘floating’.23 Here, and in similar works of the time, ‘Bonnard presents something less to see than to feel beneath the thin layers and membrane of the fingers [ . . . ] his art full of touch does not make the skin a vulgar object to see, but a sensing subject, the always-​active subject below’.24 Bonnard often painted female bathers –​women in the bath, getting out of the bath, and standing before a mirror after a bath. In Nu au mirroir (La Toilette), from 1931, Serres suggests, Bonnard renders a painting of his model’s skin that recalls the surface of the gown in Le Peignoir, thirty-​ seven years earlier (see Figure 7.1). No longer a question of regular patterns

Figure 7.1  Pierre Bonnard, Nu au mirroir (la Toilette) (1931), detail

214 Touching in the fabric, here Bonnard paints directly ‘on the living gown of the skin, impressions proliferating by chance in a manner impossible to imitate’. In doing so, he not only draws us into the touch and texture of the skin, but ‘the chaos of its singularity’.25 The woman applying her make-​up in front of the mirror, the ostensible subject matter of Nu au miroir, becomes a kind of parallel to the painter’s own act: she applies colour to her skin as he does on the canvas. Both are involved with appearance and the action of making something appear, Serres argues, in a way that collapses the usual distinction contained in the idea of appearance. He evokes the art of appearance in the commedia dell’arte, via the fêtes galantes of Watteau and Verlaine, an art in which the painted face does not cover an identity like a mask but makes one appear: ‘By means of cosmetics the real skin becomes visible.’ This, he argues, works in the opposite way to the contemporary fascination with the mask among Bonnard’s contemporaries: No, the woman does not put on a mask that lies, as the moralists say, nor to make up for what is irreparable, as young people claim; she draws the Map of the Offering of Touch [la Carte de Tendre du tact], with its rivers of hearing, its streams of taste and lakes of listening [ . . . ]. It makes visible its invisible identity card, or the impressionable body.26

This is a long way from the role of the mask in German Expressionism, as a marker of a crisis of the subject –​a sign of a distorted, alienated, or even anonymous subject. In the face of the anonymity of modern life, as Georg Simmel underlined, the subject has to exaggerate itself in order to be seen, or heard, at all.27 In Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire this takes the form of grotesque distortion; in the fêtes galantes of Verlaine and Debussy it takes a form more like that which Serres finds in Bonnard –​making something appear by insisting that the subject is found in the sensible, not in language. There is, Serres argues, ‘no impressionism without an imprinting force, without the pressing of touch. From his fingers of skin, Bonnard makes us touch the skin of things’.28 There is common ground here with ‘the art of touch’ in Debussy’s Études but also the Estampes (1903); these ‘prints’ are taken to refer to contemporary Japanese prints but, as with Serres, there is a play between how the object is made and the impression it produces on the senses of the receiver. In his discussion of Bonnard’s Le Jardin (1936/​7), Serres finds an ambiguity as to whether one sees ‘the subject of the impression or the imprinted object’ (le sujet de l’impression ou l’objet imprimé). What is presented, he concluded,

The art of touch  215 is ‘the interface, a film of transition which separates and which unites the impressionant and the impression, the imprimant and the imprimé’.29 Debussy’s title ‘Voiles’, we are similarly told, plays on the ambiguity of the French word that means both veils and sails. But read against Serres’ discussion of the painting of Bonnard, we might find in Debussy’s Voiles a study not only in symmetrical reflection but also in the art of touch, and an exploration of foregrounding touch itself that parallels the work of contemporary painters upon their canvases (toiles). As with the dancer’s veils (voiles) for Mallarmé, or silence for Maeterlinck, the veil makes visible. In the painting of Bonnard, Serres suggests: ‘The eye loses its pre-​eminence in the very domain of its domination –​in painting. At the extremity of its effort, impressionism comes, in the true sense of the word, to contact.’30 The parallel with Merleau-​Ponty is striking, not just for the language of interface between the viewer and the viewed but also for its exploration through painting. In L’Oeil et l’Esprit (The Eye and the Mind), his last completed essay, Merleau-​Ponty considered the art of Cézanne as a way of knowing the world that is instructive for philosophy.31 Such painting embodies a perception of the world, he argued, that does not construct an ideal or abstract representation of the world for a viewing subject but, rather, one that opens the body of the viewer to the world that is viewed. In opposition to the idea of vision at the heart of Decartes’ Dioptrique, a kind of detached ‘aerial view’ of the world (le survol), Merleau-​Ponty finds in Cézanne’s painting a vision of a world in which the viewer is already immersed (englobé), a world that is ‘around me, not in front of me’ (autour de moi, non devant moi). It provides a kind of model to which philosophy might aspire: ‘that philosophy which needs to be done is that which animates painting, not when it expresses opinions about the world, but at the moment where its vision becomes gesture, when, as Cezanne said, he “thinks through painting”.’32 In her discussion of the consequences of Merleau-​Ponty’s thought for thinking about art, Jessica Wiskus focuses on an analysis of Cézanne’s Four Bathers (1888–​90) in terms of its opening out to space, achieved not by the ‘strict separation between space and the bather’ but rather a kind of play, allowing them to ‘intertwine and be of one another –​as the bather herself inhales and exhales, breathing of the liquid substance of the air’ (see Figure 7.2). She continues: ‘These lines do not mark an “end” to space; rather, they evoke a certain promiscuity of flesh and space.’33 The figure of the bather, a recurrent topic in painting from classical art onwards, becomes again a central topos in Impressionist art. The act of submerging oneself in the sensuous

216 Touching

Figure 7.2  Paul Cézanne, Quatre baigneuses (1888–​90)

infinitude of water exemplifies the act of aesthetic immersion itself. And, as Wiskus points out, Merleau-​Ponty finds in the painting of Cézanne a quality of ‘depth’ which emerges from a concentration on ‘color and texture –​rather than linear perspective’.34 Wiskus’s rich reading of Cézanne’s painting, in terms of this exchange between body and surrounding space, between the substance of the body and the substance of the air, might just as well be an account of resonance in music. What is resonance if not an exchange and intertwining between the substance of sound and the silences that mark its boundaries? Indeed, resonance calls both into question. We cannot say, as in my earlier discussion of ‘Soupir’, that sound disappears into thin air, since sound is only a disturbance of the air causing the tympanum to vibrate. We call resonance the after-​life of the sound, but the distinction is blurred and the ear does not distinguish precisely between the two. It offers an auditory example of Merleau-​Ponty’s central idea of the chiasm –​the flesh in which the sense of the perceiver and the sense of the world conjoins.35 Music offers endlessly varied examples of this

The art of touch  217 since the body of the listener is necessarily intertwined with the body of vibrating sound. The resonance of music is of the world ‘out there’ but only heard when it sets the listener in sympathetic motion: the body is the tympanum between the two. Submersion in water, explored by painting as an essay in touching the world, is thus paralleled by the submersion in sound explored in music, as an essay in listening to it (see Chapter 6). It is no surprise therefore that, in the play with the visual created by the allusive titles of Debussy and his contemporaries, images of water are recurrent. But the images of Debussy’s music are primarily neither pictorial nor symbolic: like Bonnard’s nudes or Cézanne’s bathers they are embodiments and enactments of movement and touch. This is not some ahistorical collapse back to some idealised body; late nineteenth-​century Paris was neither classical Greece nor renaissance Italy, as Manet reminded his audience with trenchant irony in Olympia and Le déjeuner sur l’herbe. In Seurat’s Une baignarde à Asnières (1884) the recreational activity of immersion in water takes place against a background landscape of industrial plants and smoking chimneys; Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro similarly often picture the freedom of water against a background of industrialisation (railway bridges, factories, steam trains). Debussy’s water pieces are not dissimilar: the technological modernity of the orchestra in La mer, like the polished technique of the pianist in Reflets dans l’eau, means that human techne is always closely juxtaposed with the illusion of the elemental. Reflets dans l’eau, the first of the Images, Book 1 (1905) exemplifies a music that explores sonic resonance (patterns of disturbance in the air) through the representational ‘veil’ of the tactile patterning of light and movement on the flat surface of water. It is a piece that parallels the immersive quality of both Monet’s Nymphéas paintings and the wider fascination with the flesh of the bather and that of the world that meets it. Debussy’s music offers an obvious parallel in terms of its exploration of colour and texture rather than the linear processes of tonal grammar. There is a difference of course, as Wiskus emphasises, since in music the line ‘moves’ whereas in painting it traditionally encloses. ‘Yet, in the work of Cézanne (not unlike that of Debussy), there is no hard edge, no finite boundary, no fixed outline. The line is freed.’36 The sense of concentric rings, moving out from a central point like ripples in water, is deftly achieved by Debussy in the opening bars of Reflets dans l’eau. Over a tonic pedal, and within the containment of the pentatonic

218 Touching harmony, the figuration of the right hand opens out concentric patterns from the middle of the keyboard –​a three-​note figure (contained in a single beat) expanding across three octaves, but which adds up to a larger, cumulative figure of two whole bars. The following two bars treats the same idea sequentially (a tone higher) before the whole four-​bar pattern is repeated to make an eight-​bar period. Only then (b. 9) does the lateral chordal movement begin to displace the static scene with a little dialogue of lower and upper registers, soon interrupted by the convergence of registral extremes towards the centre (bb. 16–​17) –​an auditory reversal of the usual rippling motion from the centre outwards. The ‘quasi cadenza’ passage that follows (b. 20) might be heard to link all the way back to the recapitulation of the beginning (b. 36), suggesting that the larger part of the music heard so far is somehow a structural parenthesis. The glittering upper-​register figures, traversing circular motions, up and down, in rapid but flexible runs, are utterly self-​sufficient. It is only the middle register voice (pianissimo, doux et expressif) that introduces a gentle tonal tension over the sustained dominant pedal that will eventually produce the quiet resolution back to D♭ (b. 36). The latter creates the sense of a still larger concentric ring –​that of a closed ABA form, though it is one hijacked by the disturbance of a rising chromatic bass (en animant, from b. 44). The tactile pleasures of this music are both of the ear and the hands. The pianist relaxes into the close proximity of the parallel chords just as the listener is absorbed by the rich tone of the pentatonic wash of the piano in its low to middle register. Similarly, in the bright upper register runs, Debussy the pianist-​composer allows the shape of the hands to produce the sense of supple ease afforded to the listener. With the en animant section (from b. 44), the indolent pleasure of Debussy’s sonic touch takes on a more urgent character that presses forward to a powerful climax (b. 57) with the cadence into E♭ major, articulated by a fulsome arpeggiation. The affirmative assertion of presence is short-​lived, however, and quickly turns to tristesse. Debussy’s eroticism here, as so often, is playful rather than a matter of life and death; as in Jeux, it is a game of protracted appearing and disappearing rather than the assertion of full presence. The final section of Reflets (marked Lent, dans une sonorité harmonieuse et lointaine) is a study in the gentlest of touches –​ once again, both that of the pianist controlling the rippling resonance of the spread chords, and the listener caught between the deep sustain of the bass and the frisson of the lightly struck upper notes in bare octaves.

The art of touch  219

Towards an erotics of music It is over fifty years since Susan Sontag made her famous stand ‘against interpretation’, arguing instead that we should afford a priority to the sensory experience of artworks: What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art [ . . . ] Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art –​and by analogy, our own experience –​more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means. In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.37

Her call has all the rhetoric of a manifesto, and has all-​too-​often been dismissed as one, explained away as simply the product of a particular historical moment (1964). But the resonance of Sontag’s words today might suggest otherwise. And her argument that, ‘at least since Diderot’ the problem with art criticism is that it ‘treats the work of art as a statement being made in the form of a work of art’ connects not only back to Mallarmé but also forward to contemporary materialist theories that insist on the material specificity of art: ‘Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text of commentary on the world.’38 Why has Sontag not been taken more seriously? Christopher Norris, writing in 2013, summed it up thus: Every so often –​and with increasing frequency of late –​the arts and humanities disciplines, musicology included, take a militant turn ‘against interpretation’. Around thirty years ago [sic] Susan Sontag sounded one such offensive in a famous essay under just that title, while Roland Barthes put a broadly similar case first from a structuralist and later –​more engagingly –​ from a poststructuralist standpoint.

More recently, Norris points out, the suspicion of interpretation has been from the point of view of ‘the body –​the living, sensing, feeling, erotic, vibrantly responsive human body’. But, as he goes on, ‘the upshot of this was a whole lot of talk –​sophisticated talk at that –​about the body and its various

220 Touching modes of sensory-​libidinal-​erotic stimulation, rather than some strictly impossible appeal to the immediate, preconceptual, unspoken (indeed unspeakable) register of inchoate drives and affects’.39 Norris neatly summarises the problem: if a discourse on art is displaced by one on the body, then the real object would have to become something strictly ‘unspeakable’. My own approach is different, which is why it grazes rather than engages with the flood of recent literature on the body. My focus is on that which takes place in musical works not, primarily, what takes place in the listening body. I am suggesting that we might listen more attentively to the ways in which the body is written through music, put in play and imagined, not just with the actual body of the listener that experiences music. The latter would be a topic for psychologists, biologists, and even neuroscientists, but which is confined to telling us about the body in general and in relation to music in general, whereas thinking about how the body is written in this piece tells us about something in particular. Fifty years on, how do we use Sontag’s insight? It is not, I think, a matter of representation (which music does rather badly) because representation has to do with language and, as Jung reminds us, eros is a counterpart to logos. Nor is it simply a case of music’s proximity to the body and its rhythms. The libidinal body may have its own codes of corporeal communication, but its erotic potential far exceeds that of representation; ‘erotic intelligence’,40 like music, has to do with the work of the imagination. As the product of desire, erotic intelligence arises as a discourse between the body and the imagination, an apparently infinitely inventive and fantastical realm occasioned by absence. Played out in all forms of social life, art and music have always provided a privileged site for exploring this gap. Kierkegaard recognised this in a famous essay on Mozart’s Don Giovanni, an opera that stages the definitively erotic quality of music itself as the spirit of sensuality –​dynamic, temporal, and immediate.41 So I am interested here neither in musical evocations of the erotic nor of the representation of some state outside of music. To recapitulate some earlier themes of this book, my focus is a music that has little to do with the communication or encoding of messages, and that distances itself from the idea of music as a kind of quasi-​linguistic discourse. This music says nothing in order to foreground a coming to presence of a vibrating body of sound. Debussy’s pleasure on hearing the gamelan for the first time was no doubt related to this idea and it is this quality, rather than any specific technique, that can be heard in the piano music of both Debussy and Ravel. This music

The art of touch  221 still uses tonality, but it does so to undermine the assumptions of tonality, opening an erotic gap between its self-​sufficient pleasure and the teleology of tonal desire, climax, and closure. ‘Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so.’42 Roland Barthes reminds us that the erotic has to do with the tremor set up between forms of culture and their transgression, returning us once more to the gap, the hinge, the border. Jouissance is the ecstasy that arises from a loss of the subject, a loss of its boundaries, a condition that relates the sexually erotic to a condition of writing –​hence the idea of ‘textasy’ in literary studies.43 One might point to something similar in music that writes this blurring of the edges of the body, that puts the subject in play in order to take it to the edge of itself, to risk its own loss –​a loss of the subject (a shipwreck) that is also an access of to a greater whole (the constellation). Georges Bataille thus locates the erotic in a dissolution of the confines of the body that opens momentarily to the whole of existence. This places it close to death, which is why he hears the scenes of terror in Pelléas et Mélisande, notably Act 4.iv, as key to its eroticism.44 ‘We are discontinuous beings [ . . . ] but we yearn for our lost continuity [ . . . ] Along with our tormenting desire that this evanescent thing should last, there stands our obsession with a primal continuity linking us to everything that is.’45 Jean-​Luc Nancy, like Kierkegaard and Barthes before him, locates this gap explicitly between the body and language. ‘Coming [jouir] occurs –​or opens up [fraye] an access –​only when the signifying or symbolic order is suspended. When it is suspended by an interruption that produces no voice of sense but, to the contrary, a fullness and indeed an overfullness: an “absent sense” or the eruptive coming of the sense that is older than all signification, as it were its truth as sense.’46 A similar idea is found in Jean-​Luc Marion’s ‘saturated phenomenon’ –​an experience of the world marked by ‘the excess of intuition over the concept’,47 the inadequacy of language to experience, an excess of the body to the word, of being to signifying. For Marion, the saturated phenomenon is not only exemplified by the artwork but is, necessarily, erotic –​hence the constellation of ideas in his work that includes ‘the erotic phenomenon’, ‘the saturated phenomenon’, the artwork, and the sense of an excess of being over signification.48 Robert Fink has shown how, in both popular music and American minimalism, a shift towards non-​teleological repetition produces a cultivation of what he calls ‘nondiscursive jouissance’.49 But repetition was always key

222 Touching to the erotic aspect of music. ‘Cara sposa’, Rinaldo’s great aria of lament and desire in Handel’s opera of the same name, consists largely of the same two words, repeated, inverted, repeated again. This is not discourse but incantation in the face of absence –​a repetition provoked by the pathetic body (the body that suffers), not rational analysis or discourse upon the situation. Such repetition by the singing voice, foregrounding the sensuality of the voice over any discursive content, momentarily evokes the presence whose loss it mourns. This pleasurable and erotic dissonance of all song, between the sense of the words (absence) and the sound of the voice (presence), exemplifies how music relates to saying but differs from it. The musical voice is the site of mediation, but also the activity of mediation, between language and the body, a dynamic field in which the music sets in play (en jeu) the subject that is both in language and in the body, but exclusively neither. Ravel’s Bolero (1928) presents a fascinating case study in the pleasures of repetition. In some ways it is a shocking piece for the way it so blatantly disdains the idea of music saying something, of having content, or developing any kind of idea. Ravel himself is quoted as describing the piece as ‘orchestral tissue without music [ . . . ] no contrast, and practically no invention’50 and, as having confessed to Arthur Honegger: ‘I have written only one masterpiece. That is Bolero. Unfortunately it contains no music.’ Bolero flouts the self-​imposed ban of modern music on simple repetition, of ‘saying’ the same thing over and again. But at the same time, it flouts music’s dangerous capacity to do just that, to do the same thing but each time slightly different, celebrating the power of musical repetition and insisting on the erotic pleasures of its dance-​like returns. The deliberately louche deformations of its theme combine to flaunt a sinuous and sensuous quality in the face of the mechanical time of the side-​drum rhythm.51 To re-​quote Barthes, it is precisely in the gap between the two that the erotic arises. Debussy’s bon mots on pleasure are well known: ‘French music desires, above all, to give pleasure’ and, most often, ‘Pleasure is the law’,52 yet the erotic aspect of Debussy’s music has been remarkably neglected by scholars. One exception is Julie McQuinn, who considers the erotic in La demoiselle élue, the Chansons de Bilitis, Pelléas et Mélisande, and the song ‘C’est l’extase’, in the wider context of Debussy’s cultural milieu.53 One of the central metaphors of the idea of the erotic, across the arts at this time, was that of ‘la chevelure’ –​a term for which the English word ‘hair’ is a very inadequate translation. Baudelaire’s poem ‘La chevelure’ or the rendering of the hair of female figures by the Pre-​Raphaelites or, later, in the work of Gustav Klimt, gives a sense of the intensity of this cultural fascination. McQuinn considers this as a

The art of touch  223 case of fetishism, a term first used in 1887 by the French psychologist Alfred Binet.54 Katherine Bergeron similarly approaches the question of Mélisande’s hair against a cultural backdrop of a similar fascination in the work of Puvis de Chavannes, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Baudelaire, and Pierre Louÿs.55 It is a key idea in Pierre Louÿs’s Bilitis poems and ‘La chevelure’ is the second of the three poems set by Debussy in 1894. But it is the tower scene in Pelléas et Mélisande that the idea is explored most fully in Debussy’s music. Act 3.i takes place at night; the tower housing Mélisande’s room is seen against the night sky and lit only by the rising of the moon over the sea. It renders spatially the gap of desire between Pelléas and Mélisande, between her at the open window and him on the path below. Debussy’s music moves between the desire of leaning out (Mélisande) and that of reaching up (Pelléas) towards the sensuous plenitude which is the object of desire. One might talk here of an erotics of falling because, between the two, is a perilous and vertiginous gap (‘Vertige!’, we might hear, as a pre-​echo of Debussy’s later setting of Mallarmé’s Éventail). The gap, made visual in this scene, is erotic (in Bataille’s sense) because it has to do with the charge between two individual identities seeking to fuse into one.56 Its enactment of desire is played out in terms of saying and touching: ‘Give me your hand, your little hand on my lips [ . . . ] I can’t lean out any further [ . . . ] My lips can’t reach your hand’. In the end, it is Mélisande’s hair that falls. The stage direction states: ‘Her hair suddenly falls loose [ . . . ] and envelops Pelléas’ (Sa chevelure se révulse tout à coup . . . et inonde Pelléas). The French verb inonder means to flood (as in ‘inundation’). We are back with drowning the tone (noyer le ton) and the fate of Mallarmé’s poet/​mariner. Jankélévitch is explicit in linking Mélisande’s enveloping hair with the immersive infinitude of the sea: ‘not only does this mystery encompass and capture consciousness, but it leads it towards the infinite depths –​because it is deep and attractive like the sea’. He goes on: ‘Not only does the unloosened hair submerge Pelléas under waves of sensual pleasure (volupté), but it carries him away on its tidal wave towards the depths of a fathomless pleasure.’57 The erotic dimension is clear; volupté implies a definitely sensual if not sexual pleasure,58 and was quite explicitly referenced in contemporary accounts of female sexuality. Jean Marestan’s L’Education Sexuelle of 1910, for example, makes use of a familiar maritime metaphor: It very frequently happens that the woman is much slower in arriving at the climax of (sexual) pleasure [volupté]. In this amorous journey to the land of tenderness, things do not advance together, and one lover is already reaching port while his friend is only just appearing on the horizon.59

224 Touching Her hair now in Pelléas’s hands and mouth, Mélisande protests dreamily, ‘Let me go, you’re going to make me fall’. On the final syllable the harmony takes a chromatic sidestep and the orchestra re-​enter with a gently undulating figure that sounds what she has not spoken (see Example 7.5(a)). For a second time she interrupts Pelléas’s rhapsody with a half-​hearted ‘Let me go’. When he refuses again, she responds simply by whispering his name in a falling phrase, part of the drawn-​out cadential progression that ‘falls’ as it opens out to the plenitude of the G♭ major passage that follows (see Example 7.5(b)). Example 7.5(a)  Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act 3.i, bb. 114–​17

Example 7.5(b)  Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act 3.i, bb. 157-​61

The art of touch  225 The release of ‘La chevelure’ is a threshold moment  –​a transformative inundation of presence which, as Katherine Bergeron has it, opens up an ‘entirely new temporal register’.60 The music settles into the dynamic containment of a rich orchestral sonority rocked in gentle motion. Reaching across the gap now gives way to holding, as Pelléas, with a repeated line about her hair in his hands, affirms through his body (Je les tiens dans les mains). That such a move is key to a wider idea of music ‘after Debussy’ is underlined by a work like Henri Dutilleux’s Tout un monde lointain (1970), for solo cello and orchestra. Each of its five movements has an epigraph taken from a different poem of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, but the title borrows a phrase that appears in the poem ‘La chevelure’. In this, one of Baudelaire’s most intensely erotic works, the poet-​lover discovers the dark wonders he had thought to be ‘a world away’, in the touch, feel, and scent of his lover’s hair. The recurrent imagery is that of the open sea and coming into port: ‘Un port retentissant où mon âme peut boire /​À grand flots le parfum, le son et la couleur.’ The poem might equally be read as an erotic exploration of music through the metaphor of the lover’s hair, and in the wordless sonorities of Dutilleux’s music the two are of course indistinguishable. The poem’s vocative mode of address and ecstatic tone is mirrored in the way the music similarly evokes the presence of a ‘wholly distant world’ through a piling up of sensual materials. The same erotic quality pervades all five movements of Dutilleux’s work, blurring the boundaries between body and landscape, self and other. Its opening movement (Enigme/​Enigma) presents the solo cello emerging from nothing (a mere hiss on the cymbals and a harmonic haze of string clusters), only gradually coming to appearance and expanding to find a voice. This is music that cultivates a sense of being in process, still forming, that is briefly rapturous, and then evaporates into the nothing from which it emerged. It draws on the fairy-​like evanescence of Debussy’s music and anticipates the ‘precarious rapture’ of the Cello Concerto (1990) and Advaya (1994) by Jonathan Harvey.61 The epigraph to the second movement (Regard/​Gaze) points to the absolute particularity of the lover’s gaze and eyes –​‘lakes where my soul trembles and sees its own reflection’. The original title of this movement was Vertige, a sense of which is caught in the ecstatic solo cello lines in the uppermost register of the instrument, both ethereal and sweet, but also with a quality of aching intensity. The third movement (Houles/​Waves) opens up a rapturous space that, by means of the lines from Baudelaire’s ‘La chevelure’ quoted in the score, connects it to the immersive

226 Touching world of the lover’s hair which, like the sea, transports the poet (‘ebony sea, you bear a brilliant dream /​of sails and pennants, mariners and masts’). The fourth movement (Miroirs/​Mirrors), marked ‘slow and ecstatic’, opens the erotic space of two identities held in a mirror relation, enclosed but moving constantly between each other. The fifth (Hymne/​Hymn), restless and unpredictable, takes its cue from a poem (‘La voix’) that affirms both the rapture and pain of art’s dreaming (‘keep your dreams, the wise have none so lovely as the mad’). The musically erotic has too often been conceived solely in terms of nineteenth-​century tonal music and the teleological forms it privileged  –​ as a drama of tonal desire, condemned to a repetitive cycle of climax and collapse. But for all Debussy’s early fascination with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, his music explores a quite different idea of the erotic. Where the Wesendoncklieder demarcate the emptiness of longing that defines Act 3 of Wagner’s later opera, songs like Debussy’s ‘C’est l’extase’ set out a space that is already fulfilled. In this, Debussy is far closer to Fauré, whose mélodies frequently define a space of sensuous containment, enveloping the listening body in a gently flowing sonic environment. His settings of Verlaine, for example, in the Chansons de Venise, Op. 58, include not only his own version of ‘C’est l’extase’, but also the languorous stasis of ‘En sourdine’. In ‘À clymene’, a song about ‘your’ presence (your eyes, your voice, your sense, your whole being), Fauré uses the topos of the barcarolle to merge the rocking of the water with the satiety of the erotic body. In music, the erotic touch of another body fuses with that of the environing landscape. In both cases, touch is the chiasmic point of exchange between self and other, touching and being touched –​as Merleau-​Ponty sets out. Music enacts this in powerful form, since the sonic landscape is palpably both external and internal; the listener moves between going outwards into the sonic space and drawing sound within the body. The vibrating body, put in motion by music, is an organ of erotic pleasure because it is the vibration across the gap/​overlap between self and other, body and world. Sense, as Nancy insists, is never ‘in general’, as is the case with signification; it is always and necessarily particular and located in a particular place and body: ‘pleasure does not take place except through place, touch, and zone. It is local, detached, discreet, fragmentary, absolute. A  nonfractal pleasure, a pleasure without limits, fragmentation, arrival, or falling due, is not a pleasure at all.’62 Sense interrupts the logical sequences of the signifying orders of language –​as can

The art of touch  227 be heard in those moments in Debussy that linger on the sensuous moment at the expense of musical argument or discourse: ‘By means of the touch of the senses, pleasure surprises and suspends the enchainment of signifying sense. Or, rather, what one calls in French the “touche des sens” (touch of the senses) consists precisely in this suspension and being-​taken-​by-​surprise of signifying enchainement.’63

8 Writing the body L’écriture musicale Twenty-​five years ago, Jean-​Luc Nancy suggested that the body had already become ‘our old culture’s latest, most worked over, sifted, refined, dismantled, and reconstructed product’.1 Ten years later, Don Ihde similarly noted:  ‘Bodies, bodies everywhere. Philosophy, feminist thought, cultural studies, science studies, all seem to have rediscovered bodies.’2 Linda Austern wrote, in the same year, of a ‘return to an epistemology of embodiment’ and went on to cite an extensive literature from the 1990s and earlier.3 Given the importance of the body to Roland Barthes, writing on music in the 1970s, to say nothing of Susan Sontag’s call for an erotics of art in 1964, the shift towards a more embodied aesthetics is already half a century old. Since then it has multiplied across the arts and humanities as part of a wider new materialism, a definitive shift away from the formalism of an earlier age. This move of the body, from its abject absence in discourse to its new-​found centrality is well-​known and I do not review it here. One might trace its roots to the beginning of the twentieth century, to Freud’s insistence on the presence of the body in the working of the mind, and to the origins of phenomenology in the philosophy of Husserl. But one might also look back to the exploration within music, visual art, and literature, of a new kind of embodied materiality. If it has taken a century for the body to come centre stage in the realm of theory, the latter might learn something from the findings of art. But what are the consequences for music of this new insistence on the body? After all the urgent assertions of a sensing, breathing, and palpitating musical body, what has been said about music? One answer is that such an approach reaffirms the claims of an embodied particularity –​one might say, even, the claims of our own embodied particularity –​in sound. But another answer is that this rush into the acousmatic body is a rush to fill the vacuum left by idealism, less a new idea than the latest swing of a disciplinary pendulum, which risks reducing music to only sound and to the body’s experience of sound. A  phenomenology of sound is not itself an aesthetics of

After Debussy. Julian Johnson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066826.001.0001

230 Touching music –​at least, not for a musical repertoire that is founded on the tension between what is heard and what is not heard, between material sound on the one hand and, on the other, form, pattern, constellation, configuration, memory, anticipation, association, interval, gap. Music after Debussy exemplifies such a repertoire, in which the sounding musical body (of the listener as much as the performer) is placed in tension with musical writing. To fetishise sound and the presence of the listening body alone, to proclaim that everything unheard in musical writing is some non-​sense of idealism, is to fall directly into the trap which Derrida exposed half a century ago. Writing, he insisted, opens up a critical space of non-​identity between speech and writing, prising apart the closure of a metaphysics of presence. But différance is not confined to language; it is also a condition of a musica scripta that flickers constantly across the non-​identity between writing and sonorous acts of musical performance. The writing of music, in the widest sense, is not defined solely by technologies of music notation, but by intentional acts of rethinking and remaking sounds that distinguishes music from the universe of environmental sounds. Musical écriture is, first and foremost, not sound but the shaping of sound; as such, it is also the shaping and writing of time and, with that, a reshaping and rewriting of our own sonorous and temporal being.4 My focus, therefore, is not the body, nor our embodied perceptions of the world, nor even specifically our experience of sound. My interest is with the idea of musical écriture as a musical re-​writing of the body –​in the sense both of directing the body of the performer into specific material configurations, and of enabling new lexicons of corporeal being within the listener. The final part of Michel Serres’ Les cinq sens is titled simply ‘Joy’, signalling the quality of ekstasis (being outside of one’s own body) that can be occasioned by forms of bodily play (in Serres’ essay, these range from walking and swimming to dancing and trampolining). The musicking body, whether that of the performer, dancer, or listener, is undoubtedly one such form of the body at play. But musical écriture is also different to trampolining precisely because it is a writing. Neither pure materiality nor the representation of materiality, musical écriture is a re-​imagining of materiality, a re-​inscribing that is also a re-​making. Mallarmé found something similar in the body of the dancer. The dancer, he tells us, is not just a woman who dances, but a kind of écriture corporelle, a writing of the body, a poetry no longer confined to the page –​‘a corporal writing that would take paragraphs of prose [ . . . ] to express’.5 In place of

Writing the body  231 the folding of pages, the dancer presents a constant unfolding, ‘like giant petals or butterflies’, of the material in which she is clothed, her skirt like a wing (aile) that writes upon the air in order ‘to create a place’.6 While dance may be metaphorically a writing of the body (poetry in motion, as the cliché has it), it also became scripted in a more literal way in the twentieth century, as in Rudolf Laban’s development, in the 1920s, of a graphic language for representing choreography. For Mallarmé, dance shares with music and poetry the sense of constant motion, a perpetual ‘dispersion volatile’ of anything solid or fixed: a writing of the body in order to dissolve it, to liberate it from being merely a solid thing, to enable it to take flight. As Suzanne Bernard summarises it: Just as in music one note perpetually succeeds another, hardly appearing before it vanishes, dance offers us a succession of forms and attitudes in the course of perpetual transformation –​and this incessant flight, here as in music, gives us the sense of an evanescent reality, shedding everything ‘qui pèse ou qui pose’ [Verlaine]; reality evoked without end, annihilated without end, and by the play of the ‘negative creation’ which Mallarmé sees as art’s own, reduced to its volatile essence.7

Mallarmé was fascinated with dancers in general, but with one in particular –​the American dancer Loïe Fuller (1869–​1928) who first appeared in Paris in 1892, astonishing audiences with her play of veils and light (see Figure 8.1).8 Mallarmé first wrote about her in a newspaper article of 1893;9 his account might equally be applied to Debussy’s setting of ‘Eventail’: an unfolding, like giant petals or butterflies, all very clear and straightforward. Its fusion with the fast-​moving nuances, constantly transforming their phantasmagoric-​mixture of air and water, typical of dusks and caves, like swiftly changing passions –​delight, grief, rage: to set them in motion, diluted with all their prismatic violence, we need the vertigo of a soul that seems to have been placed in the air through some kind of artifice.10

In the phantasmagorical figure of the dancer, Mallarmé found a re-​writing of the body that is pre-​eminently musical. His wordplay of the dancer as signe/​cygne reminds us that the ballet dancer is often some kind of bird or fairy –​a liminal or hybrid figure, paradigmatically a princess who has been turned into a swan. And, as with all fairy-​tales, the transmigration of form

232 Touching

Figure 8.1  Loïe Fuller, photographed by Frederick Glasier (1902)

is a vehicle for self-​discovery  –​hence the theme of the double (Odette/​ Odile) in ballet and the enactment of the non-​human body as other. If dance, pre-​eminently, (re)writes the human body, so too does music:  it too puts the bodies of performers and listeners in motion and thereby projects the movements of virtual bodies in which performers and listeners share. The listener may remain largely motionless, but the imaginary body takes flight with the myriad forms of movement into which music draws the listening body. Music thus creates an avatar of the human body –​a virtual being which enacts new forms of motion on behalf of the motionless body. Jacques Rancière devotes a whole chapter (‘The Dance of Light’) of his Aisthesis to Loïe Fuller and her art of fictive appearing.11 Key to this art, as Mallarmé underlines, is her dress as a kind of veil (voile). Rancière puts it like this: The veil is not only an artifice that enables one to imitate all sorts of forms. It also displays the potential of a body by hiding it. It is the supplement that the body gives itself to change its forms and its function. The novelty of Loïe Fuller’s art is not the simple charm of the sinuous. It is the invention of a new body [ . . . ].12

Writing the body  233 For Mallarmé, Fuller’s dance found a perfect analogy in music which also uses the body to make something that does not resemble it: ‘the movement of the veil does not transpose any musical motifs, but the very idea of music’. Or again: ‘The veil is music because it is the artifice through which a body extends itself to engender forms into which it disappears.’13 This musical self-​ sufficiency of her dancing was underlined, for Mallarmé, by the absence of any backdrop or scenery and thus any pretence of representation. Instead, Fuller stepped out onto an entirely black stage to present the ‘contentless’ play of the movements of her body and dress in the light trained upon her. What Fuller made visible was thus the play of light in motion, as so often in the work of contemporary painters, and as contemporary film pioneers of the 1890s were just discovering. It was this play of appearing itself, Rancière underlines, that Mallarmé found in the folds of Fuller’s dress as much as the ‘unfolding of a fan, swaying hair, or the foam on the crest of a wave. For him all these aspects symbolise the pure act of appearing and disappearing.’14 The critical language of reception around Fuller’s performances often framed her dancing in terms of some primordial appearance or original beginning. Rancière quotes a review by Paul Adam from 1893: She placed the original form of the planet before a thousand spectators, the way it was before it burned, cooled, covered with rain, sea, land, plants, animals and men. The dullest socialite feels a little shudder before this apparition of the genesis of worlds.15

Such an idea was cultivated across the arts in the early decades of the twentieth century –​from Fauré’s settings (1906–​10) of some of the poems of Charles Van Lerberghe’s La chanson d’Ève (1904) to Nijinsky’s choreography of Stravinksy’s Le sacre de printemps (1913) –​foregrounding through art the elemental act of appearing itself rather than the telling of stories. If the cultivation of the primordial can be found in music as much as painting, poetry as much as sculpture, it was self-​evidently in dance that this ‘re-​writing’ of the body took place most palpably. Debussy’s unloosening of the pianist’s body from the strict entrainment of the five-​finger exercise might thus be heard in parallel with developments in dance away from the disciplined lexicon of classical ballet to a new idea of the expressive immediacy of the natural body. One of its key pioneers, Émile Jaques-​Dalcroze, began his career as a composer (studying with Fauré in Paris in 1884, and Bruckner in Vienna in 1887); another, Rudolf Laban, whose career took him between Paris,

234 Touching Munich, and Berlin before he left Nazi Germany for England in the 1930s, quite literally explored the idea of ‘writing the body’ in his development of a notational system for dance to parallel that of music. The key figures of ‘free dance’ overlap with those of music at every turn –​Grete Wiesenthal in the Vienna of Mahler and Schoenberg; Loïe Fuller and Isadora Duncan in the Paris of Debussy and, later, Stravinsky; Mary Wigman and Rudolph Laban in the Munich of Wassily Kandinsky. Laban established a network of schools in the 1920s, and opened an Institute of Choreography in Berlin in 1927, just as Schoenberg moved to Berlin for his third and longest teaching appointment there (1926–​33) and as the broader idea of the ‘Schoenberg School’ solidified around the new principles of composition enshrined in ‘The Method’. Debussy himself may have had little affection for the way in which Nijinsky choreographed his Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faun and Jeux for the Ballets Russes, in 1912 and 1913 respectively, but there is a deeper connection between the rewriting of the body in Debussy’s music and a parallel movement in contemporary dance. Both were increasingly engaged in what Jacques Rancière describes as ‘miming the act of appearing instead of miming the appearance of characters to whom something happens’.16 What is common to both, and what Mallarmé saw in Loïe Fuller’s dancing, was ‘a new idea of fiction.’ As Rancière sees it: this substitutes the plot with the construction of a play of aspects, elementary forms that offer an analogy to the play of the world [ . . . ] The new fiction is this pure display of forms. These forms can be called abstract because they tell no stories. But if they get rid of stories, they do so in order to serve a higher mimesis: through artifice they reinvent the very forms in which sensible events are given to us and assembled to constitute a world. The ‘transition’ from music to fabric is the recapturing of the power of abstraction, of music’s power of muteness, by mimetic gesture itself. The body abstracts from itself, it dissimulates its own form in the display of veils sketching flight rather than the bird, the swirling rather than the wave, the bloom rather the flower. What is imitated, in each thing, is the event of its apparition.17

This might be taken to be exactly what takes place in the Préludes pour piano by Debussy –​a ‘veil’ of mimesis in order to stage the act of appearing itself, in myriad forms of movement. In this, Debussy’s music comes close to the quality that Michel Serres finds in the pre-​vocal arts of mime and dance, which ‘say nothing but carry everything’.18 It is perhaps for exactly

Writing the body  235 that reason that such an art demands a certain kind of silence. As Rancière suggests of Loïe Fuller: ‘Silent to the point where uttering a word about her while she is present, however softly and for the edification of a neighbour, seems an impossibility, because it confounds us.’19

Imaginary bodies Debussy’s two books of Préludes for piano (1909–​10; 1912–​13) might be read as a kind of catalogue of such a (re-​)writing of the human body. The Préludes do not describe, depict, or represent, for some passive audience, Le vent dans la pleine, Brouillards, Feuilles mortes, or Feux d’artifice; rather, they make the listening body move like wind, mist, dead leaves, or fireworks. They do not evoke the hills of Capri, Spain, or a moonlit terrace, but place the body in a new sensory environment for which these are merely associative reference points, ways of grounding something for which we have no name. Debussy might just as well have added, before each of his allusive postscript titles: ‘This music moves your body as strangely as if you were just now’ a Delphic dancer, making footsteps in the snow, lost in the movement of sails, tumbling along on the west wind. The link between the dancer and an irreal kind of bodily movement is explicit in La danse de Puck and Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses, but the fairy creature, whether of air or water, is just one way into the fantastical, of putting the body in motion in ways that seem to place that of the listener into a different element –​to make us move like the wind, a fountain, or snow dancing. The ‘fairy’ pieces are simply the tip of the iceberg, a nod to the idea of representation as a cover and a diversion for a far more radical, unsettling kind of activity. In this they are like the titles Debussy appends at the end of each Prélude, separated from the music by an ellipsis. This familiar poetic conceit marks the gap between the musical and the visual. The three dots of the ellipsis make the associative image provisional, open-​ended, unstable; they dissolve the fixity of the poetic and visual image to point back to the space without a name created by the music. The unreal fairy body, like music itself, connects the real human body to the elements of which it is made. When the Préludes are not evoking the movement of fairy characters like Puck or Ondine, they are often concerned with the elements –​pre-​eminently water and air. In place of musical saying, they explore the logic of the sensing body in relation to a world at the margins of language. As in General Lavine (Book II, no. 6), the body here is always

236 Touching ‘eccentric’ in the sense of being particular, individual, resisting the centricity of a conventional relationship to the world. Debussy’s music exhibits a whole menagerie of non-​human or half-​human forms –​from Jimbo the elephant (Children’s Corner) to the collection of toys in La Boîte à Joujou, from the sirens of the Nocturnes to Mallarme’s faun. In this, his music is closely related to works of his contemporaries that explored eccentric bodies by evoking animals in music –​witness Ravel in L’enfant et les sortilèges and Janáček in The Cunning Little Vixen –​to say nothing of composers’ fascination with the movement of birds, from Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending to the ornithological worlds of Messiaen. Debussy’s fascination with exploring a rich diversity of forms of the musical body is announced in the initial series of pieces in the first book of Préludes. There is an intriguing ‘logic of sense’ to the sequence with which Debussy links each one to the next. The movement of the Delphic dancers (no.  1)  is highlighted by their veils, which as sails (no. 2) catch the breeze that becomes the wind on the plain (no. 3), but later subsides to carry the sounds and scents of the evening (no. 4), a landscape of colour, scent, and sound like that of the hills of Anacapri (no. 5). At which point Debussy introduces a hiatus: the warmth of Italy and its lively dance steps are suddenly juxtaposed with a frozen landscape and faltering steps in the snow (no. 6). The bodies evoked in ‘Danseuses de Delphes’ (I, no. 1) are absent bodies; summoned by the slow hieratic movement of this solemn Sarabande they remain, nevertheless, distanced in time and place. The anecdote that this piece was inspired by a Greek bas-​relief in the Louvre is not insignificant given the quality of moving/​not moving it achieves.20 It offers a valuable insight into a quality of Debussy’s music ‘in reverse’:  where the bas-​relief pictures movement frozen in the stillness of a static object, Debussy’s music uses movement to evoke a stillness of the body. The repetition of a narrowly defined figure is key to the sense of this ‘still movement’ –​an idée fixe of the Préludes as a whole, announced thematically in its opening number. Apart from a brief moment of appearance (bb. 15–​17) these are otherwise absent bodies. The evoked body is restrained, constrained even, in its movement; according to Marguerite Long, Debussy played this piece ‘with almost metronomic exactness’. This is a classicised, ideal body, which the body of the pianist enacts at the keyboard with the arms moving symmetrically outwards from the centre (bb. 1–​4), later answered by their convergence back towards the centre (bb. 11–​14). This sense of the symmetrical spacing of the body is taken up, along with the sense of still movement and the B♭ pedal, in ‘Voiles’ (I, no.  2).21 The

Writing the body  237 symmetries of pitch and register within this piece have often been noted, with the middle C of the piano acting as the axis of symmetry between the bass B♭ and the high D (see bb. 21, 33–​37, 52). Once again, the pianist’s arms mark out this space either side of the middle C, the embodied sign of the centre of the keyboard, the still point of the pianist’s turning world, the white blank of C major from which the musical fantasy is spun and to which it returns. The ‘veils’ of the Delphic dancers link this prelude to the preceding one, the ‘sails’ link it to the wind of the succeeding one, the B♭ pedal links all three. There is no journey here, no movement of the body from one place to another. This is a body at rest, immersed within its own space, with only a brief single moment of breaking out in the jouissance of bb. 42–​44 (emporté means, literally, carried away) only to return at once to something ‘très retenu’ (b. 45). This too is distanced, objective even, avoiding the rhetoric of subjective expression, though where the body was restrained by the held-​back rhythm in the first prelude, ‘Voiles’ is to be played ‘Dans un rhythme sans rigueur et caressant’. On one hand, ‘Le vent dans la plaine’ (I, no. 3) is a piece about the physicality of touch, about the interface between the touch of the hands and les touches (the keys of the piano). On the other hand, it evokes a quality of movement that suggests a non-​human presence, something ungraspable, a piece of objective nature, as inexpressive as the noise of the wind. Its concern is the infinite variegation of a patterning of sonority, of son before sens. It might recall Vincent D’Indy’s remark about Debussy’s harmony, that it was without sens (both sense and direction), since ‘Le vent’ challenges any expectation of the sense of direction conferred by tonal practice. The directions of sonority, like those of the wind, are quite other to those of human discourse and Debussy makes no concessions to the latter as the music trills its way in apparently circular and meandering patterns, constantly in motion but going nowhere. The title of this prelude makes an oblique reference to Verlaine’s poem ‘C’est l’extase langoureuse’, the first of the Romances sans paroles, which takes as its epigraph a phrase from the eighteenth-​century writer Charles-​Simon Favart –​ ‘Le vent dans la plaine /​suspend son haleine.’ Debussy set Verlaine’s poem in 1887 and later included it in the six Verlaine songs he published as Ariettes oubliés in 1903. Similarly, the title of ‘Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir’ (I, no. 4) looks back to the Cinq Poémes de Baudelaire, and ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’ (I, no. 8) borrows the title from one of Debussy’s earliest songs (to a text by Leconte de Lisle). How should we read this late look back, in the piano music, to the earlier songs? One response might be

238 Touching to hear it as an extension of what already takes place in the songs themselves, which often frame or stage a song, at one remove, as a kind of reflection upon music and its performance. The fascination with music about music is evident in other ways in the Préludes too –​as in ‘La sérénade interrompue’ (I, no. 9), a pianistic evocation of music played on the guitar, or ‘Minstrels’ (I, no. 12), which, like many of the early songs, takes the scene of musical performance as its topic. In the case of ‘Le vent dans la plaine’ one might certainly discern some connections with the song ‘C’est l’extase langoureuse’ –​not least, the sense of movement suspended in the murmuring of the wind that holds its breath for the lovers. But more significant is surely the distance between the erotic subjectivity of Debussy’s songs in the 1880s and the elemental objectivity of the Préludes three decades later. Where the song foregrounds the sense of the first two lines (C’est l’extase langoureuse,/​C’est la fatigue amoureuse), the Prelude makes more of the lines of poetry that follow which evoke, in wonderful detail, the auditory richness of the rustling and murmuring of the surrounding environment. The contained movement of the Prelude, held over its B♭ pedal, suggests an objectivity of nature independent of the presence of human subjects. Whereas, in the song, music serves conventionally as the expression of feeling and the carrier of language, the piano prelude foregrounds the body at the keyboard and the physicality of touch. It is effectively a toccata (a piece that arises from a focus on touching) and proceeds by means of a logic of the body. The opening figure is a product of the movement of the hands before it becomes material for the musical mind (see Example 8.1). So too are the later gestural ‘break outs’ (in bb. 28, 30, 31, and 33) consisting of loud full chords in both hands, converging from the outer registers back to the central space of the keyboard. The eruptive force of this gestures is a bodily spasm; without formal or harmonic function, it is a product of the gestural musical body not the logical musical mind. It foregrounds figure over discourse, gesture over syntax. Debussy thus foregrounds the body both by making the movement of the pianist’s body the material of these pieces and by putting virtual bodies into motion. But he also foregrounds the body by accentuating sensuous intensity over discursive order. Witness the ways in which he explores a logic of the senses in preludes like ‘Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir’ (I, no. 4). This too is a study of movement within a contained stillness and distance (note the horn topic in the closing bars). This too has a title that links to a song –​Baudelaire’s Harmonie du soir, set by Debussy in 1889. Baudelaire’s

Writing the body  239 Example 8.1  Claude Debussy, ‘Le vent dans la plaine’, Préludes, Livre I, no. 3, bb.  1–​6

poem is a pantoum, a form in which lines two and four of each quatrain become lines one and three of the next. At the same time, however, the rhyme scheme of abba creates a closed, contained quality to each quatrain. Debussy’s song mixes this up, with the piano accompaniment forming a counterpoint of wordless reminiscences against those given by the poem itself. ‘Les collines d’Anacapri’ (I, no.5) links to the previous prelude through the idea of space but also the movement of the body within space through dance, though the languorous waltz of the previous prelude gives ways here to the bright energy of a Neapolitan tarantella (joyeux et léger, b. 14). But the vivid present of the popular song is, as so often in Debussy, presented as an act of memory. The framing gesture of the opening bars (quittez, en laissant vibrer) might recall Carolyn Abbate’s remarks about the ‘plucked string’ that opens and closes Debussy’s early setting of Verlaine’s ‘Mandolin’;22 the presence of the bright energy of ‘the hills of Capri’ is an act of deliberate recall, a making appear through music. Unlike the earlier song, however, the prelude wants to assert, with Proustian intensity, that the presence recalled through memory is more vivid and more luminous than the original. The astonishing closing section, in the highest register of the piano, concludes the prelude in a gesture of luminous evanescence, with the steely brightness of the upper strings vibrating in the air. In the final gesture, Debussy has the pianist pick out (fff,

240 Touching trés retenu) the three highest black notes of the keyboard, each heavily accented (see Example 8.2). It makes for a remarkable sound, as if the pianist were trying too hard to squeeze out some bell-​like resonance from strings too short and too taut to deliver such a sound. Overdetermined, it thus frames this joyous energy of the dancing body as backlit by memory. It is this act of memory which connects the energetic dance steps of ‘Les collines’ to the weary and faltering steps of ‘Des pas sur la neige’ (I, no. 6), two pieces that otherwise seem to make an absolute contrast and thus a kind of rupture within the sequence of the set. The body moves quite differently, but it is nevertheless the movement of the body that is the material of both

Example 8.2  Claude Debussy, ‘Les collines d’Anacapri’, Préludes, Livre I, no. 5, bb.  80–​96

Writing the body  241 pieces. As Steven Rings has shown, the constricted step motion that defines ‘Des pas sur la neige’ is contrasted with the gently expansive arabesque of recollection, with its drawn out triplet figure (bb. 3, 7, 18–​19).23 The frozen body is here also a lost body; human presence is marked by absence and emptiness, by footprints that are merely traces of presence, but that act as thresholds to the recalling of presence (expressif et tendre). It is telling that the footstep motif is a version of the ‘dotted’ rhythm that Debussy employs elsewhere as a device of musical appearing24 –​at the start of La mer, for example, and again in Act 3 of Pelléas et Mélisande, as Pelléas and Golaud ascend out of the underground caverns to mark a kind of return to life, a coming to presence through the return to sunlight.25 If presence is attenuated in ‘Des pas sur la neige’, it is entirely displaced in the violence of ‘Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest’ (I, no. 7). The absence of human presence is underlined here by an exploration of musical sound that borders on noise, a kind of anti-​syntactical statement distanced from anything resembling musical speech and thus a definitive kind of saying nothing. In the same way, the rolling gusts of sound from out of the bass register seem to have nothing to do with the movement of the human body. The opening six bars present no musical material in a traditional sense, but only a gestural and physical exploration of the hands, a shaped energy of the body. Even when something more like a musical ‘idea’ appears (from b. 7) it is interrupted by another bodily gesture (the sforzando figures at the start of b. 10 and b. 13). The passage from b. 15 anticipates later electronic music in that it shapes sounds as a single fluid substance rather than through differentiated parts combined into syntactical structures. The modernity of this music is not located in its dissonance as such, but in this foregrounding of the agitation of the body as the origin of musical sound. Nevertheless, ‘Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest’ explores a level of dissonance and violence almost without equal in Debussy’s output. Bars 35–​42, taken in isolation, surely verge on the edge of ‘unmusical’ noise for many listeners, with its compound seconds crashing up and down the keyboard like a kind of angry anti-​music (see Example 8.3). This is the opposite of the elaboration of contained space we so often find in Debussy’s music; it is, rather, a violent breaking out from within. The excess of bodily violence upon the keyboard suggests a level of anger that has little to do with the Hans Christian Andersen tale to which the title putatively refers. This is not just a violence of the body, but a violence against the discourse of music itself. Jankélévitch points to the use of adjacent seconds in Debussy’s piano music, especially when doubled at the octave, as breaking one of ‘the

Example 8.3  Claude Debussy, ‘Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest’, Préludes, Livre I, no. 7, bb.  35–​42

Writing the body  243 Example 8.3 Continued

taboos of academic pianism’ in order to obtain a quality of atonal noise at the limit of the musical.26 The modest reticence of ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’ which follows hardly seems like the work of the same composer. How does one make sense of this contrast between the ‘furious’ violence of ‘Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest’ and the quiet calm of ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’ (Trés calme et doucement expressif)? The latter takes its title from a poem by Leconte de Lisle, published as part of a set of Chansons écossaises in his Poèmes antiques (1852). Debussy set that text in the early 1880s as one of the songs written for Marie-​Blanche Vasnier though, as James Briscoe underlines, there are no obvious musical connections between the early song and the piano prelude written nearly thirty years later.27 It is, nevertheless, another framed act of memory. Debussy looks back to an earlier period of his life and career, by reference to a poem that itself is a framed evocation of pastness; both prelude and poem are thus acts of stylistic throwback. The courtly dance style of Debussy’s music, and the parallel chordal motion, seem to anticipate the definitive stylistic archaicism of the later ‘Placet futile’ (from the Trois Poémes de Stéphane Mallarmé). The muted modal language (centred on G♭) twice promises a move to a more vivid presence, marked by the turn to E♭ major –​once in b. 6, and then again, more energetically (un peu animé) in bb. 19–​21, but the move is sidestepped and comes to nothing.28 Musicologists, trained to recognise stylistic traits and place them in historical sequence, and mindful of the subtleties of musical intertextuality, are apt to ascribe to composers a knowing and deliberate play of self-​referentiality. Who knows? Perhaps Debussy’s play with the past was in this vein. But it may also be the case that it was the hands of the pianist-​composer that took him

244 Touching there –​the memory of hands that yearn for familiar and habitual shapes. This makes sense of what otherwise does not –​the sequence of the avant-​garde pianism of ‘Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest’ and the comforting ease of the hands that follows in ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’. It is the hands that link the latter to ‘La sérénade interrompue’ (I, no. 9) –​ here, the hands of the guitarist rather than the pianist. This too, is an act of distanciation –​from Scotland to Spain, and from an innocent ‘serenade’ to a far more complex one. Memory is once again key, since this astonishing imitation of the guitar is generally understood to be a kind of hommage to Isaac Albéniz who died in 1909 (aged 48), and specifically to Albéniz’s own collection of twelve substantial ‘impressions’ for piano, titled Iberia, which had been published in 1908. Once again, this is a piece about music and music-​ making but, like some of Debussy’s early Verlaine settings (‘Mandolin’, most obviously), this is also a piece about music-​making in the past, about the gap between the dream of a past music that makes present and a present music that does not. So the central idea of this prelude is not the imitation of the guitar, wonderful though it is, but the melody that does not appear. In bb. 32–​ 40 the piano right hand (expressif et un peu suppliant) tries to sing, but cannot move beyond the same two pitches. Later, in bb. 54–​72, it tries again but without getting much further. At the third time of trying, from b. 97 onwards, it settles briefly into its wordless song –​fragile, distant, and haunting –​before simply vanishing (see Example 8.4). The preluding of the guitar, in the end, thus frames a song that barely appears. In this, ‘La sérénade’ exemplifies the idea of a prelude in Debussy’s hands –​a framing of the act of appearing. Where ‘La sérénade’ frames appearing as a fragile and elusive gesture, ‘La cathédrale engloutie’ (I, no. 10) offers a rare and striking staging of appearance in forcefully grand and sonorous terms (making use of a thickly-​ scored chorale topic, fortissimo, that might recall the ending of La mer). But the ironic twist, underlined by the pianissimo evanescence of the prelude’s ending, is that not only is this act of appearing momentary, it is also fictional. ‘La cathédrale’ is one of Debussy’s most overt examples of making appear, of coming to presence through sonorous and spatial expansion. If its title references the fairytale legend of the lost city of Ys, it does so, as so often in the Préludes, to use the fiction of art to frame the act of appearing itself, not the appearance of any thing. This is one of Debussy’s most naked studies of expanding sonority outwards rather than plotting any kind of musical argument. Marked ‘augmentez progressivement’ and later, ‘dans une expression allant grandissant’, this sense of expansion displaces the usual linear

Writing the body  245 Example 8.4  Claude Debussy, ‘La sérénade interrompue’, Préludes, Livre I, no. 9, bb. 90–​112

functions of harmonic form to create a huge resonating space that tries to exceed that of the piano. The ancient capital of Cornouaille is of course another ‘lost world’, as distant as the Allemonde of Maeterlinck’s Pelléas, or indeed the Cornwall of Wagner’s Tristan, and it is the radiant quiet chorale with which Debussy concludes the piece (bb. 72–​89), rather than the impossibly ‘orchestral’ fortissimo version earlier (bb. 28–​41), which is suggestive of real presence (see Example 8.5). It is an idea implied by Michel Serres in an allusive reference to Debussy’s piece that ‘the earth is submerged in noise as, in ancient times, was once the cathedral under the sea’.29 Noise –​the noise of language and discourse as much as that of urban life –​submerges presence as completely as the ocean depths; only in silence can presence rise imperceptibly to the surface, if the closing bars of Debussy’s prelude are to be believed. The aquatic gives way to the aerial in ‘La danse de Puck’ (I, no. 11). The title’s reference is less to Shakespeare than to illustrations by Arthur Rackham in the edition of Shakespeare owned by Debussy.30 The evoked, fictional body of the fairy creature Puck is the ‘alibi’ here for Debussy’s capricious rewriting

246 Touching Example 8.5  Claude Debussy, ‘La cathédrale engloutie’, Préludes, Livre I, no. 10, bb.  72–​89

of the body of the pianist and the listener, one that moves between dance (the possible movement of the body) and flight (its impossible movement). As such, it goes to the heart of Debussy’s play with musical material to put the body in play. The single line of the opening bars has a built-​in freedom that continually moves in and out of metrical focus. The insouciant changes of pace and character, the refusal of all seriousness or weight, and the frequent overstepping of its own boundaries, makes this piece one of Debussy’s most mercurial and light-​footed. Nothing could be further from the grand chorale that marks the rising of ‘La cathédrale’ and yet, this too is about appearing –​ the appearing of something ungraspable and in flight, ‘rapide et fuyant’, as the performance direction has it in the final evanescent bars. With ‘Minstrels’ (I, no.  12)  Debussy returns to the figure of the musician, to the act of self-​framing encountered in ‘La sérénade interrompue’. But here, even more than the earlier example, Debussy’s concern seems to

Writing the body  247 be self-​effacement  –​framing his own disappearance as the composer/​pianist behind this theatrical show. It takes over from Puck the same playful quality –​the opening is marked ‘nerveux et avec humour’, the passage at b. 37 is marked ‘Moqueur’, making explicit what was already clear, that this is a piece that makes fun of itself, such that the ‘expressif’ marking in b. 63 can only be taken ironically. One might search for outward referents and objects of representation  –​in the blackface comedians of Debussy’s Paris, or else their masked commedia predecessors in Verlaine and Banville –​but the musical reference is audibly to Debussy himself via the style of his early piano pieces from the 1880s and 1890s (especially the ‘Mouvement’ passage, bb. 9–​34). There is an element of Debussy’s friend Erik Satie here, of appearing only to announce the show is over, of making an entry in order to announce an exit.

The philosopher’s body It has taken a remarkably long time for phenomenology to emerge as a real force in music aesthetics  –​witness how, until recently, the name of Maurice Merleau-​Ponty has been largely invisible in the field. It is true that Merleau-​Ponty wrote very little specifically on music and his comments on art (mostly painting and literature) appear only in the late and often incomplete writings, unpublished until some years after his death.31 But it is not insignificant that his late turn to art as a way of rethinking the antinomies of philosophy has similarities with other major philosophers of the twentieth century, including Wittgenstein and Heidegger. To consider what it is that Merleau-​Ponty offers to a rethinking of art, one needs to ask the question the other way around: what was it in art that Merleau-​Ponty sought as a way of rethinking philosophy? At the heart of phenomenology is of course a different way of knowing the world; its opposition to Cartesian dualism lies precisely in its identification of a ‘co-​constitution’ of the perceiving consciousness and the world that is perceived, an acknowledgement of the centrality of the body in the production of knowledge. This, as Amy Cimini insists, is quite different from merely reinscribing the old duality by backing the opposite side (the body), a lurch of the disciplinary pendulum for which she criticises both Suzanne Cusick and Carolyn Abbate. The latter’s ‘Drastic/​Gnostic’ essay (2004), argues Cimini, ‘enforces a particularly strong distinction between mind-​centric

248 Touching hermeneutics and embodied listening and performance’.32 Merleau-​Ponty, by contrast, is concerned not with the opposition between these but precisely with their co-​constitution. Such a way of knowing the world has clear overlaps with the kind of listening that music invites, privileges, and arguably entrains. One might go even further: it is surely not just that artworks provide an ideal example of the kind of attention to the world that lies at the heart of the phenomenological epoché, but that artworks provide the model for acts of consciousness through which we engage with, and are engaged by, the world. When Husserl declared, in 1913, that ‘the phenomena of transcendental phenomenology will be characterized as non-​real (irreal)’33 he made an unlikely alliance with Mallarmé, Debussy, and a host of other artists who, by then, were already making works which occasioned radically new ways of experiencing the world by suspending the ‘natural standpoint’ with its normative empirical idea of the world. What is suspended in Husserl’s famous ‘phenomenological reduction’ if not the normative way of looking at the world structured by language? The empirical consciousness is, at root, one that codes experience against the denotational terms of language. At its heart, the ‘absolutely independent realm of direct experience’34 that Husserl puts at the centre of his phenomenology, is as negatively defined as the ‘no-​thingness’ at which Mallarmé aims in the ‘dispersion volatile’ of his poetry. It is also the mode of attention to things which Debussy’s music requires and, at the same time, enables, when not closed down by a reduction to mere visual analogies of the world (so many audio-​pictures of the sea, sunsets, fountains, and fairies). By foregrounding sound over structure, sensation over syntax, Debussy’s music quietly insists we listen through the body. In doing so, we exceed the body. Merleau-​Ponty rarely discusses music so it is significant that he reaches for it to give a sense of the enlarged experience of the world conferred by acts of heightened sensation.35 Sensation, he insists, is at once particular and contingent while at the same time a particularity that ‘opens onto the whole’: ‘In the concert hall, when I reopen my eyes, visible space seems narrow in relation to that other space where the music was unfolding just a moment ago.’36 Art is not Merleau-​Ponty’s focus, but it affords a special case of the intensity of attending to sensing itself. His account of contemplating the colour blue, for example, might just as well have been occasioned by Van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889), a painting that doesn’t simply provoke such a way of knowing the world, but articulates, embodies, and explores it:

Writing the body  249 Myself as the one contemplating the blue of the sky is not an acosmic subject standing before it, I do not possess it in thought, I do not lay out in front of it an idea of blue that would give me its secret. Rather, I abandon myself to it, I plunge into this mystery, and it ‘thinks itself in me.’ I am this sky that gathers together, composes itself, and begins to exist for itself, my consciousness is saturated by this unlimited blue.37

This is quite different to the Cartesian opposition of body and soul, subject and object, a division made, Merleau-​Ponty suggests, ‘to establish a clarity within us and outside of us, namely the transparency of an object without folds, and the transparency of a subject who is nothing other than what it thinks it is’.38 Contrary to this idea, ‘the experience of one’s own body, however, reveals to us an ambiguous mode of existence’.39 Once again, sound provides an ideal medium for the intermingling between the individual listening body and that of the world: there is an objective sound that resonates outside of me in the musical instrument, an atmospheric sound that is between the object and my body, a sound that vibrates in me ‘as if I had become the flute or the clock,’ and finally a last stage where the sonorous element disappears and becomes a highly precise experience of a modification of my entire body.40

By following the manner in which music unfolds, we too are written. We enact with the music its own comportment and way of being. It is for this reason that we can say that music offers an alternative way of knowing the world –​not through signification but sensation, not through propositional statements of an instrumental language, but through the body’s engagement with the rhythm, tone and movement of musical sound. Merleau-​Ponty is adamant that knowing the world in this way, finding ‘the sense of the world’ (Nancy), is not only possible, but essential: The unfolding of sensible givens beneath our gaze or beneath our hands is like a language that teaches itself, where signification would be secreted by the very structure of signs, and this is why it can be said that our senses literally interrogate the things and the things respond to them [ . . . ] We understand the thing as we understand a new behaviour, that is, not through an intellectual operation of subsumption, but rather by taking up for

250 Touching ourselves the mode of existence that the observable signs sketch out before us. A behaviour outlines a certain manner of dealing with the world.41

In The Rhythm of Thought, Jessica Wiskus discusses the work of Merleau-​ Ponty in relation to Cézanne, Proust, Mallarmé, and Debussy, and shows how the language of philosophy is itself changed in the encounter with artworks. As Wiskus underlines, Merleau-​Ponty proceeds by means of ‘noncoincidence’ and ‘lacuna’ –​in other words, gaps –​in opposition to the Cartesian coincidence between seeing and the seen object (a co-​incidence that is enabled, enshrined, and fixed in language).42 Artworks gently dislodge and dissolve that fixity and here Merleau-​Ponty finds resonance with his own language of non-​coincidence. Neither the poetry of Mallarmé nor the philosophical prose of Merleau-​Ponty throws us into the cthonic darkness of the a-​linguistic; rather, both open up a gap, a dynamic space in which the relation of subject and object is rewritten. Something similar is found in the exploration of spatial depth in Cézanne and musical colour in Debussy, both of whom step back from an earlier use of line, (of linear perspective in classical painting, and the linear function of tonality in classical music). Merleau-​Ponty comes to music through Proust as, perhaps, does Deleuze too. Both are indebted to the force of ‘the sensible idea’. In the last few pages of ‘The intertwining –​The chiasm’, in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-​ Ponty discusses Proust’s idea of the musical idea as a kind of model for his philosophy of the flesh.43 As Wiskus underlines, the ‘sensible idea’ is not waiting for some linguistic clarification or more adequate articulation. Quite the opposite, as Merleau-​Ponty insists: ‘the ideas we are speaking of would not be better known to us if we had no body and no sensibility; it is then that they would be inaccessible to us.’44 Quoting from The Visible and Invisible, Wiskus underlines that, for Merleau-​Ponty, the musical idea is ‘not the positing of a content, but the opening of a dimension that can never again be closed . . . [not a] “positive thought” [but] “negativity or absence circumscribed.” ’45 Thus, as Wiskus concludes, ‘the musical idea is a “negativity that is not nothing” for, through this divergence or negativity, the fact that there is an unpresentable comes to presence.’46 In the writings that mark the very last stages of his work before his untimely death in 1961, Merleau-​Ponty seems to find in music a model for a philosophy that might do something similar, that works ‘in the same sense of music, that, speaking not at all, says everything’.47 In other words, something is made present in music –​it takes place –​and that something which has

Writing the body  251 been presented (which is the presentation itself, not some metaphysical thing that stands behind it as the object of some representation), is unrepresentable in language. It is heard, seen, makes sense, it takes place, we have a knowledge (connaissance) of it but which, at the same time, brings us to presence with it (co-​naissance). If art is affirmative, in an existential sense, it lies here. It may also be why music has such an extraordinary capacity to make us weep, because in it we are, in some small way, reborn, but cannot speak of it. Merleau-​Ponty’s focus on the sensing body gives way, in the later works, to the idea of the flesh, a term whose theological overtones are impossible to ignore. The body signalled by this term is not the body closed off by the limits of my own body, but the larger flesh of the material world of which I am part through, and only through, my own body. The idea of flesh is the exact opposite of the fetishism of the body. It is, as David Abram summarises it, a term for something ‘that has had no name in the entire history of Western philosophy. The Flesh is the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its own spontaneous activity.’48 It is, for Abram, thus the site of a constitutive participation in the world (a term he borrows from the anthropologist Lucien Lévy-​Bruhl). Perception always involves participation; in Abram’s words, it ‘involves, at its most intimate level, the experience of an active interplay, or coupling, between the perceiving body and that which it perceives’.49 It is this mutual implication of perceiving subjects and the perceived world in which they are immersed that explains the importance of empathy to phenomenology –​that is, of experiencing the body of another as if, in some degree, it were one’s own. My body lurches inwardly when I see someone fall; it contracts violently at the sound of a collision; it relaxes on arriving in a peaceful landscape. In the widest sense, touching is the site of this reciprocal participation in the flesh of the world –​the touching of the world through the senses that interconnects different forms of being in the world. Empathy connects us to the world because we are pathic beings –​bodily, experiencing, and therefore suffering. But in modern speech, pathos rapidly becomes pathological; being sensitive bodies becomes the root of suffering, illness, and disease. What was once a sign of the capacity for experiencing and articulating intense emotional experience –​the root of the sonata or symphony pathètique –​falls away to something merely pathetic. Music provokes a pathic response in its participants, necessarily, through the body (the discussion of music and emotion in terms of semiotics makes it merely a representation of emotions and therefore intellectual, not bodily).

252 Touching My body ‘suffers’ in some way in the Pathétique Sonata because it feels the suffering contortions of the musical body (the painful intervals and stilted movement) as if it were my own. But this brings us back to what takes place in Debussy’s Préludes. The touching, empathetic body does not simply suffer –​ it takes flight, dances, plays, swims, floats, sparks, appears, and vanishes. The joy of this bodily engagement provoked by the music comes, in part, from the sense of being liberated, momentarily, from one’s habitual bodily comportment. The rush of empathetic engagement that music and dance can elicit is addictively affirmative, as most of human experience testifies, because it restores a quality of connectedness with the world (other people, the environment, the divine) that a certain kind of language-​use erodes –​not phatic language to be sure, not the kind of everyday exchanges of speech that affirm the connection of one person to another, but the instrumental use of abstract language that, as Bergson and many others insist, has to do with separation and control. It is precisely for that reason that the rise in the status of music in western culture was coterminous with the height of rationalism in the eighteenth century. And in this, music enacts what theory arrives at only belatedly. David Wellberry, summing up the paradigmatic shift that takes place within post-​structuralism, might just as well be talking about the collection of pieces that make up the two books of Debussy’s Préludes: One widespread reading of post-​structuralism claims that it eliminates the concept of the subject. It would be more accurate to say that it replaces that concept with that of the body, a transformation which disperses (bodies are multiple), complexifies (bodies are layered systems), and historicizes (bodies are finite and contingent products) subjectivity rather than exchanging it for a simple absence.50

What speaks is nevertheless also what touches and feels. The body is also a speaking body, and there is no speech without a body. The historical moment marked by Freud (and thus, too, by aesthetic modernism) has to do with a recognition that the body is also conditioned and coerced by language, and that language can be, in the modern sense, pathological –​it makes us ill (witness both Derrida and Michel Serres).51 If neurosis is one response to the pathogen of language, art’s rewriting of the body is another. In the widest sense, art is a mode of speaking and writing, making and moving, in which the body challenges, opposes, wrestles with, or gently reworks the language imposed upon it. Julia Kristeva’s ground-​breaking Revolution in

Writing the body  253 Poetic Language (1974) argued exactly that, showing how the self-​critique of language in poetic writing around 1900 was at the same time an eruption of the body in language, a crisis arising from ‘the heterogeneity of biological operations in respect of signifying operations’, leading to a ‘fracture of a symbolic code which can no longer “hold” its (speaking) subjects’.52 In this way, however, modernism reasserts something ancient; Rousseau argued, in the eighteenth century, that while the corporeal origin of expressive speech is gradually attenuated by abstraction it is nevertheless preserved in speech acts and heightened through music. Derrida devotes a significant part of On Grammatology to discussing Rousseau’s Essay on the Origins of Languages. Famously, he critiques Rousseau’s assertion that only in speech is presence manifested, as opposed to the absence occasioned by language. The critique is deftly accomplished, not least because it is accomplished by using Rousseau’s own discourse (the Confessions) against himself. In the latter, Derrida shows, it is precisely writing that restores the presence that Rousseau found himself unable to achieve in speech, ‘of presence disappointed of itself in speech’.53 Unable to express himself truly in speech, Rousseau distances and absents himself from society in order to write, the better and more truly to be present to himself. Only by bodily withdrawal (from speech) is he true to himself (in writing). Hence it is that Derrida discusses writing as a ‘dangerous supplement’ in Rousseau’s eyes, playing on the twofold sense of a supplement as both addition and substitute. For Rousseau, presence ‘ought to be self-​sufficient’ while his writing suggests otherwise. Writing, Derrida suggests, is as much a ‘dangerous supplement’ for Rousseau as the shameful secret of his own masturbation, precisely the means by which he deals with his obsession for Madame de Warens (known to him as ‘Mama’). Marking both her absence, while conjuring a presence that her proximity in daily life does not deliver, this is a supplement that is not only a substitute, filling the absence or lack that it marks, but at the same time an addition. Derrida’s point is not really about masturbation. It is, of course, to deconstruct a metaphysics of presence that determines the supplement (of writing) as ‘simple exteriority’, as ‘pure addition or pure absence’.54 The difference to which he points is essential and constitutive in the case of art works. The still life painting, according to the logic Derrida deconstructs, would be merely an empty supplement to the bowl of fruit it depicts: ‘What is added is nothing because it is added to a full presence to which it is exterior.’55 It is not, of course, that the bowl of fruit is not physically present, but that the work of art

254 Touching is a special way of making present, of bringing it into our gaze. As Jean-​Luc Marion has it, painting is a case of looking away from the totality of the visible that besieges us the better to look: ‘in order to see, it is enough to have eyes. To look demands much more.’ The looking engendered by the painting is of a different kind to everyday seeing; it offers us a ‘supersaturated phenomenon’ in which ‘the ontic original’ (a lemon, say) is displaced by the intensity of appearing in ‘the phenomenal original’ (the painting of a lemon –​as in Manet’s Le citron, Figure 2.2).56 It is not insignificant that it was musically sensitive writers like Roland Barthes, rather than musicologists, who reasserted the presence of the body in discourse about music. In Barthes’ collection of essays on music from the 1970s, grouped under the title of ‘Music’s Body’, he famously insisted on a physical particularity that stands outside musicological discourse: ‘no matter how much you classify and comment on music historically, sociologically, aesthetically, technically, there will always be a remainder, a supplement, a lapse, something non-​spoken which designates itself: the voice’.57 In ‘Rasch’ (1975), an essay on playing Schumann’s Kreisleriana in terms of the pianists’ body, Barthes offers his most corporeal reading of music. Music here is understood as the actions of the ‘pulsional’ body that has nothing to do with language. ‘It speaks but says nothing: for as soon as it is music, speech –​or its instrumental substitute –​is no longer linguistic but corporeal.’58 The piano ‘speaks without saying anything, in the fashion of a mute who reveals on his face the inarticulate power of speech’.59 The passion with which Barthes pursues his manifesto against the apparent repression of the body in professional musicology, might well be taken up in the belated corporeal turn by disgruntled musicologists:  ‘no more grammar, no more musical semiology: issuing from professional analysis –​identification and arrangement of “themes”, “cells”, “phrase”  –​it risks bypassing the body; compositional manuals are so many ideological objects, whose meaning is to annul the body.’60 One of the consequences of this division is that music has tended to become fetishised as pure immediacy (ineffable, ideal, beyond language, irrational, feminine). Even some of the most insightful writers on music and language have fallen into this trap –​Proust, Jankélévitch, Kristeva, Barthes. The danger is that, in listening so hard for ‘the body’, Barthes missed its rewriting in each new piece of music. To repeat, music is not some pure unmediated genotext, a direct speech of the body; it is, in any culture, shaped by its own grammar of sense-​making and its own lexicon of sonic materials. So,

Writing the body  255 just as Julia Kristeva points to a spectrum of language-​use running from scientific writing (mostly phenotext) to modernist poetry (more genotext), so different musics show quite different mixings of their sensible and grammatical aspects. Roland Barthes points to something similar in drawing, from the function of architects’ plans to the materiality of artworks. Consider the difference between the discourse of a Haydn String Quartet and the movement of sonic ‘atmospheres’ in the orchestral music of Ligeti or Xenakis. Eighteenth-​ century music rested on a code sufficiently formulaic that Mozart was able to construct a game for the writing of Menuets by throwing dice, whereas music of the late twentieth-​century avant garde often seems ungraspable because of its distance to the formulas of language which had shaped music throughout the tonal era. Barthes’ physiognomy of music nevertheless remains productive, half a century on; his listening for ‘Schumann’s body’ in Kreisleriana, as a proxy for the encounter with ‘other’ and irreal bodies to which musical writing gives access, has rarely been bettered. More recently, however, Gilles Deleuze offered an equally intriguing, and more extended study of the body in regards to painting –​specifically that of Francis Bacon –​in a book subtitled The Logic of Sensation.61 Bacon’s work, argues Deleuze, foregrounds the figure instead of the figurative –​which is to say, he presents the figure (of the body) in its materiality instead of in terms of representation, signification, or semantics. The body/​figure takes place; it does not stand for, mean or say. It has to do with presence: ‘Painting directly attempts to release presences beneath representation, beyond representation.’62 There are two ways of getting beyond the figurative (representation), Deleuze suggests –​one is abstraction (one thinks of Mondrian or Webern perhaps), the other is by way of the figure. In this, the work of Cézanne is definitive for modern art. The importance to Cézanne of ‘sensation’ and a ‘logic of the senses’ is one that parallels a central concern of music ‘after Debussy’ –​including many composers outside the French tradition (one thinks of Janáček or Lachenmann). But the eruption of materiality within art is everywhere in the age of Debussy and the ensuing decades –​ from the materiality of the written page in Apollinaire, to the foregrounding of the dancing body over the formulaic lexicon of its classical moves –​in Loïe Fuller, Isadora Duncan, or Mary Wigman. The violence of Expressionism has its roots here: in its refusal of signification in order to uncover the presentness in the presentation of the bodily figure. To do so often required a kind of destructive stance towards the codes of signification, to allow presence to break through the signifying codes that

256 Touching cover its nudity. Deleuze, building on the idea that Bacon presents the body like meat on the slab, refers to the painter as a ‘pulveriser’.63 This is a term often used by Pierre Boulez, whose most violent music was more or less contemporary with Bacon’s canvasses in the 1950s; both men may well have borrowed the idea from René Char and the Surrealists. It is an odd contradiction in our reception of Boulez’s music, with its emphasis on the abstract aspects of his compositional thought, that we have ignored the physicality and visceral violence of the music (the very thing from which audiences recoil). The astonishing disparity between the cool and objective discourse around the music and what takes place in the concert hall is precisely what we should be addressing rather than perpetuating; the objective and abstract discourse is a cover, a vessel, a frame –​the flipside of the untrammelled violence of the music towards discursive order. Boulez is perhaps an extreme example of the attempt to work out, anew, the constitutive tension of all music between its sonic materiality and its abstract organisation. Music is bodily, Deleuze insists, but it also ‘disembodies [ . . . ] it strips bodies of their inertia, of the materiality of their presence [ . . . ] in a sense music begins where painting ends [ . . . ] it is lodged on lines of flight that pass through bodies’.64 Where painting inclines to ‘hysteria’ (a logic of the senses), music inclines to schizophrenia (a fracture of the identity between body and not-​body –​the condition of modernity). Music, by this account, is predisposed to an aesthetics of non-​identity, since it is always in flight between the body (whether my body or that of the wider world) and the play of forms that exceeds the body. Which brings us back to Debussy’s Préludes and the idea of writing the body. ‘Let there be writing, not about the body, but [of] the body itself,’65 demands Nancy, who proceeds to wrestle with what this might entail. The body, he suggests, is ‘what in writing is not to be read’66 (a reworking of Lacan on the voice as ‘what in saying is other than what is said’). The musician knows this well. The toccata arises from touch, from the hands on the keyboard, from the body –​precisely ‘what in music is not to be heard’ but which informs the whole. Until recently, philosophy has generally had no interest in speech and voice (‘what in saying is other than what is said’), only in the logical consistency of propositional language. Wittgenstein stated this in exemplary fashion in the Tractatus only to then conclude that all that was of urgent and existential interest to human life lay outside such language-​use. Its opposite would be a language that preserves a corporeal relation to the world rather than a merely arbitrary or conventional one. But, contra Saussure, David

Writing the body  257 Abram points to more recent moves towards ‘an ecology of language’,67 a model of language not as arbitrary but shaped by landscape, place, and the body that dwells within it.68 He cites powerful examples of indigenous oral cultures in which that close link between place and language is preserved, in a ‘synaesthetic association of visible topology with auditory recall –​the intertwining of earthly place with linguistic memory’.69 In alphabetic writing, by contrast, the graphic sign is detached from the mnemonic thing that it originally stood for, hence the development of the abstract space of a language no longer bound to place. As Abram has it: ‘In order to read phonetically, we must disengage the synaesthetic participation between our senses and the encompassing earth. The letters of the alphabet, each referring to a particular sound or sound-​gesture of the human mouth, begin to function as mirrors reflecting us back upon ourselves.’70 Language thus became the means by which modern society severed itself from place and landscape –​and, Abram goes on, ‘if alphabetic writing was an important factor in the emergence of abstract, homogeneous “space,” it was no less central to the emergence of abstract, linear “time.” ’71 Abstract written language is thus central to the trajectory of modernity –​the source of both its huge gains (the control over nature afforded by the detachment of abstract thought) but also its losses (the sense of being alienated from the whole of which one used to be part). We cannot reverse the trajectory of modernity, spun out across millennia; we cannot simply decide, once more, to become an oral culture. But in the face of the losses of abstract language and, indeed, its real dangers, modernity has fostered material, embodied, empathetic, chiasmic modes of being in the world through art. The wider idea of music signalled by my loose term ‘after Debussy’ may be a tiny moment within that historical process and a tiny space within the diverse cultures of modernity, but it points to a larger faultline in modern culture and modern thought that exceeds the name of any one composer or philosopher. The turn back towards the body, from the philosophy of Husserl, Bergson, and Merleau-​Ponty through to the current interdisciplinary proliferation in theories of embodied materiality, attempts to re-​write, from language, the body’s relation to language. But without listening to the parallel move made within art and music over the last hundred years, the embodied exploration of ‘the identity between body and not-​body’ (Deleuze), such proliferation of linguistic discourse will surely remain the sound of one hand clapping.

9 Thinking in sound The play of the sensible I want to write my musical thought with the greatest detachment from myself. I want to sing my interior landscape with the naïve candour of a child. Without doubt, such an innocent grammar of art will not go without opposition.1

What is there to take hold of in the opening bars of Debussy’s ‘Jeux de vagues’? A bare open fifth rises and falls through the strings against the background of a mournful woodwind chord that presses gently to the fore and quickly recedes, the whole brief gesture edged by a glimmer of glockenspiel whose resonance hangs high over the flicker of harp and a muffled stroke on the cymbal. The two bars are repeated exactly, but this time catching, at the top of its contour, a pair of flutes which hang momentarily in the air before collapsing in a downward flurry to end in a quiet eddy of clarinets.2 As the movement progresses, familiar figures come and go, remixed and recoloured, in a rapid turning of the orchestral kaleidoscope. Passages that push forwards are punctuated by moments of collapse and bright eruptions of unprepared events. A constant sense of newness is balanced with the suggestion of melodic continuity and the gentle tug of desire. But this play of movement, energy, surface, colour, and gesture, proceeds in multiple directions. The result is an astonishing study in non-​arrival, a scene in which nothing takes place ‘but the place’. Taken as a whole, the movement frames a space in which mobile forms rise and fall, enacting an allusive play of desire, before disappearing back to nothing. The second movement of La mer exemplifies an idea of play that pervades the music of Debussy and many of his contemporaries –​witness his ballet score Jeux, Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, or Federico Mompou’s ‘Jeux sur la plage’ (from the Scènes d’enfants). If such titles link the idea of play in general to that of water in particular, it is less to frame musical images than to evoke a quality

After Debussy. Julian Johnson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066826.001.0001

260 Touching of movement. ‘Jeux de vagues’ might be taken to exemplify this radical playfulness and ungraspable mobility. In a detailed study, Francesco Spampinato underlines its resistance to conventional formal analysis by comparing the different formal divisions suggested by nine different analysts; apart from the start and the end, not one structural division is universally shared in his examples.3 For Jean Barraqué, this music is dominated by ‘a law of the instant’4; for André Boucourechliev it is ‘an open temporal field, without orientation’5; for Vladimir Jankélévitch it presents ‘a continuous deformation and reformation’ of possible forms. As a study in insubstantiality, a continuous process of appearing and disappearing, ‘Jeux de vagues’ challenges an analytical approach that habitually works with fixed objects. Spampinato, following Bernard Vecchione, suggests that we should think less in terms of (structural) coherence here, and more in terms of the cohesion of its materials.6 Or, following André Souris, that we should move from ideas of musical form to an idea of formation (formant), a key term in the vocabulary of both Boulez and the spectralists.7 Or, once more, following Gaston Bachelard, that we think less about the ‘imagination of forms’ and listen instead for ‘the imagination of matter’.8 But the case can be overstated; this is not Ligeti, or Xenakis, or Murail, and ‘Jeux de vagues’ is not without clear structural divisions. Spampinato’s own analysis hinges on the alternation of two principles, an ‘oscillating condensation’ (associated with water) and a ‘chaotic disagregation’ (associated with air), principles which can both alternate and co-​exist. The alternation can be clearly heard at the beginning; after the initial ‘dive of the seabird’ (bb. 1–​8), passages of aquatic continuity (bb. 9–​17, 35–​47, 62–​71) alternate with passages of dissolution and collapse (bb. 28–​35, 48–​51, 72–​91). This pattern, Spampinato suggests, makes for a formal scheme that one might characterise as a kind of ‘swinging’ (balancement) between the two, a sensation of bodily movement ‘evoking the passive sensation of being rocked’9 –​a metaphor that returns us to the elision of la mer/​la mère. But this alternation of suspension and release also creates, at the meridian of its arc, the sense of being ‘suspended and immobile, in an intoxication produced by the impression of weightlessness, though destined to last only an instant’10 –​a metaphor that returns us to the axial moment of suspension at the centre of ‘Soupir’, or the sudden shudder of vertige at the hinge of ‘Eventail’ (see Chapter 3). But if commentators have traced the development of music ‘after Debussy’ from one single piece, it is probably Jeux, a score that has frequently been discussed in terms of its mobility of form and material. According to the

Thinking in sound  261 ballet’s scenario, the play of its three dancers ends as it begins, with a contingent chance event –​the bouncing of a tennis ball, as aleatoric as the throw of a die (un coup de dès). The three dancers vanish and this ballet about nothing is over; as the scenario puts it simply, ‘et c’est tout’. Jean Barraqué’s assessment was that, in La mer, Debussy created ‘a new formal concept, which one might call “open form” and which finds its full flowering in Jeux and the last works.’11 In Jeux, in particular: Debussy wanted his music to be deliberately unstable and in flight, creating a tangle of motifs and structures which disappear and reappear in a manner that is sporadic and sometimes hidden. Indeed, minute analysis shows that the composer sometimes takes into account ‘absent developments’, as if the music were taking place elsewhere, following a deductive logical route, but one manifest through interruption and forgotten sections. It is in this way that the work slips into conceptual collapse, because the idea of discontinuity takes on a new sense; structurally, it has to do with an ‘alternative continuity’. Here, the structural genius of Debussy attains a level of temporal expression in music that no other contemporary work was able to achieve.12

For Barraqué and others, Jeux was the quintessential forbear of the idea of ‘Moment’ form in the post-​war avant garde.13 By this account, musical parameters no longer articulate a linear continuity or progression of linked musical ideas, but work instead as ‘a proliferation of instants, determinants which allow all the amalgams, ellipses, and opposition of motor forces’.14 It was this profound shift in musical syntax that provoked Barraqué’s claim, a century after Debussy’s birth, for the composer’s definitive position in twentieth-​century music, one that remains no less true a century after his death: ‘The discoveries of Debussy, which traditional analysis is no longer sufficient to grasp, bring forth a new musical aesthetic. And that’s why Debussy is certainly an artist of our time. We can even say that he was the first “modern” musician.’15 Debussy was, of course, not alone. In Ravel’s Jeux d’eau (1901), just like Debussy’s ‘Jeux de vagues’, the unbounded motion of water, potentially infinite in the permutations of its dynamic forms, is apparently evoked in music that is nevertheless bounded and shaped in time. If both pieces suggest a lack of intentionality, they do so through highly refined and crafted intentional processes –​of musical écriture, of piano playing, and of attentive listening and musical experience. Stephen Zank shows that Ravel’s piece can be seen

262 Touching as a miniature sonata form, underlining that its play of infinitely variegated sensuous surface is allied with meticulous structural precision. The profound irony is of course that sonata form exemplifies the tonally-​directed and discursive musical structures of an earlier age, so Ravel’s music here undermines the form it inherits.16 It is not that this music lacks dynamism but that it is deployed in a way that has little to do with the linear drama of the sonata. The idea of development is displaced by a set of permutational processes (repetition, sequence, variants, transpositions) to produce an alternating pattern of self-​contained movement and moments of implied linearity. Like Debussy’s waves, Ravel’s music is not without a sense of implied direction, but arrival is repeatedly sidestepped by sudden structural dissolves followed by gradual processes of reforming. The succession of variant returns is based on a few brief but infinitely malleable figures, typically only half a bar in length. The mechanical precision of the opening section, like a fountain, is a combination of technological artifice and the natural element it orders (water/​sound). The precision derives from the constancy of its rhythmic units (quavers and demisemiquavers) presented in clear-​cut metrical patterns, but the larger sense of regularity comes also from Ravel’s method of proceeding based on repetition, extension, inversion, and variants of the same half-​bar units. This music is permutational rather than developmental; slight changes in register, harmony, and texture inflect what is essentially the same material (e.g., bb. 5–​6). The rate of motion ebbs and flows by means of rhythmic contraction or quicker rates of change in harmony or texture (thus bb. 5–​6 prepares the opening of b. 7). It makes for a complex form that speeds up and slows down, like eddies of a stream that, viewed as a whole, seems to move at the same speed. In terms of a Schoenbergian notion of the musical idea, Ravel plays with material that might seem shockingly empty –​mere ornamental decoration in place of hard, discursive Stoff. It is impossible to ignore the way in which, at exactly this time, such a tension was discussed in gendered terms –​the feminine art of decoration and ornament, orchestration and colour, versus the masculine art of discursive ideas, musical argument, and strong structural forms.17 But the adherents of the latter were fighting a losing battle, because the mainstay of their musical world-​view (the directedness of tonal movement towards closure) had already been undone from within: its feminine other had been gently unloosening its unidirectional obsession for at least a century –​from Schubert, Chopin, and Schumann, to Tchaikovsky, Fauré, and Mussorgsky. And with it, the motivic argument and tonal discourse that

Thinking in sound  263 had underpinned the great formal structures of Germanic practice shrunk to the geometric play of Webern’s three-​note cells. It is one of the great ironies of music history that Heinrich Schenker formulated principles of tonal form at the very moment they were effectively dissolving around him. Or, indeed, that Schoenberg insisted on the constructive strength of the motivic idea just as its underpinning principle of identity (its relation as particular to the tonal whole) became unsustainable in his own music. Fundamentals of Musical Composition was thus a retrospective historical document, a manual of Classical musical thought, just like Schenker’s Principles of Free Composition. By contrast, as Gurminder K. Bhogal has shown, a work like Ravel’s Jeux d’eau exhibits ‘a structural emphasis on ornament’ that was a wider preoccupation of Ravel’s cultural milieu.18 Ravel’s music foregrounds an idea of ornament ‘as unbounded, surface-​consuming figuration’, displacing its ‘more traditional marginal role as accompaniment or transitional material’. In other words, what had earlier been background here becomes foreground, just as the erasure of boats and human figures in Debussy’s La mer shifts the focus to what had hitherto been background (the patterning of water in dialogue with the light and wind). What had been merely the figuration of accompaniment figures in Fauré’s songs becomes the material itself in the piano music of Ravel and Debussy. This focus on the musical surface gently, but radically, inverts a fundamental assumption of western classical music. In this, Bhogal argues, it parallels the blurring of figure and ground in contemporary visual art. In her analysis of Ravel’s Noctuelles (1905) and Ondine (1908), the first pieces, respectively, of Miroirs and Gaspard de la nuit, she shows how the music sets up an expectation of points of cadential closure, but then, ‘just when our expectations are about to be fulfilled, Ravel deceives us by suddenly saturating the texture with decorative flourishes, which thwart our anticipation of a structural event’.19 The ‘evanescence’ of this music (Ravel’s own term) thus arises from the constant oscillation between figure and ground: Interruption by abundant ornament suggests a release from its restriction to the periphery; now, textural empowerment, coupled with Ravel’s formation of fluid structural boundaries, facilitates the blurring of deep-​level phenomena with surface-​level ones.20

Unsurprisingly, foregrounding what was traditionally understood to be background was as shocking in music as it was in contemporary painting. Bhogal cites a 1906 review by Édouard Schneider of the Noctuelles that

264 Touching immediately recalls similar comments about the ‘nothingness’ of Debussy’s music: ‘It is always the same unintelligible babble of notes, the same stuttering without end, which becomes exasperating in the long run.’21 What Schneider misses in the piece is the intelligibility of a discursive form; what he resists is the erotic play of its sonic surface. Ravel’s score includes, as an epigraph, a line from Henri de Régnier’s poem ‘Fête d’eau’:22 ‘River god laughing as the water tickles him’ (Dieu fluvial riant de l’eau qui le chatouille). The verb chatouiller means to tickle, but also to arouse or excite. Since the river god is himself water, the image evokes a sense of auto-​eroticism paralleled in a flood of contemporary art works exploring the self-​sufficiency of a (feminised) erotic body –​from Gustav Klimt’s Water Snakes to Debussy’s Sirènes. Embodied musically in a play of colour, texture, and tone, such works ignore the phallocentric ordering and linear purposiveness of goal-​directed tonal structures. The pianist is necessarily involved in a constant self-​touching as the two hands overlap. The musical figures are themselves developed from the hands –​the opening figure in the right hand, for example, is as much a physical gesture of the hand as it is, in a technical sense, the arpeggiation of a certain harmony. The constancy of movement, underlined by the little internal runs that offset it, hangs between indolence and pleasure; without any need to move, its pleasure in the repetition of its own patterning is itself a product of the gentle sensuousness (très doux) of the hands’ movement. But Ravel’s music is far more than a piece of beautiful acoustic fabric that might be cut to any length and that does nothing but shimmer in the repetition of its internal patterns. It does not take place out of time, for all that it plays with patterns of suspending time and letting it run on and turn back on itself. The purpose of such a piece is hardly to conjure a visual experience (for which a painting would surely work better) but rather to occasion a special kind of movement in the empathetic body of the listener. To describe the piece in terms of its indolent pleasure, its lightness of touch, its fluid motion, its bright glimmering, risks the idea that Ravel’s piece is simply permutational in the same way as the effect of sunlight on water –​without directed form or temporal direction. The point, of course, is that Ravel’s music is not simply the play of water in a fountain; it is not some acoustic simulacrum of the real, a substitute for water that avoids, for audience and performer alike, the inconvenience of its uncontained wetness.23 The play between representational pretext and music’s freedom from representation is found across Ravel’s works. Ondine also has a poetic epigraph (from a poem by Aloysius Bertrand) but we would be mistaken to

Thinking in sound  265 take the poem as any kind of programme. Ondine’s cry of ‘Ecoute! –​ Ecoute!’ is not the start of a narrated musical tale, but simply an admonishment to listen –​to listen for presence, not for saying or telling. If Ondine’s song is heard in the melody given in the left hand (from b. 3, and returning at b. 81), the point of such a wordless melody is to make present, not to tell. Ondine’s ‘voice’ emerges from the ‘water’ and dissolves back into it. The poem, after all, is about desire for presence and the failure to consummate that presence, a flickering between presence and absence caught in the constant ‘ornamentation’ of the demisemiquaver figure (a presence without substance). Bhogal suggests that ‘by endowing the thirty-​second-​note motif with structural and expressive value, Ravel participated in a widespread cultural movement that privileged detail and its allusions to feminine sexuality’.24 Music that is like speech has to breathe; it moves in phrases with clear cadential endings and new beginnings. But the water pieces of Debussy and Ravel present, instead, a continuous surface, a constantly resonating body of sound, an immersive whole with a rhythm quite different to that of speech. Proceeding by a logic of permutation not argument, these pieces present a single material, put in motion through inflections of register, texture, tone, and harmonic colour, quite different to the quasi-​linguistic opposition and development of ideas in music from Haydn to Schoenberg. Like water, this music is capricious, complex, and polymorphous –​shocking for its purposeless and unproductive play. It is a material idea that joins the aquatic continuity not just of Fauré’s mélodies, but also the Barcarolles and Nocturnes, to the waterscapes of composers a century later, such as those of Jean-​Claude Risset (Sud, Aqua), Tristan Murail (Le lac, Le partage des eaux, Serendib, Sillages, Gondwana), or Kaija Saariaho (Oltra Mar, L’amour de loin). The play of music has always offered a radical version of Derridean polysemy, so too a prime example of Derridean dissemination, the profligate spilling of the seed of ‘meaning’. Intensely thoughtful and intensely meaningful, musical play nevertheless puts in motion a kind of thought in which any sense of meaning, no longer tied to the proposition or concept, is plural, proliferating, and postponed. This inclination towards polysemy has always provoked distrust –​hence the rapidity with which it has been ‘fixed’ to meaning, from Plato to the Counter-​Reformation, from the Baroque theory of affect to programme music, from philosophy to musicology. Part of the power of music lies in its capacity to propose itself as meaningful while at the same time refusing any definitive meaning. And in this play with the proposition and simultaneous questioning of meaning, music has exerted a

266 Touching powerful capacity to radically unsettle and destabilise the models of meaning on which philosophy and rational logic hinge. But does this really have philosophical consequences? Isn’t music’s play with meaning nothing more than a perturbation of logical sense, a kind of semantic fairground ride that leaves the mind slightly giddy and no more? There are two ways of answering this. Music’s deployment of materials with multiple and transitive values is either an essentially empty imitation of the meaningful activity of language (a dumb-​show, a nonsense language, a children’s game), or it is a serious game that deploys, constructs, and engages powerful kinds of meaning that stand outside of language. If the latter were to be the case (as the idea of an art music contends), how do we discuss (linguistically) a musical thought that takes place in a-​linguistic terms? How do we understand better the logic of musical thought when music no longer imitates language, but insists on a kind of material thought? When Debussy expressed a desire to write works ‘with the naïve candour of a child’ he not only touched on a central topic of French aesthetics around 1900 but also the idea of an intuitive, primitive, and unrefined immediacy that was becoming a powerful current within aesthetic modernism more broadly. Nietzsche held that play, so often associated with the activity of children, was the highest form of wisdom; Fritz Mauthner expressed a similar idea at the end of his three-​volume Beitrage zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1902).25 A childlike vision would later inform the vision of painters like Marc Chagall and Paul Klee. Its corollary was the idea of the dream, a phenomenon of the human mind which –​at precisely this time –​became theorised, for the first time, as a kind of thought.26

The grammar of dreams Gaston Bachelard’s L’eau et les rêves:  Essai sur l’imagination de la matière (1941) has to do with the imagination of matter in the sense of imagining through matter –​the embodied materiality of thinking, of thinking in and through the materiality of the world, as opposed to in images, representations, or ideas. For Bachelard, as for Debussy, Ravel, and many others, the material properties of water seems to offer a particularly rich form of such a material imagination. One of the many scenes of dreaming to which water gives access is what Bachelard calls ‘la barque oisive’ (the boat of reverie), which he traces through many literary forms as a kind of recovered childhood cradle (‘un

Thinking in sound  267 berceau reconquis’).27 Musicians know this topic well –​witness how the berceuse merges with the barcarolle, from Chopin and Liszt through to Debussy and Fauré, in works that are empty of content, in any conventional sense, and consist only of their reverie-​inducing rocking, to-​and-​fro.28 Bachelard might easily have had in mind Ravel’s Une barque sur l’océan in the following passage: Long hours, careless and tranquil, long hours lying in the bottom of the solitary boat in which we contemplate the sky, to what memory do we return? All images are absent, the sky is empty, but movement is present, living. Smoothly, rhythmically –​it is the almost immobile and silent movement of the water that carries us. Water rocks us. Water makes us sleep. Water returns us to our mother.29

Art’s proximity to dream vision is popularly taken to refer to the creative state in which the artist must plunge in order to make art. A more useful idea, perhaps, is that art works upon the mind in an associative manner like that of a dream; what art and dreams have in common is less their fictional status than the fact that they both (momentarily) loosen the mind from the habitual confines of its linguistic sense-​making. It is this, surely, that is evoked in the frequent recourse to dream imagery and dream thought in the music of composers like Henri Dutilleux (Ainsi la nuit, L’arbre des songes, Tout un monde lointain), Toru Takemitsu (Dreamtime, Les yeux clos, To the edge of dream, I hear the water dreaming), Witold Lutosławski (Les espaces du sommeil),30 and Kaija Saariaho (From the grammar of dreams, Grammaire des rêves). If we look back, through these more recent musical dreamworks, the fascination with dream images and dream thoughts in the songs of Debussy and his contemporaries may look less like a sentimental cliché of the fin de siècle and more like a continuation of modernity’s preoccupation with rationalism’s Other rooted in Romanticism.31 Debussy was hardly exceptional in a French tradition in which poetry and song were saturated with dreams that designate an alternative mode of consciousness to the everyday. Contemporary with Freud’s theorisation of the dream, but completely independent from it, Symbolist poetry and music pursued its own dreamwork under the special conditions of an aesthetic écriture. Just as Mallarmé said that the ballerina is ‘a corporal writing that would take paragraphs of prose [ . . . ] to express’,32 so Bachelard says that, in poetry, ‘it is the pen that dreams’,33 pointing to the conjoining, in the making of the

268 Touching artwork, of the conscious act of writing and a logic it deploys without being its master. Bachelard is careful to distinguish between dreaming (an involuntary activity of the mind during sleep) and reverie (an activity of the waking mind loosened from the purposiveness of the everyday). Moreover, he writes not about poetic reverie (implying a kind of daydream whose images are borrowed from poetry) but about the poetics of reverie, that is to say about a constructive process, a kind of making, a doing of the imagination, an écriture. If we read Bachelard in English, a language that does not accord a gender to impersonal nouns, his expanded thoughts on the significance of the feminine reverie (la rêverie, la songerie) versus the masculine dream (le rêve, le songe) may strike us as fanciful, but it is surely resonant with Kristeva’s exploration of how language acts stage an opposition between the body of the mother and the law of the father, and thus connects back to Freud via Lacan.34 One of Kristeva’s sources was of course Mallarmé, a poet who, Mary Breatnach tells us, spent his entire creative life trying to answer the question with which he once opened a lecture: Do we know what it is to write? ‘As far as the poet himself was concerned’, says Breatnach, ‘this was the most fundamental question of all, ultimately perhaps the only one worth asking. It preoccupied him throughout his life.’35 Lyotard says something similar about Freud, that his entire work ‘centres on the relation between language and silence, signification and meaning, articulation and image, interpreting or constructing commentary and figuring desire’.36 Debussy’s famous statement that what he looked for in a librettist was ‘a poet who half speaks things’, predated his encounter with Maeterlinck’s plays, but came after he had already immersed himself in the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé. The two men met in 1890, when the poet invited the composer to collaborate on a production of his L’après-​midi d’un faune. Both Mallarmé’s poem, and Debussy’s subsequent musical response, exemplify the way in which a dream logic might inform the work of art; both are milestones in how, respectively, poetic and musical écriture explores a ‘grammar of dreams’. But how? How does Debussy’s music, in the words of Jean-​Yves Tadié, embody ‘a material imagination of the elements’?37 Jankélévitch was one of the first to wrestle with the problem with any detailed reference to the music, pointing to the idea of an open, unstructured field in which the harmonic resonances of different chords form a series of connections (enchainements), relations between apparently distant and heterogeneous tonalities: ‘chords belonging to several heterogeneous tonalities which relate to one another at

Thinking in sound  269 a distance, attracted one to another across the emptiness’.38 It is not necessary to follow Jankélévitch’s rather mystical turn to ‘secret affinities’ in order to recognise the phenomenon to which he points as a derangement of grammatical order, of the play of sonority over grammar. This quite different logic of harmony necessarily produces a different kind of musical form –​a different temporal logic. Indeed, it lends itself to the idea of a musique informelle, the term that Adorno reached for in trying to theorise an idea of new music fifty years after Debussy’s death. Julia Kristeva characterises the semiotic chora as ‘a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated’, ‘an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases’.39 Its ordering principle is the body of the mother (le corps de la mère). Its patterning of constant generation and negation of lack and fulfilment is of course paralleled by that of Debussy’s music and its aquatic logic (le corps de la mer). But the sea in Debussy is not equivalent to the semiotic chora in Kristeva’s theory,40 nor are the rules of musical form and syntax equivalent to the paternal law of the symbolic order. Nevertheless, Debussy’s aquatic musical logic offers a powerful parallel to ‘the revolution in poetic language’, in Mallarmé and others, in relation to which Kristeva developed her theory of literature. My interest is not with applying Kristeva’s terms to Debussy, as if a literary theory could explain musical practice; on the contrary, it is to suggest that Debussy’s music offers a material exploration, a concrete thinking in sound that predates the literary theory by more than half a century. Such an idea is already evident in Debussy’s work, and it is one to which Jankélévitch often points: ‘at once, unformed and multiformed, isn’t water the unformed form par excellence?’ he asks, at the start of a highly ornate passage of writing that imitates in its own use of language the fluidity which it evokes.41 Forms appear in Debussy’s music, but they are unstable and fluid; the sea fascinates Debussy, he suggests, because it embodies a static or contained mobility, the immobility of the mobile, but more than that, a kind of unformed and perpetual unrest.42 ‘Jeux de vagues’, for example, presents less the idea of movement than a combination of ‘unruly agitation’ and moments that are ‘oddly stationary’. These waves go nowhere; they have no destination and turn back on themselves. It is the simultaneity of multiple directions that is chaotic in the picture of the sea moved by the wind. And it is this directionless quality, that ‘excludes all progress, all teleology’, that confers a certain tragic aspect of La mer. Its abolition of sens (direction/​

270 Touching sense) reflects the non-​sense of the world of nature: ‘In the blind chance of the tempestuous, play and tragedy are the same thing.’43 Compared to the mercurial play of musical material in Debussy’s La mer, the music of Fauré might often seem comfortably predictable, not least in all those song accompaniments that keep the same flowing figure (in triplets or semiquavers) uninterrupted for the entire duration of the song. But it is precisely the regularity of the repeated figure that lulls the listener into a state of reverie, one characterised by a quality of detachment, a letting go that comes from no longer having to follow a sequence of linear or dramatic events. The dissociated consciousness, freed from the logic of mere succession, expands instead into the endlessly nuanced space of the enlarged moment. This is exactly what is achieved by Fauré’s unique control of harmonic movement –​lateral and tangential rather than logically sequential, Fauré’s harmony evokes a sense of light and shade, spatial proximity and distance, density and weightlessness, rather than the directed grammatical forms normally associated with tonal forms. The late song cycles, like Mirages, Op. 113 and L’horizon chimérique, Op. 118, demonstrate this in almost every song, but it is found throughout the span of Fauré’s sixty years of song composition  –​indeed, songs such as ‘Arpège’ (Op.  76, no.  2)  and ‘Accompagnement’ (Op.  85, no.  3), both nocturnes, seem almost like a self-​conscious nod to the idea. The latter fuses a whole set of dream topics –​night, moonlight, the mirror of the lake’s surface, and the boat that glides into a dreamlike space: ‘Ma barque glisse dans le reve /​ Ma barque glisse dans le ciel /​Sur le lac immateriel!’. It is hardly surprising that Fauré was drawn to dream-​like topics for his mélodies (‘Rêve d’amour’ Op. 5, no. 2, ‘Après un rêve’ Op. 7, no. 1, ‘Le pays des rêves’ Op. 39, no. 3) but it is primarily the unloosening of directed sense, rather than the poetic texts, that achieves this quietly radical shift in focus. ‘Le pays de rêves’ is a barcarolle, its constantly lilting rhythm gently unloosening the earthbound body to put it into aquatic transport. ‘Shall we walk, hand in hand, in the beautiful land of dreams?’ (Veux-​tu qu’au beau pays des reves, Nous allions la main dans la main?), asks the singer in the opening line, a line that might equally stand at the beginning of any number of Fauré’s mélodies, or indeed pieces for solo piano. The same sense of rhythmic rise and fall, under a subtly shifting harmonic current, can still heard in Fauré’s last songs. ‘Vaisseaux, nous vous aurons aimés’, the closing song of L’horizon chimérique, is also a barcarolle, and similarly longs for a heterotopic space which merges the horizons of the sea and of one’s dreams.

Thinking in sound  271 It was, to be sure, a familiar elision. Ravel’s setting of Tristan Klingsor’s poetry in Shéhérazade (1903) is a good example of musical transport to an imaginary space through placing the listening body in a kind of musical reverie. Shéhérazade is of course the narrator of tales (the original function of the sirens), tales designed precisely to keep the king from falling asleep by drawing him into reverie instead. At the start of Ravel’s first song the voice intones the single word ‘Asie’ like an incantation, summoning up the presence of the longed-​for and fantastical space. The space that is delivered is that of music itself, marked by the arrival (in b. 11) of a barcarolle, a slower passage in 6/​8 evoking the rise and fall of the sea. Self-​sufficient music becomes the space for reverie. Baudelaire’s opening line, ‘Music often takes me like a sea’ (La musique souvent me prend comme une mer), echoes behind Ravel’s opening, and joins it to Henri Dutilleux’s musical reverie, Tout un monde lointain (1970), explored in Chapter 7. Or again, it might make a connection further forward to the music of Tristan Murail or Kaija Saariaho. The proximity between the aquatic, the structural fluidity of a musique informelle, and heterotopic space of reverie are everywhere evident in the work of Murail –​in La barque mystique (1993), for example, which takes its title from drawings by Odilon Redon, or Gondwana (1980) whose title refers, like a kind of metaphor for Murail’s music more generally, to a mythic super-​continent which breaks up in the huge timescale of geological continental drift. But, as the composer notes, the title was suggested by the sound structures themselves:  ‘bells and waves, bells that metamorphose into waves, allusions to storm, to the breath of tempests, mute seismic movements –​without having any descriptive intention’.44 This dreamlike interiority is characteristic of all Murail’s music. On the one hand, as with Debussy, the poetic titles are richly suggestive; on the other hand, the music distances itself from any conventional idea of representation. For all that Jankélévitch insists, in the case of Debussy’s Préludes, that the titles are merely alibis, what is presented is precisely a play across the gap between the real and irreal, the idea of the familiar ‘object’ and the fantasy of the musical work that takes off from it. It is thus no mere convenience or convention that, from Debussy to Murail, the poetic title persists; it draws attention to this definitive play across and between the gap opened up by the art work. The same might be said about the music of Kaija Saariaho, who has often used electronics to create a liminal exchange between a familiar acoustic world rooted in the physical presence of the musicians and a defamiliarised space of sonic transformations. Like dream sequences, her music reorders

272 Touching and rearranges materials in order to disorientate and derange the familiar order of things. Sometimes, to be sure, her music may be about dreams45 but, as with Fauré before her, it is the musical language itself that works as a dream. First and foremost, and before any use of electronics, this has to do with how her music loosens itself from language and refuses musical objects mimetic of language. In her settings of Sylvia Plath in From the Grammar of Dreams (1988), Saariaho writes the voices of the two singers in such a way that the physicality of the body seems to break through the words. The noisy mechanics of the mouth, of breath and tongue and teeth and throat are brought to the fore as markers of the ‘pulsional body’ (Barthes) that presses itself through the mere signifying surface of the words. The result is a kind of corporeal assault on language in which the body’s energy is decoupled from the rational order of syntax, grammar, and sense. In the fourth of these five songs, for example, the rhythmic force of inhaling and exhaling produces a visceral sense of fighting for breath far more palpable than the mere signification of this poem about drowning. The use of two similar voices (a soprano and mezzo) allows Saariaho to create the sense of a single voice repeatedly divided, breaking apart and coming back together. The constant gapping of the voice from and within itself, creates a drama in which, by the end of the fourth song, the attempt to recover a fragile self-​identity is achieved in the final whispered ‘I am’. The fifth and final song is marked ‘happy and sensual’ and is full of trills and bird-​like vocalise, quite distanced from any linguistic object until the final concluding delivery of ‘I smile’.

Music as thought In ‘Les parfums de la nuit’, the central movement of Debussy’s orchestral triptych Ibéria (1905–​08), music, the ephemeral art of sound, proposes to evoke the yet more evanescent realm of scent. The nocturnal setting signals the closing of the visual realm and, with it, the distinctions between things on which rational thought depends. It is not that there is an absence of musical material in a traditional sense –​analysis of the movement will produce harmonic, melodic and rhythmic motifs as required –​but rather that the overriding sense of the music has to do with qualities of tone, movement, the clarity and density of sound, and the play of tone colour akin to chiaroscuro in visual art. What stand out are less the notes in terms of pitch-​class (as analysis tends to deal with them) than ‘notes’ in the sense used by the expert

Thinking in sound  273 wine-​taster. In that sense, the dominant notes of Debussy’s sonic mélange are the solo oboe (leaning often towards the darker cor anglais), the muted tones of trumpets and horns, the dense block chords in the strings, and the hard edge of the xylophone. What most insistently draws the ear is the astonishing quality of sound achieved by arresting and unusual doublings –​a high bassoon solo in unison with a muted solo violin (six bars after Rehearsal Figure 46), a single melodic line given by flutes, piccolos, muted trumpets, two solo violins, and two solo cellos (at Rehearsal Figure  48), or the extraordinary flickering across several octaves of a single pitch in harp, cello harmonics, viola pizzicato, flutes, and celesta (at Rehearsal Figure 43). A close reading of the score, far from dispelling the mysterious poetry of this nocturnal study, reveals the precision and the clarity with which the composer shapes each sonic event –​note, for example, the close attention on almost every page to exactly how many string players are required at any one time, from solo to two players doubling, from just a few desks to the whole section. A performance of this piece is made of thousands of highly controlled and self-​reflective intentional acts on the part of around seventy individual musicians, each of them written by a musical score consisting of the marks of thousands of highly selective musical choices. In other words, there is absolutely nothing vague or dreamy here. Few human products represent such a concentration of rational decisions. It has been a central theme of mine that music ‘after Debussy’ not only suggests a different kind of ontology but does so most overtly by reconfiguring our idea of nature. In the same spirit that Eduardo Kohn explores ‘How forests think’,46 one might pursue the same question about music. How does music think? The question frustrates the philosopher because, for philosophy, thinking is necessarily conceptual (even, as in formal logic, where the concept becomes abstracted to a symbolic, quasi-​mathematical one). But is musical écriture utterly disconnected to philosophical écriture, or even the formulas of the logician or mathematician? In each case, the text is not itself thinking (since texts have no agency) but carries the trace of thought and provokes thought.47 Each suggests a complex dynamic system of connections through a set of self-​referential terms. Mauro Carbone’s study of the ‘a-​philosophy’ of Merleau-​Ponty is titled The Thinking of the Sensible.48 Since we too are ‘sensible’, this is of course the thinking of the sensible by the sensible, through the sensible. It is not insignificant, as Carbone notes, that Merleau-​Ponty located his idea of a ‘new ontology’ implicitly at work in both ‘the evolution of the concept of Nature’ and

274 Touching in the experience of contemporary art.49 Nor is it surprising, for the same reason, that a parallel is often drawn between aspects of the recent expansion of nature writing and the work of Merleau-​Ponty. Robert Macfarlane, for example, in bringing the remarkable writing of Nan Shepherd back into public view, compares it to Merleau-​Ponty’s rethinking of seeing the world. At the heart of Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, no less than the The Phenomenology of Perception, is the radical proposition that the body thinks. The work of the distinguished Professor of Philosophy and the rural Scottish school teacher overlap in the same exploration of what it is to know the world through the body. Thus Nan Shepherd, on her lifelong engagement with walking in the Cairngorm mountains: ‘walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent. But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body.’50 In 1863, discussing the painting of Eugène Delacroix, Charles Baudelaire suggested that here was an art in which ‘colour thinks by itself independently of the object it clothes’.51 It was a remarkably prescient comment, identifying a profound shift in art that was only then beginning to gather pace across the arts but which would soon define a central current of aesthetic modernism. But is this really thinking? Isn’t Baudelaire’s ascription of thought to the play of colour merely fanciful, no more than a provocative poetic metaphor? The question points to a much larger one about the nature of thinking and its relation to language. Art offers powerful evidence that thinking is not confined to working with the abstract propositions of language, though it is by no means alone in this –​witness the case of chess, sport, dancing. Music ‘after Debussy’, and the parallel movements in the visual and literary arts, constitute a principal means of realising this idea, one whose consequences we have barely begun to think through. Baudelaire’s formulation similarly offers a way of understanding a current of music that runs from Delacroix’s contemporary, Hector Berlioz, via Debussy, to the works of Grisey, Murail, and Saariaho. Just as painting began to take colour as its primary material, not merely as a way of enhancing line or volume in the service of naturalistic representation, just as sculpture began to think in stone,52 so too did music begin to explore the potential of sound in its own right, as opposed to merely a resource for ‘colouring’ musical discourse. In the case of music, this meant the ‘secondary parameter’ of sonority or timbre finding a level of independence from the hitherto ‘primary’ function of musical grammar and discourse.53

Thinking in sound  275 Philosophy resists the idea that music might be a kind of thought, for the simple reason that it begins with a strictly philosophical idea of thought and quickly discovers that music does not exhibit properties that would satisfy it. My point is that, if we begin by examining the sustained processes of the embodied mind involved in musical écriture –​sparking across the gap between invention and deduction, system and intuition, logic and association –​ then we might ask the question the other way around. How does philosophy satisfy the conditions of musical thought? Judged by the standards of music, academic philosophy lacks qualities essential to embodied thought:  tone, gesture, rhythm, repetition, particularity, multivalent logic, polyphony, touch, care, empathy, presence. Of course, our object is not, and cannot be, the thought process of the composer. That the composer ‘thinks’, any less than the listener ‘thinks’, may not seriously be in doubt. We might agree, therefore, that while music does not literally think (since music is not itself a consciousness) it is nevertheless both the trace of thought, and has the potential to provoke thought. And what of the performer? What is the performance of music if not a thinking through the body? The idea of a musical writing, however, which defines the western art music tradition, presents us with a peculiar problem. If the score is the trace of thought and provokes thought in its performative and auditory re-​enactments, then the score is a writing of thought in the same way and to the same extent as the book which has been, for a thousand years, its model. (Mallarmé, in Un coup de dés, marks the point when the tables turned and the writing of the book turned to the writing of the score.) The book of philosophy does not itself think any more than the musical score thinks. To bridge the gap, we may need a different idea of thought. For Debussy’s contemporary, Henri Bergson, the essence of thought is not found in concepts, words, or ideas, but in a dynamic relation between things. Indeed, one of the reasons that his work has not had more impact on philosophy is perhaps because its central idea (the durée) is essentially musical. It leads to no philosophical system, precisely because it undoes the terms on which any such system might rest. La durée, Bergson tells us, is simply ‘pure, unadulterated inner continuity’54 and impossible to approach in a way that tries to take it as a series of broken moments, no matter how small. This is primarily a problem of language: time, change, durée, all have to do with processes of motion and transformation. Scientific knowledge and language, on the other hand, are all built around the differentiation of static entities. Fixity, Bergson concludes, is what our intelligence seeks, but ‘it is flux, the continuity

276 Touching of transition, it is change itself that is real’.55 The opposition is played out in the distinction Bergson makes between intelligence and intuition, the one static, the other fluid. Intelligence starts ordinarily from the immobile, and reconstructs movement as best it can with immobilities in juxtaposition. Intuition starts from movement, posits it, or rather perceives it as reality itself [ . . . ] Intelligence ordinarily concerns itself with things, meaning by that, with the static, and makes of change an accident which is supposedly superadded. For intuition the essential is change; as for the thing, as intelligence understands it, it is a cutting which has been made out of the becoming and set up by our mind as a substitute for the whole.56

Intuition is the attribute of the creative mind, for Bergson, because it gives access to ‘an uninterrupted continuity of unforeseeable novelty’, as opposed to intelligence, which understands the world in terms of an arrangement of fixed and separated objects. But he goes further, anticipating Merleau-​Ponty in the way in which intuition offers an access to the world denied to intelligence: ‘Intuition, then, signifies first of all consciousness, but immediate consciousness, a vision which is scarcely distinguishable from the object seen, a knowledge which is contact and even coincidence.’57 This is the opposite of the practical and social function of intelligence, which ‘aims above all at making us masters of matter’ –​a view of language as will-​to-​power that joins Bergson back to Nietzsche and forward to Iain McGilchrist’s analysis of the relation between the two hemispheres of the brain.58 Such a language-​ use renders us powerful but cut-​off from the rest of the world –​in Bergson’s words: ‘The things that language describes have been cut out of reality by human perception in view of human work to be done.’59 While Bergson may protest ‘against the substitution of concepts for things’60 he does not step outside of language. Intuition still speaks, he insists, but it prefers a language of concrete ideas and metaphor. At times this takes him to the very margins of what might be called philosophy –​as when he calls for ‘a need for recasting and sometimes completely setting aside conceptual thought in order to arrive at a more intuitive philosophy.’61 In order to do so is not a simple task; it will require us ‘to turn aside from the social vision of the object already made; it will ask us to participate, in spirit, in the act which makes it. It will therefore turn us back, on this particular point, in the direction of the divine.’62 This essentially re-​creative act, a recasting of

Thinking in sound  277 our apprehension of the world through intuition rather than the language of the concept, might almost be a manifesto for the ‘turning aside from the social vision’ of the world practised by aesthetic modernism during Bergson’s lifetime  –​witness the work of Mallarmé, Debussy, Cézanne, Kandinsky, Schoenberg. The two realms overlap in an attitude to the world that joins Bergson’s intuition with the notion of aesthetic attentiveness to the appearing of the world. Intuition, Bergson tells us, ‘represents the attention that the mind gives to itself, over and above, while it is fixed upon matter, its object. This supplementary attention can be methodically cultivated and developed.’63 And how should it be cultivated, if not by the kind of aesthetic contemplation that art both affords and entrains –​an idea that joins Bergson to Merleau-​Ponty, Michel Serres, Jean-​Luc Nancy, and Martin Seel. As Bergson himself sums it up: Art is ‘a preparation for the art of living’.64 Anticipating a whole century of philosophical self-​critique, Bergson puts his finger on why the discourse of philosophy is necessarily interminable. At the heart of philosophical thought, he suggests, is a single point. ‘In this point is something simple, infinitely simple, so extraordinarily simple that the philosopher has never succeeded in saying it. And that is why he went on talking all his life’65 –​thus Jankélévitch, Nancy, and many others. The discourse of the philosopher is an endless series of corrections, commentaries, glosses, and reformulations because of ‘the incommensurability between his simple intuition and the means at his disposal for expressing it’.66 What would be the alternative? How could philosophy move in the opposite direction to the closing down of particularity? ‘Suppose’, Bergson conjectures, ‘that instead of trying to rise above our perception of things we were to plunge into it for the purpose of deepening and widening it’.67 His answer to his own rhetorical question is worth quoting in full: It will be said that this enlarging is impossible. How can one ask the eyes of the body, or those of the mind, to see more than they see? Our attention can increase precision, clarify and intensify; it cannot bring forth in the field of perception what was not there in the first place. That’s the objection. –​It is refuted in my opinion by experience. For hundreds of years, in fact, there have been men whose function has precisely to see and to make us see what we do not naturally perceive. They are the artists.68

Bergson’s passionate defence of artistic vision hinges on the opposition of two ways of knowing the world at the centre of his philosophy. Since these

278 Touching are, to some extent, cultural and individual choices, they introduce an ethical question about human relations to the world that, in turn, becomes an ecological one. Habits of mind and perception, designed for action and practical living produces a mindset, Bergson argues, that ‘shows us less the things themselves than the use we can make of them. It classifies, it labels them beforehand; we scarcely look at the object, it is enough for us to know to which category it belongs’.69 Art, habitually sidelined as peripheral to the important practicalities of human life, is by this account central precisely because of its tangential status. While everyday life requires a narrowing of our apprehension (‘the more we are preoccupied with living, the less we are inclined to contemplate’), artists like Turner or Corot ‘show us that an extension of the faculties of perceiving is possible.’70 What is remarkable here is less that Bergson accords high value to the heightened experience afforded by artworks, but that he takes this as a model for what philosophy should aspire to. This suggests a reversal of the power relations between two opposing ways of knowing and relating to the world (recalling, once again, the model of the divided brain explored by Iain McGilchrist). It is a tension that not only runs through a century of philosophy since Bergson, but is met, from the other direction, by the eruption within music ‘after Debussy’ of the particular against the abstract grammar of its organisation. Talking about the apprehension of the world through intuition, Bergson sounds exactly like Jankélévitch or Barraqué talking about Debussy’s La mer: ‘There are changes, but there are underneath the change no things which change: change has no need of a support. There are movements, but there is no inert or invariable object which moves: movement does not imply a mobile.’71 Or again: ‘There do not exist things made, but only things in the making, not states that remain fixed, but only states in process of change.’72 This is, perhaps, unsurprising, given that it was music that afforded Bergson his most memorable metaphor for intuition. In a musical melody, he asks, ‘do we not have the clear perception of a movement which is not attached to a mobile, of a change without anything changing? This change is enough, it is the thing itself.’73 Of course, as he acknowledges, notation and the visual approach to music that it inculcates, means that we can divide up the melody and ‘picture notes placed next to one another upon an imaginary piece of paper’.74 Contemporary with Bergson’s work was not just the late work of Debussy, but the founding systems of musical analysis based in the divisions made possible by the musical script. Bergson might almost have

Thinking in sound  279 been thinking of music analysis in his assessment that: ‘In its eternally unsatisfied desire to embrace the object around which it is condemned to turn, analysis multiplies endlessly the points of view in order to complete the ever incomplete representation, varies interminably the symbols with the hope of perfecting the always imperfect translations.’75 While the effort to reconstitute the whole from the parts is endlessly frustrating, because frustratingly endless, the opposite is not only possible but the occasion of an excess of being: But the truth is that our mind is able to follow the reverse procedure. It can be installed in the mobile reality, adopt its ceaselessly changing direction, in short, grasp it intuitively. But to do that, it must do itself violence, reverse the direction of the operation by which it ordinarily thinks, continually upsetting its categories, or rather, recasting them. In so doing it will arrive at fluid concepts, capable of following reality in all its windings and of adopting the very movement of the inner life of things.76

This is one of the finest and most succinct explanations of aesthetic modernism that I know. The problematic violence of modernist art, often understood as a kind of self-​negating of hard-​won technical skill and achievement, is here recast as a reversal of the ‘direction in which it ordinarily thinks’ the world –​to which one might add, ordinarily feels and experiences the world. Modern art quite literally recasts its own categories and, ‘in so doing’ moves to something more fluid. If, ideally, ‘to philosophize means to reverse the normal direction of the workings of thought’,77 then philosophy may have something to learn from this astonishing turn within the arts around 1900. Gilles Deleuze finds the same idea at the heart of the work of Proust: The ideas of the intelligence are valid only because of their explicit, hence conventional, signification. There are few themes on which Proust insists as much as on this one: truth is never the product of a prior disposition but the result of a violence in thought. The explicit and conventional significations are never profound; the only profound meaning is the one that is enveloped, implicated in an external sign.78

From Debussy’s La mer to Murail’s Le partage des eaux or Saariaho’s L’amour de loin, music ‘after Debussy’ is shaped by a similar focus on movement over the presentation of (musical) objects. As Jean-​Yves Tadié insists (in a book

280 Touching titled Le songe musical) Debussy’s principal theme is often movement itself rather than movement of any thing.79 Borrowing from Bergson the idea of a ‘theatre of change’, Jean-​François Gautier similarly suggests that, in La mer, Debussy abandons classical form and harmony for the sake of a kind of infinite variation: ‘nothing concludes, everything recomposes, disperses, moves away as if suspended’.80 The real subject of La mer, Gautier insists, is not the sea ‘as violent or noisy, aquatic or oceanic, in other words simply as wet, but as an example of the general law of movement which governs nature; inaccessible to concepts, which enunciate static truths, this law-​become-​music speaks more directly to the imagination, beneath the symbolic’.81 The same could be said of the Nocturnes. The few lines that Debussy wrote about these might be read to suggest that Debussy is, after all, suggesting his music has a representational function, as if he were saying, simply –​look, this is what my music pictures. But even these lines, Debussy’s concession to the audience at sea with pure music, make clear that it is not specific objects which are of concern here, but precisely the manner in which the scene makes visible the quality of movement of which each piece consists. Thus, Nuages has to do with ‘the unchanging appearance of the sky’ (l’aspect immuable du ciel), Fêtes with ‘the movement, the dancing rhythm of the atmosphere’ (le mouvement, le rythme dansant de l’atmosphère), and Sirènes with ‘the sea and its unnumbered rhythm’ (la mer et son rythme innombrable). Exactly the same is true of the orchestral Images or the Préludes for piano. It was not only the arts in which this idea was explored during Bergson’s lifetime –​key to the birth of modern physics in the work of Einstein and Planck was an understanding of matter as motion rather than fixed entities. In the music of the later twentieth century enabled by the computer, the two realms might seem to come together. The spectralists’ concern with dynamic processes, so often reflected in a Debussy-​like fascination with the movement of water or light, is equally a product of the digital capacity of the high-​ speed processor. This is the productive paradox at the heart of contemporary electro-​acoustic music, that it cultivates flow, change, and flux, but by means of the affordances of digital processes, which is to say making sound through the addition of tiny but discrete particles of information. It was exactly a century after the year of Debussy’s birth that Max Matthews discovered the potential of computers for the creation of music. By then, Jean-​Claude Risset had already turned his back on the debates over integral serialism to pursue his own recherche into the ‘vocabulary of sound, in a search for a new material permitting a greater grasp of the interior of sound, on its interior structure,

Thinking in sound  281 harmonic or inharmonic, its sound substance, in short, on the composition of sound itself ’.82 Risset’s entire career, and the movement of musical écriture he embodied, might be summed up in the title of a collection of interviews with the composer –​ Du songe au son (From dream to sound).83 The essence of spectralism, applied as a broad label to an idea of music from the 1970s onwards, is less the analysis and instrumental synthesis of the overtone structures of sounds which gives us the technical label, than the exploration of an idea of musical sound in a continuous process of transformation, of sound as dynamic process rather than as sonic objects or events. As Jean-​Luc Hervé underlines, in relation to the music of Grisey: ‘Reflection on time was always one of Gérard Grisey’s major preoccupations and since Talea and above all Le temps et l’écume (1988–​89) he was interested in the “déroulement” of musical discourse according to different temporalities.’84 In the end, spectralism is a research into new forms of musical logic –​a way of making sense in music that is not based on a mimetic relation to grammatical structures of language but to the senses. Such a music is a research into ways of knowing sensibly, but one conducted by highly rational means making use of the most sophisticated digital tools. The question of perception remains key to this exploration of new sonic possibilities opened up by digital technology for sound analysis, synthesis, and transformation, which is why Hugues Dufourt links this movement to a new epistemology. It has to do with our perception of the physical world (thus our bodily being) but in relation to highly complex operations and aesthetic structures (thus of the mind). What is heard as a single sound and what is heard as a composite? This has to do with the harmony and relation of whole and part. Paradoxically then, the digital turn, for all its technological tools, moves us from a logical, rational, empirical, positivist conception of experience to a phenomenological one. In philosophical terms, Bergson’s idea of a ‘fluid concept’ may be essentially unthinkable; in musical terms, however, it is realised in the temporal unfolding of sound. Music affords no concepts or ideas (however much we try to foist these upon it), but at the same time it is more than a random or incoherent collection of dissociated sounds. Like Bergson’s idea of the melody as the moving curve of the durée, the unfolding of musical sound in time is a continuous whole shaped from within by its own musical sense. The principle of that continuity and coherence is not a concept but a logic of sense which arises from a network of associative connections between sounds, a constellation of purely musical gestures. Like Adorno’s ‘logic of the judgement-​less synthesis’,85 like Mallarme’s ‘cygne/​signe’,86 like Deleuze’s logic of sense in the

282 Touching painting of Francis Bacon,87 like Bergson’s durée, music enacts, embodies, and sounds forth in a way that gathers its particulars into a coherent whole without subsuming them in an overarching concept. Compared to the fixed unanimity of the concept, the musical work is a patterning of a dynamic and polyphonic space of possible relations. This is the challenge of musical thought to philosophical thought, a challenge foregrounded not only in music ‘after Debussy’, but in painting and poetry and dance –​a thinking, through sound, colour, movement, of the particularity of our embodied being in the world.

 Epilogue Being musical

After words Whereof we can no longer speak, thereof we must not stop talking. We have to keep pressing speech, language, and discourse against this body, whose contact is uncertain, intermittent, hidden, and yet insistent.1

Jean-​Luc Nancy’s playful but urgent inversion of Wittgenstein makes a good epigraph for any aesthetics of music. It is echoed by all the writers I have drawn on –​writers who explore the gap between language and our embodied, sensuous experience of the world, neither to close it nor to declare writing futile. Wittgenstein himself, one of the most important thinkers on language in the history of philosophy, published only one short book during his lifetime (the Tractatus) and periodically quit academic life for a different kind of experience of the world –​as an officer in the Austro-​Hungarian army, as a teacher in a remote village primary school in the Austrian alps, as a gardener in a monastery, and as a hospital porter in London. But his famous retreats, like his time in the remote Norwegian village of Skjolden, were part of a rhythm that we might, retrospectively, understand as a flickering between two different ways of being –​one deeply embedded in language, the other at its margins. Wittgenstein’s work on language nevertheless marks a definitive break in the history of western modernity. George Steiner, reflecting on the moment of aesthetic modernism around 1900, talks of a ‘break of the covenant between word and world which constitutes one of the very few genuine revolutions of spirit in Western history and which defines modernity itself ’.2 To come afterwards, he suggests, is to live in a time of ‘epilogue’, shaped by ‘the logic of the “afterword” ’. The embodiment of such a moment, we might

After Debussy. Julian Johnson, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190066826.001.0001

284  After Debussy suggest, is less the philosopher who works on language, than the poet who chooses silence over writing –​witness Arthur Rimbaud who, in 1875, at the age of just 21, gave up poetry. One of the most important poets in the French language, Rimbaud seems to have quite literally written himself into silence. His entire oeuvre was written in a mere four years, between the ages of 16 and 20, after which he was utterly silent as a writer. For the remainder of his short life he led an itinerant and precarious existence, eventually working in the coffee trade in Ethiopia before his early death from cancer in 1891, aged 37. But Steiner’s observation about coming late, ‘in a time of epilogue’, is almost as old as modernity itself; Nietzsche had identified that ‘we moderns’ live as epigones as early as 1873. Schlegel expressed a definitive sense of modernity as coming too late in 1803.3 There is, it seems, a recurrent fascination with the melancholia of declaring, again and again, our own epigonal and epilogical status. We might recall Georg Lukács’s trenchant quip about the critical thinkers of the Frankfurt School, taking up residence in the Grand Hotel Abyss –​‘a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity [where] the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered’.4 To continue writing about the abyss of language in Mallarmé or Derrida, Debussy or Boulez, endlessly theorising the ‘time of epilogue’, might suggest something similar. One might easily picture the guests aboard the cruise-​ship ‘Abîme’, dining in style between seminars on the shipwreck of language in Un coup de dés or the siren calls of Debussy’s musique informelle, while all the while floating precariously above the depths of a cold, dark, and wordless ocean. The ideas explored in the preceding chapters suggest a different model, unconstrained by a demand for a point of historical or discursive closure. There are two versions of the post-​historical, post-​subjective time of the epi-​logos  –​one essentially empty, the other essentially fulfilled. Both are perpetually available. Indeed, self-​awareness of their dual presence and the vertiginous divide between them is definitive of the modern condition, precariously perched between ‘coming after’ and being on the brink of fulfilment.5 Music has richly and multifariously explored both and has done so in counterpoint with language and the ordering of the world according to language. But music ‘after Debussy’ parallels Bergson’s attempt to articulate a temporality outside the logic of division imposed by language: the concept of the durée is precisely such an idea, a fluid continuity of Being unbroken by language. The aesthetic attitude, as a way of being in the world, is not itself

Epilogue  285 determined by the logic of history, however much the material production of artworks takes place in history.6 Indeed, art’s distance from the merely historical and the merely factual and contingent is a condition for its critical function. As George Steiner insists: ‘All serious art, music and literature is a critical act [ . . . ] the construct of the artist is a counter-​statement to the world [ . . . ] It says that things might be (have been, shall be) otherwise.’7 For Jean-​Luc Nancy, music meets philosophy across the threshold between sense (as discursive meaning and signification) and sense (as an embodied being in the world). Hence his formulation that we now witness the end of philosophy and the end of the world it has fashioned (the world as an object of knowledge in the Cartesian sense). In its place, he suggests, we attend to ‘how the end of the world of sense opens the praxis of the sense of the world’ –​that is, a move from abstract systems of signification to ‘the concreteness or praxis of sense’.8 In music we are surely afforded a rich and embodied example of such a praxis: a way of knowing the world through aesthetic play that is, thereby, a way of being in the world. As a mode of knowing the world, of thinking the world sensually, music’s inverse relation to language has hardly begun to be explored. Music provokes the rational mind with a logic of sensual particularity that quietly resists that of conceptual and abstract thought. Music is not only a writing of the body, an enacting of sensible relations, but also a way of thinking the particular. This is why it is the counterpoint of a philosophical language which can only think the general. It is also why music has so often been made secondary by a certain kind of linguistic culture; it has been understood as ‘weak’ (and thus ‘feminine’ to a spectacularly damaged masculine mindset), because unable to think in abstract ‘truths’. This is an odd situation: given that we are particular creatures who deal with the world in particular ways and with other particulars (people, places, memories, feelings), we generally have far more need of a language of the particular than the abstract generality of philosophical language. Particularity is the palpable material and embodied place of our lives. After the collapse of the grand claims of language, and the distorted masculinity it articulated, the quiet presence of the musically feminine returns like a gently incoming tide.9 All the musical works I have explored are acts of dispersion volatile, works that free themselves, and us who (momentarily) go with them, from the gravitational pull of language to fixed things. But the space of music’s ‘saying nothing’ is not a negation of language so much as an opening up of the definitive gap between linguistic thinking and embodied experience. It is not

286  After Debussy a regression from thinking or saying (as Adorno feared), because it is itself a thinking and saying of great eloquence, a dialogue that opens between linguistic culture and a material being in the world. The temptation to decipher the musical act, to collapse it back into (linguistic) meanings is constantly present –​even for the listener, let alone the commentator, the theorist, or philosopher. To resist such a collapse requires the cultivation of a particular mind-​set –​to allow the fullness of presence without rushing to ‘convert’ it into words and meanings. This is surely the space onto which artworks open, and the condition to which listening gives access. It is part of the paradoxical condition of language that pointing to such a simple phenomenon produces such a welter of words. Since art fosters an amazement with the world, allowing us ‘to be amazed to the point of not understanding’10 (as Heidegger has it), it necessarily bewilders the mind by exceeding and deranging its habitual linguistic certainties (what Heidegger calls our ‘inauthentic everydayness’).11 My argument has been that music ‘after Debussy’ might be understood, in part, as a critique of a musical tradition that had allowed itself to become discursive rather than phatic, linguistic rather than sonorous. By foregrounding music’s elemental act of appearing, this repertoire repositions and re-​emphasises that function of art which Jean-​Luc Nancy singles out as definitive: Art disengages the senses from signification, or rather, it disengages the world from signification, and that is what we call ‘the senses’ when we give to the (sensible, sensuous) senses the sense of being external to signification. But it is what one might just as correctly name the ‘sense of the world’. The sense of the world as suspension of signification.12

Before any idea of representation or mimesis, expression or content, art appears. The fait (deed and fact) of art is that it takes place. It presents, makes present, becomes present. Music, whose medium is time above all else (music works without sound but not without time), foregrounds this act of appearing like no other. But music’s elemental act of appearing becomes occluded, in a discursive culture, by a linguistic model of saying. The paradox at the heart of ‘absolute music’ is that, for all its freedom from language, it claims to speak a language of its own.13 With this, the physicality of musical material becomes a vehicle for its geistliche (spiritual/​intellectual) content; the embodied experience of sound becomes valued for the contemplation of the forms it sets in motion, as a vehicle for a content that might be thought

Epilogue  287 separately. Hegel’s idea of the historical development of art, as the expression of the increasing inadequacy of material form to spiritual content, is the paradigmatic expression of this idea. Music, of course, resists such a reduction of its sonorous being, even in its most abstract forms. Nevertheless, the historical eruption of musical modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century may be understood, in part, as a ‘return of the repressed’ –​a rude reassertion of the primacy of sound.14 Such a reassertion of the sonorous challenges, with renewed force, our habits of collapsing music into the kinds of ‘sense’ afforded by language. Music ‘after Debussy’ provokes once more the question: Why speak about music at all? Writers have often replied that thereby we bring the mute content of music into the articulate realm of language. But a musician (and even a musicologist) might answer the other way round: we speak about music in order to open up language. By enlarging its spaces through the resonance of music, language becomes more open to the (non-​linguistic) world. Its enclosure gives way to moments of unbounded space. To assert that music is also a way of knowing the world is to say that music writes a space in relation to language and thus rewrites our being in the world. So there is no rejection of language. On the contrary, speaking about music offers a particular kind of working on language  –​bringing towards language the mute appearing of music, not to make it articulate (let alone to explain or translate it), but rather to allow its highly meaningful muteness to resonate within language. Language needs music. In order to hear its own limits, its tendency to close down the sense of the world, language needs music’s resistance, its mute refusal of the categories of language. Of course, this risks being naïve. To step sideways from sanctioned modes of language, especially those that define professional or scholarly discourses, is necessarily to provoke the charge of naïvety. And yet, isn’t that the primary instinct of philosophy itself? In her introduction to Lyotard’s Why Philosophize?, Corinne Enaudeau asks: ‘What reason was there, is there still, to philosophize, to plunge back down into the depths of the gaps in meaning –​ each time anew, in a re-​found naivety that will be judged childish?’.15 The answer, as Lyotard sets out in the first of these four lectures, is because of lack. We philosophise to ‘attest to the presence of lack by our speech’. And that means, as Husserl once remarked, that the philosopher is an eternal beginner.16 Many artists have said the same, often towards the end of a successful life’s work: one begins again. ‘I am working on things which will only be understood by little children of the twentieth century’, wrote Debussy to

288  After Debussy his friend Pierre Louÿs in 1895, signalling a definitively childlike character that runs throughout his work.17 Jacques Derrida, who was at pains not to sound naïve, spun a vast web of words in order to traverse language and to make gaps within it, to insist through erasure and différance that language, cut free from signifieds, gives access to an open space, the blanc between the words towards which Mallarmé’s entire output was shaped. Michel Serres, who is not afraid to sound naïve, comes at the problem from the opposite direction. ‘Some of us have never doubted, their whole lives, that there exists a world beyond the sign’, he asserts in Les cinq sens, a book of nearly five hundred pages that evokes, through the sheer richness of its language, an experience of the world outside, before, and after the word. A book that richly embodies Nancy’s call (‘thereof we must not stop talking’), it epitomises a current of literature that parallels the broad sweep of music ‘after Debussy’. Like Jankélévitch, insisting across the course of several books that there is nothing to say about music, Serres repeatedly tells us, in a flood of words, that ‘language makes you sick, like a drug. Like an anaesthetic, it desensitizes you.’18 Nor is this paradoxical mode of writing confined to philosophy. Witness the resurgence, over the last few decades, of a kind of nature writing that attempts to open up language by bringing it into closer relation with a vividly sensuous experience of the world. As Robert Macfarlane underlines, in his introduction to Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, such writing is itself a way of presenting the ‘unmappable surplus’ of landscape, a surplus in relation to anything language brings to bear upon it.19 In Landmarks, Macfarlane explores the interaction of language and landscape such that the intensity of certain kinds of contact with nature (re)shapes language. Discussing Roger Deakin’s account of swimming through the waterways of Britain (Waterlog), Macfarlane writes: ‘To enter water is, of course, to cross a border. You pass the lake’s edge, the sea’s shore, the river’s brink –​and in so doing you arrive at a different realm, in which you are differently minded because differently bodied.’20 Unfinished at his death in 1961, Merleau-​Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible explores this central problem of language and its relation to Nature. A sketched outline from March 1959 has the work in three parts: I. Being and World; II. Nature [later, ‘Wild Being’]; III. Logos.21 As the editors put it, his concern with the question of language was, in particular, to rethink the relationship between language and an experience that it does not master: speech ‘gives expression to an experience that is mute and ignorant

Epilogue  289 of its own meaning, but only in order to make that experience appear in its purity’.22 They continue: ‘the greatest merit of expression is to disclose this continuous passage from the word to being and from being to the word, or this double openness of the one upon the other. To think through this exchange is no doubt what The Visible and the Invisible was to devote itself to at the end.’23 Death intervened in this late work of Merleau-​Ponty, not unlike the way Adorno understood the presence of death to intervene in Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony; both point to an unresolvable tension within themselves that the interruption of death merely highlights. Merleau-​Ponty proposes a philosophical relation to the world that is more musical, one that stands against the world in a questioning or interrogative mode but does not expect an answer.24 It is odd, therefore, that musicology generally shies away from ‘phenomenological naiveté’25 even though, as Merleau-​Ponty insists, what is most needed is precisely the sophistication of such naïvety, since ‘true philosophy is to learn again to see the world’.26 It is doubly strange in that a corpus of music ‘after Debussy’ has itself richly explored this idea –​witness Fauré’s La Chanson d’Ève, for example, a work centred on stepping outside of an old language to feel the world as if for the first time. A tradition of music since has afforded exactly this learning again to see the world, enacting the relation at the heart of Merleau-​Ponty’s project –​the ‘intertwining’ of the embodied mind that perceives and the world that is perceived. In ‘The Intertwining –​The Chiasm’, Merleau-​Ponty uses the same metaphor as Kierkegaard –​that of the coastline or sea-​shore, something between us and the (visible) world that is ‘an intimacy as close as between the sea and the strand’, or else a connective tissue between perception and the perceived, the world and my body.27 We might also remember Derrida’s idea of the hinge (brisure) or Mallarmé’s wing (aile), when Merleau-​Ponty writes that ‘our body is a being of two leaves, from one side a thing among things and otherwise what sees them and touches them.’28 Except, as he goes on: ‘There are not in it [the body] two leaves or two layers; fundamentally it is neither thing seen only nor seer only, it is Visibility sometimes wandering and sometimes reassembled [ . . . ] Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?’.29 The sense of two hands grazing each other, of the hinged movement between two parts, the spark across the gap/​overlap, is explored again and again by the writers I  have drawn on. In Discourse, Figure, Lyotard joins philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-​Ponty, as much as poets like Mallarmé, in insisting that we have to work on language: ‘one must begin

290  After Debussy where one is, namely, from within words’.30 We do not step out of language and its discursive webs but, on the other hand, we live in a figural world in which ‘the given is not a text, it possesses an inherent thickness, or rather a difference, which is not to be read, but rather seen’. But it is precisely this difference that gets lost, that ‘continually fall[s]‌into oblivion in the process of signification’.31 Lyotard’s approach is to show that language is never transparent, and always tangled with the figural. The signifying function of language and the sensuous appearing of (poetic) artworks are not utterly cut off from each other, unrelated and unrelatable; rather, one is a kind of inverse of the other. Poetry thus offers a radical reversal of language-​use in the discourse of knowledge (or ‘science’, as Bergson has it). On the one hand, science attempts to force the particularity of a designated object into the invariant structural relations of language, on the other, there is ‘expressive speech striving to open itself up to the space of vision and desire and to produce figurality within the signified’. In both cases, he goes on, ‘language [is] fascinated by what it is not’: where science attempts to possess this other, art wants to be it.32 How might we keep open and explore this gap between discourse and figure, to attend to the space between linguistic practices and embodied ones? Art provides us with a particularly rich site for such an exploration –​ art whose (discursive) silence is ‘a refutation of the position of discourse’,33 whose writing traces itself in the materiality of ‘bodies, colors, sounds, in words too’ but only ‘to give them back their silence, which makes so much noise in the human body’.34 Since this figural world of art is mute, and will not speak in the language of discourse, we have to work on language instead. Must one therefore keep silent in order to bring it to light? But the silence of the beautiful, of perception –​a silence that precedes speech, an innermost silence –​is impossible: there is simply no way to go to the other side of discourse. Only from within language can one get to and enter the figure.35

Such a move is possible, Lyotard argues, because the body (and thus the figural) is already in language (thus Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Barthes, and many others). For Lyotard, ‘discourse is always thick’, it always has the sensible body caught within it. And the apparently inscrutable silence of art, its mute refusal of discursive speech, is by the same token already in language too: ‘silence is the very condition of discourse since it is also on the side of the thing of which one must speak, that one must express’. Put another way,

Epilogue  291 this silence or muteness of the figural (in nature as in art) marks the gap that makes language possible and initiates it: silence is the result of the ripping-​apart that allows discourse and its object to stand vis-​à-​vis each other, and the work of signification to begin; it is the result of the tear, integral to language, where the work of expression occurs. [ . . . ] Such violence belongs to the depth of language. It is its starting point, since one speaks in separation and the object must first be constituted as lost for it to have to be signified.36

The figural provokes us to rethink a mode of knowing the world shaped overwhelmingly by language. As Lyotard has it, paraphrasing Paul Klee, painting ‘is not something to be read, as contemporary semiologists would have it’, but rather ‘makes visible seeing itself ’.37 The frame of the painting, allows us properly to look by protecting us from the excess of the visible that ‘lays siege to us’ all around.38 Attending to the act of seeing or listening itself is central to aesthetic engagement (Seel, Serres). In its particularity, it is necessarily resistant to the conceptual apparatus of philosophy: The philosopher, of course, has no trouble demonstrating in his discourse that the unique status claimed by sensory certainty is unthinkable and unsayable, and that if it needs to be established, then it has to be said, and therefore embedded in a semantic field that ushers it into universality. But what he cannot incorporate is the showing, manifestation itself. Diadeictics is not a dialectics in Hegel’s sense, primarily because the latter operates on the surface of a semantic grid, while the former presupposes the empty interval, the depth that separates the showing from the showed.39

Put another way, ‘the result of sensory activity is a Dasein, not a Sinn’40 –​ a kind of being not a signification, meaning, concept, or idea. It is this that marks out the different task of philosophy in which Lyotard is interested and why it necessarily results in ‘working on language’. He quotes Merleau-​Ponty’s assertion that ‘words most charged with philosophy are not necessarily those that contain what they say, but rather those that most energetically open upon Being, because they more closely convey the life of the whole and make our historical evidences vibrate until they disjoin’.41 Encounters with the sensuous have the capacity to produce this derangement, this gap, this vibration in our discursive logic that (momentarily) breaks it apart. This is the critical

292  After Debussy work that art and music performs upon (philosophical) language. And this is the task of a musicology worthy of its name: to allow encounters with music to rearrange linguistic habits of mind, to provoke a re-​writing that opens on to a more musical understanding of the world. The encounter between discourse and figure, language and music, deranges the opposition of terms upon which the system depends and offers an access out of language that is otherwise closed. This is the real value of the bringing together of mousike and logos. Lyotard draws on the idea of the mirror to explore the relation between the two: the figures of discourse, he says, act as ‘a chain or switch between the intelligible discursive order and the sensory spatiotemporal order’. This crossing of the intelligible and the sensory, as in Freud’s conception of the dreamwork, is what ‘gives discourse access to what is alien to it’. But like the offset symmetry of the reflection in impressionist painting, the reflection is not an exact reproduction: ‘this reflection is a hyper-​reflection insofar as it does not consist in reflecting the designated in the signified, but that on the contrary some element of the space of reference, as it comes to lodge itself in discourse, produces anomalies there, thereby making itself visible’.42 As in Monet’s Sur les bords de Seine à Bennecourt (Figure 5.2) where the surface of the water breaks up the image of the opposite shoreline and gives access to part of the view not seen ‘in reality’, what is invisible comes into view as a reflection through another medium. Lyotard’s model, of this ‘hyper-​reflection’ between the signification of discourse and the sense of the figural, of one creating a new space in which the other can resonate, is foregrounded by art as a remaking of space, loosening the signifying conventions of representation in order to open up a new space. Of course, we see the reflection in the water, it is not imagined, just as we hear the resonance of the chord across the silence in Debussy. But both give us sensible access to the aesthetic reconfiguration of the real; both open up a space that our everyday seeing explains away. And very soon, it was this space that was, quite literally, to fill the entire canvas –​witness the case of Monet’s huge water lily paintings, explorations of the space between knowing discursively (these are paintings of water lilies) and figurally (these are whorls of colour, light, and refraction). Or again, witness the way in which the arabesque that begins as a decoration of the melodic line, a detour that complements the functional direction of the grammatical unit, but then displaces the discourse to become itself the musical space –​such is the change from the early Debussy to the self-​sufficient space of the late Études.

Epilogue  293

Before words I wondered whether music were not the sole example of the form which might have served –​had language never been invented –​for the communication of souls. Music is like a possibility which has never been developed, humanity having taken different paths, those of language.43

We might think that Proust, writing around the time of Debussy’s death, merely echoes an impossibly romantic notion of the nineteenth century, but recently his poetic insight has begun to receive some unlikely support. In the last two decades there has been an astonishing convergence of interest in questions of music and language from scientific disciplines as diverse as evolutionary anthropology, archaeology, neuroscience, cognitive and social psychology, cognitive biology, linguistics, human evolution, child development, and education. Undoubtedly, different disciplines are shaped by different questions as well as different methodologies, but at the heart of this convergence there seems to be a shared interest ‘in the comparative study of language and music as cognitive systems’.44 A central idea in evolutionary approaches to language is that of a proto-​language –​in Steven Mithen’s terms, ‘a single precursor for both music and language: a communication system that had the characteristics that are now shared by music and language, but that split into two systems at some date in our evolutionary history’.45 Proust, it seems, was not so wide of the mark. The shared history of what we have come to regard as two quite separate modalities has been taken up by Gary Tomlinson, in a remarkable study from 2015.46 Like Mithen, Tomlinson is interested in getting beyond the usual accounts of the relation between music and language that tend to look for one being derived from the other. Proceeding by a kind of ‘cognitive archaeology’, Tomlinson proposes a ‘co-​evolutionary’ theory of music and language.47 Tracing this process across a million years of hominin development, he argues that, far from being peripheral or relatively trivial to evolution, ‘the set of capacities that enables musicking is a principal marker of modern humanity’.48 And it is in the differences between these capacities and those of language that Tomlinson locates the huge significance of ‘musicking’ in the development of modern humans. Key to this is the idea of entrainment, which for most of the period in question has to do with the ‘taskscapes’ of toolmaking and finding food. But ‘among the most precise forms of human

294  After Debussy social entrainment are musical ones, especially entrainment in musical meters’.49 Both Mithen and Tomlinson propose an evolutionary view in which music is not merely the manifestation of capacities already established elsewhere in cognitive and social development, but in which ‘musicking’ is a key practice through which such capacities are developed in the first place. Music, from such a view, is not a late addition to the cognitive skill set of early modern man, a pleasant and diversionary pastime acquired after the serious business of evolutionary tasks; on the contrary, the ‘co-​evolutionary’ approach suggests that the modalities of musical tasks were integral to the development of the individual and collective mind. Tomlinson’s primary concern is to argue that ‘musicking’ is overlooked in the usual accounts of symbolic cognition as central to human development, and that making language ‘preeminent’ obscures other behaviours. But the widely shared idea of a proto-​language, understood in relation to a vast evolutionary time-​scale, begs a question about the relation between music and language in contemporary life. Mithen is particularly interested in an aspect of intellectual development common to us all, the infant acquisition of language, and thus ‘a source of evidence that suggest that music has a developmental, if not evolutionary, priority over language’. So-​called infant-​directed speech (IDS), the highly musicalised kind of speech used to address infants, would seem to be a universal of language use. Its proximity to proto-​language is certainly thought provoking, given that Mithen summarises proto-​language as either ‘compositional’ (using distinct words but with very limited or no grammatical ordering) or ‘holistic’ (a system in which the whole utterance is the message which cannot be separated out into individual words),50 and Tomlinson suggests proto-​language is ‘in effect a lexicon without grammar’, a ‘sequenced communicative behaviour’ that is gestural and bodily as well as vocal.51 Tomlinson’s model of ‘musicking’ has nothing to do with representation or referential sign systems: ‘Musicking in its modern guises structures acoustical information in complex ways without necessary reference beyond itself; it is arguably the most intricate self-​conscious human organizing of information of any sort with such pervasive, immanent nonreferentiality.’52 It sounds very much like Kant’s characterisation of what takes place in the mind when it is engaged aesthetically –​a free play of the cognitive faculties without being bound to a concept and thus, to an external referent. And, for Tomlinson, the non-​referential and musical aspects of protolanguage represents a very significant achievement of the human mind: the ‘abstracting of pitch from

Epilogue  295 meaning represents a momentous swerve in communicative means as, for the first time in the long development of human communication, a new ingredient appeared in vocalised gesture that attenuated meaning and referentiality rather than bolstering and specifying them’.53 ‘Musicking’, in other words, embodied the achievement of a sophisticated non-​referential communication. Tomlinson points to ‘far-​reaching consequences of this swerve in a new kind of sociality, a transcendental sociality that could sponsor both ritual and religion –​and tightly bind musicking to them’.54 Why was it so momentous that ‘musicking’ should bring with it a kind of behaviour distant from referential meaning? Because in this way, Tomlinson argues, music embodied and developed a definitive and highly-​valued human capacity for a kind of abstract thinking that was ‘resistant to signification’.55 It represented a key moment in humans’ increasing capacity ‘to think at a distance’56 as opposed to requiring a copresence with the object of discourse. Music, in other words, is both the product of, but also the training ground for, the definitive human capacity to think that which is not physically present, the basic premise of the ‘vast expanse of the human imaginarium’ and the very possibility of a metaphysics –​of thinking a world not immediately present. From the earliest beginnings, then, musicking was not a means of reflecting or expressing aspects of human life but rather of enabling and developing ‘the structural aspects of cognition’.57 Without them, Tomlinson argues, with the resources of language alone, we could never have developed in the way that we did: Language does not offer, except in league with musicking, modes of entrainment precise and hierarchized; its intonational structures remain analog in nature and even in tonal languages, offering no developed hierarchies such as discrete-​pitch combinatoriality; and its timbral limitations do not afford the boundless explorations of the soundscape available through musical tools. These are the features that constrained the role of language in the coalescence of human modernity. They are the musical absence at the heart of language.58

Such considerations are of a quite different order to the concern of my own book. Compared to the vast evolutionary timescale of Tomlinson’s project, the musical repertoire on which I have focused is no more than the blink of an eye. But with this idea –​‘the musical absence at the heart of language’ –​ they find a point of overlap. I cite these studies not to prove an argument

296  After Debussy but as an example of the radical way we might rethink what music is and what music does. In the scheme of things, music ‘after Debussy’ may indeed be no more than the briefest of historical moments, but Tomlinson’s closing thoughts suggest a way of connecting this historical particular to a much larger perspective: It is not that ancient humans anticipated modern musical formalism, but that all the formalist conceptions of musical effect generated in Western discourse over the last two centuries –​and in many other times and places as well –​have been groping their way toward basic, ancient truths about musicking and its difference from language.59

The scientific accuracy or theoretical plausibility of the accounts of Tomlinson, Mithen, and other recent writers, are not my concern here. My interest is with our present understanding of what music might be. From that perspective, Proust’s moment of speculation about music’s potential has a historical ‘truth’ to it. George Steiner, who knew nothing of such recent enquiries into the paleolithic record, came to a similar point of view from a quite different starting point: I believe the matter of music to be central to that of the meanings of man, of man’s access to or abstention from metaphysical experience. Our capacities to compose and to respond to musical form and sense directly implicate the mystery of the human condition. To ask “what is music?” may well be one way of asking “what is man?”.60

What sounds like poetic speculation, in Proust or Steiner, meets recent evolutionary theory half way. As Tomlinson has it, there is ‘a close kinship between the beginnings of music and those of humanly-​enacted meaning itself ’ such that ‘a world without music . . . would be explicitly inhuman’.61 But the idea of a pre-​linguistic mode of understanding, in terms of early hominin development, finds a parallel in the pre-​conceptual moment of all perception. Making sense of the world is prior to language not simply in terms of human evolution, or the development of infants’ cognition, but in the space kept open by aesthetic experience. It may be that the moment of perception, prior to language rushing in, is less than a micro-​second –​perhaps a merely virtual or theoretical gap –​but it is also true that we deliberately

Epilogue  297 cultivate certain kinds of experience to foster the opposite, to keep open the field of apperception by holding off conceptual determination (witness Kant’s understanding of contemplating ‘the beautiful’ in both nature and art). The contemplation of nature and art have in common that both afford a space for an embodied and non-​linguistic experience of the world –​an experience, moreover, we actively seek to cultivate. But an idea of art, or nature, as communication, symbol, or representation, obscures this more fundamental capacity. By contrast, approaches to art that foreground the act of appearing also foreground the act of perception itself and thus a certain kind of being in the world. At odds with the attitude that divides self and world –​an instrumental relationship necessary for hunting or land development, say –​ aesthetic perception has to do with a kind of knowledge that ‘intertwines’ (Merleau-​Ponty) the viewer and the viewed. The hinge between these two modes of seeing the world is the same as that which joins and separates music and language. We cannot rewind the process of language acquisition, neither that of human evolution as a whole nor that of our own individual cognitive development, but we can deploy language in different ways or choose, momentarily, to silence it. Aesthetic practice is precisely that: cultivating a sense of the world that appears when we make spaces in language. For Michel Serres, as for Derrida or Nancy, this is the space of writing, conceived in the broadest sense. Music, for Serres, is precisely the ‘space before meaning’ towards which the writer works, in contradistinction to the philosopher: The writer descends from meaning [sens] towards music because what he writes designates silently that which he can never say; he writes meaning in order to blindly sign towards a space before meaning; he therefore under-​ writes with music in order that, in words, he can say thousands of varied things. For his part, the philosopher instead haunts the totality of meaning and tries to speak in many voices [ . . . ].62

Of course, in a linguistic world, this desire to return to an experience of things ‘before’ and ‘without’ language will always looks ‘naïve’, a term whose pejorative tone masks something which is the object of profound longing –​ the nativus, the place of origin, the childhood state we spend a lifetime trying to refind, as in Proust’s rewriting of a lifetime. Serres muses on the apparent impossibility of the task:

298  After Debussy Hoping for a return to things themselves, we have naively desired to hear, to see and to visit, to taste, to caress, to feel, to open ourselves to the donné [given]. How can this be done without speech? To unpick ourselves from a flesh which has spoken for millennia? Does there exist a single donné independent of language? If yes, how could it be apprehended? The discussion closes before it begins: nothing is known of language for saying the donné independent of language.63

In a world ‘filled up without gap by propositions and categories’, is it not the case, Serres asks, that ‘language and language alone give the donné?’.64 But his answer, to the contrary, is that there nevertheless remains a space ‘which resists being assigned by language and which is still without concept’, and that space is the space of the body.65 The body is the place where word and world intertwine, not as an opposition but as an interface. For Serres, this mixing [alliage] of sense [sens] and signification [sens] is heard in the sound [son] of the voice, a sound that is heard through the body, by means of the generalised tympanum of the skin (which is to say, as touch).66 The sense that lies within and beneath the voice before it speaks any words, is for Serres a kind of proto-​ linguistic music he likens to the voice of the sirens –​one that Ulysses refuses but which Orpheus turns into music. ‘Music, beneath language, universally beneath languages, its physical support and condition, resides beneath and before sense. Sense supposes and would not emerge without it.’67 The voice of the sirens thus joins with the proto-​language of the earliest stages of human sense-​making; both still resonate within music. Which brings us back to the kind of listening we considered in the Prologue. The ‘givenness’ of the world (le donné du monde) appears not in the noise of language but only through patient listening, not in acts of saying but in transparent acts of appearing and taking place. In order for the donné to appear, one needs space, distance, and solitude –​above all, distance from the ‘enclosure’ of language that ‘prohibits one seeing that its noise obfuscates and disturbs the things of the world and makes them flee’.68 In a nod to Mallarmé, Serres pictures the philosopher who contemplates the apple tree in blossom through his window. What follows? ‘Long dissertation on the tree, the design which makes possible the image which he has of it or the word he writes which is found in his language, on the absence of all orchards.’69 The actual tree, outside, is quite another thing. Philosophy forgets that it looks through the window of language, from inside the house. Or, if it doesn’t forget, it denies the possibility of stepping outside. The philosopher sees only the

Epilogue  299 discourse, the words, not the world, because the words are precisely what keeps the world from him. Which is where philosophy might learn from art, and precisely why philosophers have perennially turned to art. Compare, for example, the presenting of presence that takes place in the painting of a tree in blossom, such as Van Gogh’s Almond Blossoms (1890) (see Figure 10.1). The representation of actual blossom seen in an orchard gives way to the epiphanic intensity of the act of appearing itself (hence the lack of any interest here in the rest of the tree or its location). Or consider the famous scene in Proust’s Du Côté de chez Swann in which, while out on a family walk, the young Marcel catches his first glimpse of Gilberte through a mass of hawthorn bushes laden with blossom. In Proust’s account, the linear progress of the walk gives way to a quite different temporality of inward experience, arrested and suspended by the searing intensity of colour, scent, and light. The effect is described as having an effect like music which, Marcel recalls, ‘offered me the same charm endlessly and with an inexhaustible profusion’.70

Figure 10.1  Vincent van Gogh, Almond Blossom (1890)

300  After Debussy Merleau-​Ponty may well have been thinking of Proust when, in a rare comment on music, he collapses the presumed connection of language to the world back into a merely self-​referential system: If it still seems to us that language is more transparent than music, it is because we remain for the most part within constituted language, we provide ourselves with available signification, and we limit ourselves –​like the dictionary –​to indicating equivalences between our definitions [ . . . ]. In music, however, no vocabulary is presupposed: the sense appears tied to the empirical presence of sounds, and this is why music seems unable to speak. But as we have said, the clarity of language is in fact established against an obscure background, and, if we push the research far enough, we find that language itself, in the end, says nothing other than itself, or that its sense is not separate from it.71

Adorno, thinking about music in relation to philosophy, similarly drew out the quality of self-​referentiality common to both: Beethoven’s music is immanent in the same way as is philosophy, bringing forth itself. Hegel, who has no concepts outside philosophy, is, in that sense, likewise concept-​less in face of the ‘heterogeneous continuum’. That is to say, his ideas, like those of music, are explained only by each other.72

It is an old idea that goes back to the age of Beethoven and Hegel themselves, and thus to the origins of the crisis of language in modernity that was underscored by the extraordinary rise in the status of instrumental music around 1800. Hegel himself states, in the Logic (1812–​16), the impossibility of translating a philosophical notion into other terms (‘The fact is that in a notion there is nothing further to be thought than the notion itself ’)73 and a similar idea is found among several of Hegel’s contemporaries. Novalis, in the Monologue (1798), similarly insists that words are not about anything but themselves.74 A century later, as Debussy and his contemporaries asserted the self-​sufficiency of musical sense unregulated by linguistic sense, philosophers of language were already approaching the same point from the opposite direction. Fritz Mauthner, in his astonishing Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1901–​02) outlined a project for delimiting the limits of language: ‘Once philosophy becomes a critique of language, the critique, in

Epilogue  301 turn, becomes the self-​liberation of philosophy.’ More than that:  ‘Critique of language must teach liberation from language as the highest aim of self-​liberation.’75 All of this is, perhaps, true. But, as Nancy insists, we go on speaking. We may acknowledge the uncomfortable gap between the self-​presence of music and the infinite deferral of language, but we still bring them together. We may admit that, placed in close proximity, the self-​sufficient sense of music quietly refuses the impotent babble of words that follow, but we still speak about music, from the casual nonsense of words after a concert to the neologisms of music theory and philosophy. We may even concede that, in the presence of music, the urge to keep speaking is a kind of deferral of experience, the product of anxiety in the face of a wordless experience, and yet we continually rush to fill that gap. So what would a more productive coming together of words and music look like? The discourse with music I have in mind is necessarily subjective because, in the absence of the particularity of a subjective engagement, no art takes place. But such a discourse is certainly not without rigour; it may be closer to the writing of literature than to legal reports, historical chronicles, or inventories of goods, but the writing of literature demands absolute rigour in the choice of every word and the balancing of every phrase. Music itself displays, at every turn, such rigorous particularity –​witness the infinite care in every nuance of the tone, timing, and spacing of sounds in any musical performance worth the name. The disparity between such musical precision and the careless language that follows is breath-​taking. So much care within music (in every detail of its writing, its preparation, and its performance); so little care with the words that rush in to fill the vacuum of silence before and after (from programme notes to radio presenters, lectures to post-​concert interviews, conference papers to musicological articles). Like diffèrance, what is imagined here ‘is not a “concept” or “idea” that is “truer” than presence. It can only be a process of textual work, a strategy of writing’.76 We might add, also a strategy of listening, of reading, of analysis, and of criticism, and thus something that emerges only in the ‘doing’ of musicology. To paraphrase Nancy, we do not speak about music in order, one day, to arrive at some hitherto elusive understanding or knowledge of the content of music, but precisely the opposite. We speak about music because its sonorous (linguistic) silence opens a space within our language use and, thereby, upon the world we construct through language and the way we live in it through language.

302  After Debussy

The margins of music We no longer know what music is. Its boundaries have been constantly challenged for over a century –​from an avant garde that blurs the distinction between music and sound and between the agency of composers and that of listeners; from the perspective of an anthropology that locates music in embodied social practices rather than textual or sonic objects; from an ecological view that understands music within a broader biological view of the sonic environment. One might begin to talk less about music as such, than simply being musical –​a kind of being in the world that embodies an aesthetic attentiveness to ourselves and our environment. But such a condition of musical being-​in-​the-​world brings us not only to the margins of music, but also to the margins of philosophy, and quite possibly of ecology or even theology, since it has to do with relations between things and a way of perceiving oneself as part of a wider whole. Music is not self-​contained; the edges of its mute seas ebb against the shorelines of linguistic thought. Such a broad conception of a musical being-​in-​the-​world might blur with the special kind of attentiveness afforded by an aesthetic attitude in general –​ ‘a form of awareness’, Martin Seel suggests, ‘that is constitutive of the human form of life’, without which, ‘human beings would have a vastly diminished sense of their life’s presence’.77 It is not that aesthetic perception replaces conceptual determination of the world but that it may temporarily suspend the latter. ‘Whoever can perceive something that is determined can also disregard this determination, or to be more precise can disregard the fixation on this determination.’78 This would be the value of an aesthetic way of knowing the world –​that it suspends the fixation of a conceptual, instrumental, thing-​ based way of knowing and thus reconnects us. In aesthetic intuition, we desist from the exclusively determining and affecting orientation. We liberate ourselves from its determinations. We abstain for the sake of presence. We allow ourselves to be abducted to presence. Aesthetic intuition is a radical form of residency in the here and now.79

And yet, the musical object remains. More than that, in the very particular culture of musical écriture on which I have focused, the musical work remains. The writing of sound  –​its self-​reflective, self-​critical, self-​aware reconfiguring of the world –​partakes in this aesthetic attentiveness to the world but is, at the same time, something quite distinct. After John Cage,

Epilogue  303 after attending to the sounds of the world, after listening for the music of birdsong and whalesong, after immersing ourselves in the ambient and acousmatic sounds of the world, urban and natural, we still make musical works. Why? What is it that they do that the natural world does not? What is it to write sound? Having opened out the bounded idea of music (as texted artwork) to the unbounded idea of a musical being-​in-​the-​world, I return, by way of conclusion, to the nature of works of musical écriture. But in drawing back to the specificity of these (eccentric, peculiar, and particular) musical texts there is no closing of the gap that has been opened. The end of the enquiry is hardly to conclude by making a closure; quite the opposite, it is to have opened a space the better to hear the resonance between two things. If there were any conclusion, it would be that the gap is precisely where we think, write and live. If such music partakes in, and gives us access to, a way of being in the world, it also remains –​as art –​a bounded object. My conclusion also returns to the question of musicology, understood less in a narrowly professional, disciplinary sense and more as the much wider field of language-​use that surrounds music. It may be that ‘to do musicology’ in a way that keeps open the gap between music and language is hardly to do musicology at all anymore, just as many of the philosophers I have drawn upon found themselves at the margins of their own discipline. But a musicology, or a philosophy of music, that treats music as an object to be subsumed under a concept, carries none of its critical capacity into the realm of discourse. The problem far exceeds some ‘merely academic’ issue of professional musicology; on the contrary, it highlights a central question of philosophy and a central question of human lives lived largely in language: How can one speak of the particular? How can one speak at all, without losing the particularity of the world? How can musicology be more self-​reflective of the gap-​overlap, the tidal reconfiguring of two spaces that border each other closely but remain quite different? In the words of Peter Szendy, this would be a musicology that ‘does not come after the fact, in the more or less scholarly belatedness of a logos (discourse, speech, or reason) that would tell and establish what the music was or what it meant’, but rather one that begins ‘from within the music: in the gap that opens between the music and its quest for itself as music’.80 One answer surely lies in the traditional focus of musicology on the specificity of the musical object as an act of writing, making, and thinking, rather than simply as the mute occasion for listeners’ experience. Such a focus resists collapsing

304  After Debussy the essential dialogue of aesthetic encounter into a solipsistic focus on the self (the opposite of the opening out to which aesthetic experience might give access). By the same token, such a focus accords a voice to music within a dialogical relation. It listens to music. By allowing the musical object to stand over and against us, by being open to its particularity rather than occluding it by the projection of ourselves, we are able to receive its gift (Marion). Only then can music rewrite us. Otherwise it merely sways us from side to side and leaves us where we were before. For Debussy, the very term ‘musicologist’ must have sounded like a suspicious neologism. He was in his early twenties when Guido Adler sketched an outline for the historical and systematic study of music, published in the inaugural issue of the Vierteljahrsschrift für Müsikwissenschaft in 1885.81 The synchronicity is striking: just as music and poetry foregrounded the idea of the unsayable and, across the arts and philosophy, the common-​sense equivalence of word and world was being undone, musicology was founded on quite different models drawn from the empirical sciences.82 At this critical historical moment, in the face of the infinite mise en abîme opened up between music and language, musicology opted for firmer ground. Of course, a systematic and ‘scientific’ approach to music was partly a consequence of the wider philosophical crisis and its aesthetic parallels. As music became more problematic, musicology responded by a turn to the certainties of historical and scientific methods. But it remains striking, at the very least, that the work of Mallarmé, Debussy, and their contemporaries, inaugurated an aesthetic attitude that is wholly at odds with the worldview of Musikwissenschaft. Contemporary with the foundational moments of musicology, Debussy’s music questions the way in which the neologism formed of mousikē and logos disguises a closing of the very gap it should reveal. Perhaps musicology might be served better by a different orthography, one that draws attention to its own internal disjunction  –​Music//​ology, or Music≠ology, or even, Musicology –​in other words, a discourse that would open up the gaps between music and language and thereby open up the gaps within language itself. That would be the task of a musicology which allowed itself to be shaped by the music to which it listened –​a musicology neither directed at rendering into language the ‘content’ of music nor seduced by the ‘nothing’ that it says, but insisting on presenting the non-​identity of what is said and is not said, of sound and silence, sense and signification. Such a discourse would have as its task to bring music continually into the realm of words not to explain music, to render it articulate through words, but rather to better define the edges of

Epilogue  305 words, to reveal the spaces carved out in language by music. This takes us further than simply repeating the mantra of music’s ineffability, while avoiding the tendency of all musicology to become like Golaud, bitter and bewildered, dragging Mélisande around by the hair and demanding that she speak ‘la verité’. Far from bringing us to linguistic silence, as Nancy underlines, ‘we have to keep pressing speech, language, and discourse’ against the ‘body’ of a music that both relates to such approaches and resists them at the same time. A century after Debussy’s death, there are belated signs that we may be rethinking how we speak about music. Key to such a move is reversing the way in which musicology, from its inception, has massively undervalued its own object. Because musicology deferred to the assumed priority of a model of knowledge drawn from the human sciences, based on empirical, positivist, and linguistic frameworks, it largely ignored the different logic of musical thought –​the aesthetic modes of knowledge and critical reflection that music affords –​and turned a deaf ear to the specific nature of music’s mute but sonorous articulation. It has taken a century or so of linguistic self-​reflection on language (from Mallarmé to Derrida, Fritz Mauthner to Albrecht Wellmer) to challenge this assumption of linguistic priority. In that same century, the difference has been explored within musical écriture itself, in richly sonorous works whose refined reflections on knowing the world sensuously have largely been ignored by academic musicology. To be sure, musicology has catalogued, analysed, annotated, and curated this music, exhaustively recorded the provenance and reception of musical works and detailed the lives of their composers, but without knowing what these objects are or what encounters they might occasion. So how could it be different? How could speaking about music be built around the gap between music and language, sense and signification, listening and understanding? How could musicology open up this vertiginous gap within its own discursive language, rather than using the latter to close it down? One answer is that musicology might learn something from the art that is meant to be its object. Rather than rendering the volatile art of music into the solid categories of language, a reversed hermeneutics might allow music to open up (critique, question, explore, enlarge) the gaps within language. Such an approach would bring to the discourses of language the critically different modes of embodied thought that music enacts. But how do we speak about music precisely to open up the gap which defines these two

306  After Debussy constitutive modalities of the mind, the highly charged space across which sparks the tension between like and not-​like? By definition, any possible answer lies not in the abstractions of theory but in individual encounters between music and language, the only approach that remains faithful to art’s logic of material particularity and one I have insisted on throughout this book. In the Prologue, I suggested that the plural branches of musicology today were plurally fragmented around an absent centre. This is that absent centre: the refusal, fuelled by professional and institutional anxieties, to allow musical encounter to resonate with and be engaged by the discourses of musicology. A refusal of music. More serious still, a refusal of oneself and a refusal of the kinds of being in the world that musical encounter affords. The musicologist is not alone in this, in reserving a certain way of being for the unspoken realm of private experience while strictly expunging it from professional activity. This, after all, is the default position of all professional discourse, from philosophy to politics, which is why all professional discourse excludes the very thing it most needs. But those who write about art and music have a particular responsibility, because the purported object of our practice is a special kind of access to this special kind of being in the world. Our refusal of it, our silencing of it within our own discourses, is thus a special kind of betrayal. I am not suggesting that we be any less rigorous; there are other kinds of rigour than the empirical facticity of contextual music history or the scholarly performance of current theoretical orthodoxy. But the writing about music I am interested in here has to do with what is not historical in music, nor political, nor philosophical. Lyotard puts it like this: It is a grave and common error to impose a classification by periods or schools on works of art. In reality, you’re only classifying cultural products, which belong in effect to observable phenomenon of historical reality, like political events, demographical mutations, and economic changes. But what there is that is art in works of art is independent of these contexts, even if art shows itself only within those contexts and on their occasion.83

It is not that we cannot, or should not, study music as a ‘cultural product’; understanding the mute art of music as part of a wider social, political and cultural history remains a powerful contribution of musicology to the wider study of the Humanities. But we should also acknowledge that when we study music in this way it ceases to function as art and becomes like any

Epilogue  307 other ‘observable phenomenon of historical reality’ –​objects (newspapers, clocks, wigs, steam engines, phonographs), ideas (freedom, dialectics, truth, self-​expression), techniques (counterpoint, sonata form, developing variation, coloratura), people (Mozart, Rossini, Schenker, Karajan), events (the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the riot at the premiere of The Rite of Spring). It is, of course, not so simple as to recast musicology into two branches: the contextual study of objects and social practices associated with music on the one hand, and the study of aesthetic encounter on the other. I exaggerate the difference between them simply to make a point. Proust does it better when, in Time Regained, he scorns the musicologist, who, refusing sensuous immediacy in the name of erudite commentary, ‘spends his life going from one concert to the next, embittered and unsatisfied as his hair turns grey and he enters an unfruitful old age, the celibate bachelor of art’.84 Anyone who tries to write on music knows this gap. There is no kind of writing on music that does not have to wrestle with the tension between whatever ‘music’ may be and the discourse we bring to it. I confess to beginning this project with the idea that music was divided from language by an unbridgeable gap and that the relation of words and music was defined by their incommensurability. If music had some kind of compensatory function, in a modernity dominated by instrumental language and a postmodernity dominated by digital information, then this would be characterised by a schism between two different orders of being, thinking, and knowing. The central challenge of my project would thus be how to delineate in words that which refuses words. But as I progressed I realised that such an absolute dichotomy is false. One is of course bound into the other, takes place across the boundaries of the other: they are co-​present in our evolution (as a species), in the development of every (a-​linguistic) infant to (articulate) adulthood, in the flickering between experience and speaking, the wrestling between grammar and the body. Writing about music is therefore less bridging a gap between two apparent opposites (fire and water, say) than thinking through the intimate non-​identity of two parts of the same mind –​like the relationship between the solid material of the stream bed and the water that flows through it, one shaped by the other at every turn. The temptation to collapse music back into ineffability does not go away, because ineffability is what we call one part of this process. Taken in isolation, there are plenty of passages in the writings of Jankélévitch that seem to do just this, and even Marcel Proust, one of the greatest writers on music, sometimes appears to fall into the same trap. It is not that the idea is completely

308  After Debussy false, but that music is, at one and the same time, both outside of language and also always in relation to it.85 Proust and Jankélévitch knew this perfectly well, which is why music occupies such an important role in their own literary and philosophical language-​work. Jankélévitch wrote several books on music and often referred to music in his others –​books on death, irony, and time. At the heart of all of them, to borrow the title of one of the shortest, is the idea of the ‘Je-​ne-​sais-​quoi’ and the ‘presque rien’. What is this thing, he asks, which is the bad conscience of a rationalism which imagines it can say exactly what things are, something which does not exist but yet is the most important thing, the only thing worth trying to say but the one thing one cannot say, whose presence fulfils us and whose absence leaves us anxious? How can one explain the irony of this paradox, this pathos of incompleteness which haunts the margins of philosophy?86 Only the part is sayable; such is the nature of language. What cannot be said is the whole, which in this respect, is the same as nothing. Saying nothing, as we have seen, is art’s way of presenting the whole. It is the paradox of all philosophy, which tries through saying to build a whole, that saying always makes un-​whole. There is nothing mystical about Jankélévitch’s insistence on the unsayable (indicible), the mystery that cannot be spoken; it is simply a way of designating this whole that always eludes the saying of language. Music, on the other hand, which does not say, nevertheless embodies, ‘while the music lasts’, an unsayable whole –​provisional, particular, and evanescent, but a whole nevertheless. This is why music is so strongly allied with the idea of love, because it has the capacity to make present the plenitude of the whole while remaining utterly particular. It is also, perhaps, why music makes us weep, because it momentarily restores a fullness of being that is lost in all the saying of language.

Notes Prologue 1. Thus, for example, George Steiner on the priority of art over secondary discourses: ‘I take it to be a moral and pragmatic fact that the poem, the painting, the sonata, are prior to the act of reception, of commentary, of valuation.’ Real Presences (London: Faber, 1989), 149–​50. 2. See Rolf J.  Goebel discussing Albrecht Wellmer, Versuch über Musik und Sprache (Munich:  Hanser, 2009) in ‘Transposing Music:  An Intermedial Perspective on German Modernist Poetry’, The German Quarterly 86, no. 3 (2013), 294–​310, 295. 3. It was given that title in 1914, having earlier been called The Ark of the Covenant. 4. The relation between music and language as, respectively, that between the right and left hemispheres of the brain is central to Iain McGilchrist’s study of the connection between divided neurological functions and the shaping of western culture. See The Master and his Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). 5. See, for example, Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals. The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body (London:  Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005); Nicholas Bannan, ed., Music, Language and Human Evolution (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012); Gary Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music. The Emergence of Human Modernity (New York: Zone Books, 2015). I touch on the relation between my own project and these approaches in the Epilogue. 6. See, for example, Aniruddh S. Patel, Music, Language, and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Daniel J. Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (London: Atlantic Books, 2008); Michael H. Thaut, Rhythm, Music, and the Brain. Scientific Foundations and Clinical Applications (London and New York: Routledge, 2008); Oliver Sachs, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary (2009). 7. Contemporary with Rodin’s hands, Paul Claudel observed that connaissance (knowledge) is best understood as a co-​naissance (being born together), insisting that one thing is known only in relation to the existence of another. See Paul Claudel, Art Poétique (Paris:  Gallimard, 2013). Jean-​François Lyotard similarly plays on this relation of co-​naissance and connaissance, in Lyotard, tr. Andrew Brown, Why Philosophize? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 76 and 83. 8. Vladimir Jankélévitch, tr. Carolyn Abbate, Music and the Ineffable (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 78–​79. 9. Elsewhere, Jankélévitch suggests ‘there is nothing to say, and at the same time infinite things to say’ about music. See Le Je-​ne-​sais-​quoi et le Presque Rien. 1. La manière et

310 Notes l’occasion (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980), 52–​53. Steven Rings similarly underlines that the consequence of Jankélévitch’s philosophy is not a ban on speaking about music, but rather ‘the possibility of a two-​way commerce between music and language’. See Rings, ‘Talking and Listening with Jankélévitch’, in ‘Colloquy: Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Philosophy of Music’ (Michael Gallope and Brian Kane, convenors), Journal of the American Musicological Society 65 no. 1 (2012), 215–​56. 10. See also Julian Johnson review of ‘Vladimir Jankélévitch (tr. Carolyn Abbate), Music and the Ineffable’, Music and Letters 85, no. 4 (2004), 643–​47. 11. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Music and Language:  A Fragment’, in Adorno, tr. Rodney Livingstone, Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music (London: Verso, 1992), 1. 12. Adorno, ‘Music and Language’, 1. 13. Keith Chapin and Andrew H. Clark, eds, Speaking of Music. Addressing the Sonorous (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 1. 14. Lawrence Kramer, ‘Speaking of Music’, in Speaking of Music, ed. Chapin and Clarke, 19. 15. Jean-​Luc Nancy, tr. Charlotte Mandell, Listening (New  York:  Fordham University Press, 2007), 1. Marie-​Louise Mallet similarly suggests that music poses ‘a threat’ to philosophy since it marks a kind of limit to philosophy. See La musique en respect (Paris: Galilée, 2002), 9. 16. Andrew Bowie makes a similar point: ‘Heidegger’s insistence on listening –​being open to being, rather than determining it –​is part of what comes to be so important in the new role of music in modernity. Music’s lack of semantic determinacy, which Hegel construes as its essential limitation, can in these terms be regarded as a challenge to the dominant philosophical concern with explanation. Explanation can involve a failure to “listen” to what escapes the frameworks upon which explanations rely.’ Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2007), 74. 17. Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 168. 18. Roland Barthes, ‘Listening’, in The Responsibility of Forms. Critical Essays on Music, Arts, and Representation, tr. Richard Howard (New  York:  Hill and Wang, 1985), 245–​60. 19. Adriana Cavarero, tr. Paul A. Kottman, For More than One Voice. Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), xii–​xviii. 20. Roland Barthes, ‘Music, Voice, Language’, in The Responsibility of Forms, 279. 21. Roland Barthes, ‘Rasch’, in The Responsibility of Forms, 308. 22. Steiner, Real Presences, 197–​98. 23. Steiner, Real Presences, 18. 24. Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, in Image, Music, Text, tr. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana/​Collins, 1977) 181. 25. In Barthes’ original French text the word is ‘la frange’. 26. Susan Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 2009), 8. 27. Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’, 10.

Notes  311 28. Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’, 13 29. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), xv. Cf. Terry Eagleton’s idea of aesthetic meaning as ‘a kind of constant flickering of presence and absence together’. Cited in Steiner, Real Presences, 123. 30. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘Production of Presence, Interspersed with Absence:  a Modernist View on Music, Libretti and Staging’, in Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity:  Essays, ed. Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 355. 31. ‘Music never can become a means’, insisted Friedrich Nietzsche. See ‘On Words and Music’, in Carl Dahlhaus, tr. Mary Whittall, Between Romanticism and Modernism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 115. 32. Pelléas et Mélisande, Act 3.iv. 33. ‘The real ivory tower’, writes Michel Serres, ‘does not surround the solitary, it encloses the meeting. The group encloses itself in a compact wall of language [ . . . ] this hard, smooth, uncrossable wall, built of its own language. Groups enclose themselves as if in prisons behind their language of wood, wind and ivory.’ Michel Serres, Les cinq sens (Paris: Pluriel, 2014), 112. 34. Debussy’s symbolist opera has been particularly prey to having its ‘symbols’ analysed, explained, and charted, until this opera with speechlessness at its heart, is made to speak. See, for example, Elliott Antokoletz, Music Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bartók. Trauma, Gender, and the Unfolding of the Unconscious (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 35. Jean-​François Lyotard, ‘Music, Mutic’, in Postmodern Fables, tr. Georges van den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 217–​33. 36. Lyotard, ‘Music, Mutic’ 218. 37. Lyotard, ‘Music, Mutic’ 220 (translation amended). 38. Laura Odello, ‘Waiting for the Death Knell:  Speaking of Music (So to Speak)’, in Speaking of Music, ed. Chapin and Clark, 39–​48, 44. 39. Plato, ‘Phaedo’, in The Last Days of Socrates, tr. Hugh Tredennick (London: Penguin, 1982), 103. 40. Odello ‘Waiting for the Death Knell’, 47. 41. Lawrence M. Zbikowski, ‘Listening to Music’, in Speaking of Music, ed. Chapin and Clark, 101–​19, 119. 42. Maurice Boucher divided his 1930 study of Debussy into three parts: ‘Avant’, ‘Lui’, and ‘Après’. See Maurice Boucher, Claude Debussy: Essai pour la connaissance du devenir (Paris: Éditions Rieder, 1930). 43. After the premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande there may well have been a group of ‘little Debussystes’ at the Conservatoire, but, as Jean-​François Gautier insists, musically-​ speaking, he had no disciples. Jean-​François Gautier, Claude Debussy. La musique et le mouvant (Arles: Actes Sud, 1997), 15 and 75. 44. Gautier, Claude Debussy, 49 and 169. 45. Arnold Whittall, ‘Debussy now’, in Simon Trezise , ed., The Cambridge Companion to Debussy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 278.

312 Notes 46. The idea is thematised in the title of Albert Jakobik’s Claude Debussy oder Die lautlose Revolution in der Musik (Würzburg: Tribsch, 1977). The same idea is key to André Boucourechliev’s Debussy:  La révolution subtile (Paris:  Fayard, 1998) and Victor Lederer’s Debussy: The Quiet Revolutionary (New York: Amadeus Press, 2007). 47. Debussy’s comment is made in ‘Pourquoi j’ai écrit Pelléas’ (1902) in Monsieur Croche, 63. For a discussion, see David J. Code, ‘Hearing Debussy Reading Mallarmé: Music après Wagner in the Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faune’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 54, no. 3 (2001), 493–​554, 504. 48. Marianne Wheeldon explores this quite separate question in her recent monograph, Debussy’s Legacy and the Construction of Reputation (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 49. André Boucourechliev insists that ‘Debussy is a solitary figure, without ancestors or descendants. He is a phenomenon outside history, if one thinks of history as a paradigm of influence.’ Debussy: La révolution subtile, 10. 50. Several books have explored the legacy of a single composer in terms of subsequent composers’ work:  Mark Berry, After Wagner:  Histories of Modernist Music Drama from Parsifal to Nono (Woodbridge:  Boydell Press, 2014); Stephen Downes, After Mahler:  Britten, Weill, Henze and Romantic Redemption (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Tim Howell, After Sibelius: Studies in Finnish Music (London:  Routledge, 2006); Jonathan Cross, The Stravinsky Legacy (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2005); Mark Evan Bonds, After Beethoven: The Imperative of Originality in the Symphony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). My own approach is rather different, since it focuses largely on the music of Debussy himself as emblematic of a key movement in modern music since, with only occasional discussion of the music of later composers. 51. Whittall, ‘Debussy now’. A fascinating set of ten ‘Portraits of Debussy’ was published in The Musical Times in 1967 and 1968, exploring the relation between Debussy and other twentieth-​century composers (including Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Messiaen, Puccini, and Koechlin). See The Musical Times, vols. 108 and 109. A colloquium held at the Sorbonne in 1962 was titled Debussy et l’évolution de la musique au XXe siècle. Published in 1965, ed. Édith Weber (Paris: Éditions du CNRS). 52. Myrian Chimènes and Alexandra Laederich, Regards sur Debussy (Paris:  Fayard, 2013). 53. Pierre Boulez, ‘Corruption in the Censers’, in Notes of an Apprenticeship, tr. Herbert Weinstock (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 27. 54. See Edward Campbell, Boulez, Music and Philosophy, (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2010), 24. 55. Jean Barraqué, Debussy (Paris: Seuil, 1982) [orig.1962], 8. 56. André Hodeir’s Since Debussy:  A View of Contemporary Music, tr. Noel Burch (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 17. It remains relatively rare for studies of twentieth-​ century music to take Debussy as a starting point. Recent exceptions include Didier Guigue, Esthétique de la sonorité. L’héritage de Debussy dans la musique pour piano de XXe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009).

Notes  313 57. Wellmer cites Dieter Schnebel, ‘Der Ton macht die Musik:  Wider die Versprachlichung’ (1990) in Anschläge –​Ausschläge. Texte zur neuen Musik (Munich, 1993). See Wellmer, Versuch über Musik und Sprache, 11. 58. Makis Solomos, De la musique au son: L’émergence du son dans la musique des XXe et XXIe siècles (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013), 14 and 18. In the conclusion of his study, Solomos underlines how this shift to sound puts into question a model of music based on the imitation of language that begins with the emergence of tonality in the early seventeenth century (495). 59. Hugues Dufourt, La musique spectrale: Une révolution épistémologique (Paris: Editions Delatour, 2014), 15. 60. This idea shapes the perspectives on twentieth and twenty-​first century music explored in Erling E. Guldbrandsen and Julian Johnson, eds, Transformations of Musical Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 61. Such a rethinking of twentieth-​ century music history is not new but it remains curiously sidelined in anglophone scholarship. It is hard to find English-​ language equivalents of the historical perspectives explored in Makis Solomos, De la musique au son or Celestin Deliège, Cinquante ans de modernité musicale, de Darmstadt a l’IRCAM:  contribution historiographique à une musicologie critique (Liège: Mardaga, 2012). 62. Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis:  Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, tr. Zakir Paul (London and New York; Verso, 2013), xiii. 63. Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris:  Éditions de Minuit, 1972). Translated by Alan Bass as Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982). The same sense of margins is signalled by Lydia Goehr in The Quest for Voice. Music, Politics and the Limits of Philosophy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). 64. Given the importance of French theory to work in the humanities and social sciences over the past fifty years, it is striking that until recently discourse about music has been almost untouched by these revolutions of thought. There are recent signs that this is finally beginning to change:  Michael Gallope, Deep Refrains:  Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Sally Macarthur, Judy Lochhead, Jennifer Shaw, eds, Music’s Immanent Future:  The Deleuzian Turn in Music Studies (New  York:  Routledge, 2016); Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts (London:  Routledge, 2013); Jessica Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought. Art, Literature, and Music after Merleau-​Ponty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Martin Scherzinger , ed., Music in Contemporary Philosophy:  Special Double Issue of Contemporary Music Review 31, nos. 5–​6 (2012); Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbit, eds, Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music (London:  Routledge, 2016); Edward Campbell, Music after Deleuze (London:  Bloomsbury, 2013); Edward Campbell, Boulez, Music and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda, eds, Deleuze and Music (Edinburgh University Press, 2004).

314 Notes 65. Jacques Derrida, ‘Tympanum’, in Margins of Philosophy, xii. The tympanum here is the ear drum that separates the interiority of hearing from the exterior daylight world of vision. 66. Derrida, ‘Tympanum’, x. 67. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Double Session’, in Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 189–​90. 68. Derrida, ‘The Double Session’, 204–​06. 69. Andrew Bowie suggests that we might regard the philosophy of music ‘not as the philosophy whose job is conceptually to determine the object “music”, but rather as the philosophy that emerges from music’. Music, Philosophy, and Modernity, 11. My own book attempts to explore a particular case of this idea. 70. I agree with Diana Raffman that because tonal music has a grammatical structure it sets up the false expectation of a quasi-​linguistic kind of meaning: ‘music’s grammatical structure may mislead us into semantic temptation. Music may be intended, but it isn’t intentional: it isn’t about anything.’ See Language, Music and Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 41. 71. Albrecht Wellmer makes clear that the question of music’s similarity to language [Sprachähnlichkeit] is necessarily a historical one, as is shown by the anti-​linguistic direction of much twentieth-​century music. See Versuch über Musik und Sprache (Munich: Hanser, 2009). 72. There is a substantial literature on music’s imitation of language in the tonal era. See, for example, from a historical point of view, Mark Evan Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) and, from the point of view of music theory, Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 1983). 73. See, for example, William Jones, writing in 1784: ‘Ever since Instrumental Music has been made independent of Vocal, we have been in danger of falling under the dominion of sound without sense’. Cited in John Neubauer, The Emancipation of Music from Language. Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-​Century Aesthetics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 65. The ‘problem’ of instrumental music was still much in evidence in what Kant and Hegel have to say about music. 74. See Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric (1991), After Beethoven (1996), Music as Thought. Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), and Absolute Music. The History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 75. I  explore this idea in Chapters  7 and 8 of Out of Time:  Music and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 76. Katherine Bergeron, Voice Lessons, viii. 77. Jacques Derrida, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 172. 78. This view of language, standard since Saussure, is wonderfully challenged by Robert Macfarlane in his recent explorations of the close relationship between dialect vocabularies and place. See, for example, Landmarks (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2015).

Notes  315 79. Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origins of Language’, in The First and Second Discourses, tr. and ed. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Harper Row, 1990), 249 and 253. 80. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Voice that Keeps Silent’, in Voice and Phenomenon, tr. Leonard Lawlor (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 66. 81. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 200. 82. The central role of Husserl’s early Logical Investigations (1900–​01) is underlined in the subtitle of Derrida’s Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology published in 1967. 83. Edward Campbell underlines that French philosophy from around 1945 to 1960 ‘is characterised as that of the “three H’s”, in other words of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger’  –​thus underlining the definitively German thread in French philosophy. See Boulez, Music and Philosophy (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2010), 10. 84. Steven Decatur Smith, ‘Awakening dead time:  Adorno on Husserl, Benjamin, and the temporality of Music’, in Music in Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Scherzinger, 389–​409,  392. 85. Henri Bergson, tr. Mabelle L. Andison, The Creative Mind:  An Introduction to Metaphysics (New York: Citadel Press, 1946), 79. 86. See endnote 64 for a list of studies which come closer to such an approach, especially in relation to the thought of Deleuze. 87. One might stretch the historical envelope further. It is not insignificant that key figures for Derrida include not only Mallarmé but also Rousseau, both of whom turned to music in order to understand language better. Rousseau’s essay on the origin of language, John Neubauer argues, grew out of his concern with music explored in the fragment of an essay entitled ‘L’origine de la mélodie’. See Neubauer, The Emancipation of Music from Language, 97. Similarly, Downing A. Thomas has shown how the later crisis of language has its beginnings in the eighteenth-​century sense that music somehow compensates for the inadequacies of language. See Thomas, Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 88. Ruth Katz, A Language of its Own: Sense and Meaning in the Making of Western Art Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 89. Michel Serres, Les cinq sens (Paris: Pluriel, 2014), 83. 90. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 69. 91. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 138. 92. Serres, Les cinq sens, 305. 93. As Iain McGilchrist summarises it: ‘the brain has to attend to the world in two completely different ways, and in so doing to bring two different worlds into being’. The Master and His Emissary, 31. 94. Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, tr. John Farrell (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2005), 15–​16. 95. Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, 3. 96. Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, 15. 97. Serres, Les cinq sens, 445–​46.

316 Notes 98. Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought, 2. 99. It is telling, for example, that Heidegger’s idea of the linguistic sign as marking a rift [der Riss] or gap between Dasein and the world, first appears in The Origin of the Work of Art (1935). 100. Similarly, the later thought of Merleau-​Ponty, including the key ideas of interleaving, chiasm and flesh, was often articulated with reference to painting and music. See Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought, and also Amy Cimini, ‘Vibrating Colors and Silent Bodies: Music, Sound and Silence in Maurice Merleau-​Ponty’s Critique of Dualism’, in Scherzinger Music and Philosophy, 353–​70. 101. Friedrich Nietzsche, tr. Walter Kaufmann, ‘Twilight of the Idols’, in The Portable Nietzsche (London: Penguin, 1982), 483. 102. Scherzinger, ‘Music and Philosophy’, 345 and 348. A similar reversal is explored by François Noudelmann in Le toucher des philosophes: Sartre, Nietzsche et Barthes au piano (Paris: Gallimard, 2008). 103. The work of Andrew Bowie is key to this idea, most obviously in Music, Philosophy, and Modernity. 104. Cited in Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 192. The authors go on to suggest that Wittgenstein’s defining of the limits of language was widely misunderstood: ‘Where the Vienna positivists had equated the “important” with the “verifiable” and dismissed all unverifiable propositions as “unimportant because unsayable”, the concluding section of the Tractatus had insisted –​though to deaf ears –​that the unsayable alone has genuine value.’ Ibid., 220. Andrew Bowie points to Wittgenstein’s suggestion, in his notes towards the Tractatus, that music might provide a means for reflecting on language. See Music, Philosophy, and Modernity, 41. 105. A. C. Grayling, Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 90. 106. The following notes, made in the 1930s and 1940s, can all be found in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value: ‘the strength of the thoughts in Brahms’s music’ (23); ‘phenomena akin to language in music’ (34); ‘some music at least, makes us want to call it a language’ (62); [there are intellectual problems] ‘that Beethoven (and perhaps Goethe to a certain extent) tackled and wrestled with, but no philosopher has ever confronted’ (9). 107. Wittgenstein returns to the difficulty of ‘understanding what it means to understand music’ (Culture and Value, 70). In Zettel he suggests that ‘understanding a musical phrase may also be called understanding a language’ (29). A musical theme makes a connection with language and its intonations ‘and hence with the whole field of our language-​games’  (30). 108. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 11. 109. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 15. 110. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 24. 111. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 25. 112. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 66/​67 and 82. 113. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 138 and 175. 114. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 112.

Notes  317 115. Hugues Dufourt, La musique spectrale. Une révolution épistémologique (Paris: Delatour, 2014). 116. Theodor W. Adorno, tr. Edmund Jephcott, Mahler:  A Musical Physiognomy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 117. Gilles Deleuze, tr. Daniel W. Smith, Francis Bacon:  The Logic of Sensation (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), xiv. 118. Søren Kierkegaard, tr. Alastair Hannay, Either/​ Or:  A Fragment of Life (London: Penguin, 1992), 76–​77. 119. Kierkegaard, Either/​Or, 94.

Chapter 1 1. Performances of Sirènes differ widely in the degree to which the sensual tone of the voices is foregrounded or kept at a distance. It is hard not to detect a rather puritanical note in Boulez’s comment that Debussy adds the voices in this movement ‘in order to enrich the orchestral colour’. Pierre Boulez: ‘Debussy: Orchestral Works’, in Orientations:  Collected Writings, ed. Jean-​Jacques Nattiez, tr. Martin Cooper (London: Faber, 1986), 322. 2. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère de l’instant (Paris: Plon, 1976), 202. 3. Jankélévitch calls them ‘unarticulated voices’ (voix inarticulées): Debussy, 202. 4. There is common ground here; in both cases, wordless female voices, at the edge of language, evoke the edge of the known world (the furthest limits of space as of the ocean). Mermaids form part of a widespread topos of fin de siècle art which included all manner of fairies, water sprites, naiads –​liminal creatures occupying the space between the human and the natural world. During Debussy’s lifetime there was a flood of visual representations of mermaids, usually in scenes of seduction –​witness the works of the English painter, Herbert James Draper (1863–​1920), for example. Many treatments of the topic were more thoughtful, for example John William Waterhouse’s Odysseus and the Sirens (1891) and The Siren (1900), Arnold Böcklin’s Mermaids at Play (1886), Gustav Doré’s Les Oceanides. Les Naiades de la Mer (1860–​ 69), Gustav Klimt’s Fish Blood (1898), Flowing Water (1898), Mermaids (1899), and Water Snakes I and II (1904–​07), Henri Fantin-​Latour’s Rhinemaidens (1885), and Henrietta Rae’s Hylas and the Water Nymphs (1909). 5. Witness the use of a wordless chorus in Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé (1912), or the less familiar Narcisse et Echo (1911) by Nikolai Tcherepnin, ‘Neptune’ from Holst’s The Planets (1914–​16), Vaughan Williams’s Flos Campi (1924) and Sinfonia Antarctica (1952), Charles Ives’s Fourth Symphony (1910–​c.1924), or Janáček’s Kát’a Kabanová (1921) in which a wordless female chorus sounds the ‘voice’ of the river. 6. Stravinsky’s nightingale is surely the model for Glière’s later (wordless) Concerto for Coloratura Soprano and Orchestra (1943). 7. Tristan Murail, who has largely avoided word-​setting as such, wrote a number of pieces for the ondes martenot in the 1970s, such as Les miroirs étendu (1971), Les nuages de Magellan (1973), and Tigres de verre (1974).

318 Notes 8. Unlike Debussy, Saariaho also has the chorus use short poetic texts (on the themes of the later opera –​love, time and death). Movement 6, ‘Death’, is dedicated to the memory of Gérard Grisey who died in 1998 during the work’s composition. 9. See Taina Riikonen, ‘Stories from the Mouth: Flautists, Bodily Presence and Intimacy in Saariaho’s Flute Music’, in Kaija Saariaho: Visions, Narratives, Dialogues, ed. Tim Howell, Jon Hargreaves, and Michael Rofe (Farnham:  Ashgate, 2011), 63–​80. For an extensive study see Anni Oskala, The Voice in Kaija Saariaho’s Music, 1977–​2000, DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 2007. 10. See Harvey’s note on the work at . 11. In relation to the earlier version of this piece, Les Sept Paroles du Christ en croix (1987–​89), the composer insisted that ‘the choir is used for the acoustic and emotional quality of the human voice rather than to carry a message’. See Peter Szendy, ed., Tristan Murail (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 133. 12. Grisey here takes a single phrase (‘I love you’) and uses it to generate a series of formants stretched across the duration of the entire piece (37 mins), a process of ‘decomposition’ of the vowels to produce 28 sections in all, each based on a separate phoneme generated by this process. The tape part was made at IRCAM using the CHANT programme. See G. Grisey, J. B. Barrière, P. F. Baisnée, ‘ “Les Chants de l’Amour”, a piece for computer generated tape and mixed choir’, Proceedings of the 1985 International Computer Music Conference (San Francisco:  ICMA, 1985), 217–​24. 13. In post-​war avant-​garde music the voice is often involved in a kind of deconstruction of language which undoes the usual borders between language and the body. For a recent study in the music of Berio see Clare Brady, The Open Voice: Vocality and Listening in three operas by Luciano Berio, PhD diss., Royal Holloway University of London, 2017. 14. Adriana Cavarero, tr. Paul A. Kottman, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 4. 15. The half-​bird figure opens up an aerial instead of aquatic liminality. Witness how siren voices may also be the wordless voices of birds, from Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending (1914) and Messiaen’s Réveil des Oiseaux (1953) to Jonathan Harvey’s Birdconcerto with Pianosong (2001), a work predicated on moving between two worlds. 16. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 105. Many mermaid paintings of this time exemplify a representation of female sexuality as dangerously seductive, half-​human, half-​animal. See n. 4. 17. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, tr. John Cumming, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1986), 32–​33. 18. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 32. 19. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 131–​32. 20. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 113. 21. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 98. 22. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 99.

Notes  319 23. Michael L. Klein, ‘Debussy’s L’Isle joyeuse as Territorial Assemblage’, 19th-​Century Music 31, no. 1 (2007), 28–​52. The passage from bb. 75–​99 has many similarities with the call in the third movement of La mer –​the repeated neighbour note motion, most obviously. 24. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 133. Julia Kristeva’s account of desire in language is paralleled by that of Jean-​François Lyotard in Discourse, Figure, tr. Antony Hudel and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). More recently, Steven Connor has explored vocality as a sonic and physical excess that destabilizes speech, undermining any idea of pure signification with the bodily noise of speech acts. See Steven Connor, Beyond Words. Sobs, Hums, Stutters and Other Vocalizations (London: Reaktion, 2014). 25. It is striking that La mer is coterminous with the developing science of phonetics around 1900 in relation to the French language, as explored by Katherine Bergeron, and attempts to recreate mechanically the production of vowel sounds in the voice box. Her discussion includes the ‘most astonishing invention’ of the sirène à voyelles as illustrated in the Petite Manuel de physiologie de la voix (c.1911) by George Marage (a compression of lectures given at the Sorbonne 1904–​1911). See Katherine Bergeron Voice Lessons, French Mélodie in the Belle Epoque (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 109. 26. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 171. 27. This aspect of speech and language, although a central component of poetry, does not begin to be theorised until the work of Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous. More recently is has become the object of scientific enquiry into language acquisition in infants. 28. Simon Trezise, Debussy: La mer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 39. 29. ‘In the third of the Nocturnes, “Sirènes”, the repeated trumpet call is unmistakably related to the one at the beginning of La Mer, where it is also repeated in the course of the work. (In the same way the cor anglais motive in “Nuages” is very close to the trumpet motive in ‘Sirènes’).’ Pierre Boulez, ‘Debussy: Orchestral Works’, in Orientations, 321. The trumpet figure Boulez refers to appears at Fig.10 (b. 110) of ‘Sirènes’. The cor anglais has a version of the same figure in Jeux de Vagues at Fig.16 (b. 9) and, as Boulez points out, it also appears in the cor anglais in b. 5 of Nuages. 30. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 73. He makes a further comparison between the aquatic realm of Sirènes and the aerial realm of Nuages. 31. The points of contact include not just specific moments of motivic recall but also close echoes of tonality, timbre, texture, atmosphere, and musical ‘topic’. Mark DeVoto, for example, suggests that the opening B major tonality of La mer ‘is an aural image, a psychological holdover from Sirènes, Debussy’s most recently-​composed orchestral work before La mer, and next to La mer the most oceanic of his compositions’. Mark DeVoto, Debussy and the Veil of Tonality. Essays on his Music (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2004), 147. 32. ‘The music of Debussy has always been listening to the sirens and to the fairy Ondine: it is Roussalka, the seduction of rivers and lakes, which draws men into the mortal deep’. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 71.

320 Notes 33. See, for example, his discussion of ‘that divine quarter of an hour which is the Ballade in F♯ by Gabriel Fauré’. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le Je-​nes-​sai-​quoi et le Presque Rien. 1. La manière et l’occasion (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980), 53. 34. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 170. 35. The term ‘New Vocality’ comes from a 1966 essay by Cathy Berberian whose work with key composers of the avant-​garde, most notably Luciano Berio, is exemplary of this expansion of vocal performance. For a study of her life and work and for a translation of ‘La nuova vocalità’, see Pamela Karantonis, Francesca Placanica, Anne Sivuoja-​Kauppala, Peter Verstraete, eds, Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality (London: Routledge, 2016). 36. Jankélévitch, Le Je-​ne-​sais-​quoi, 96. The reference is to Rimsky Korsakov’s opera, The Legend of the City of the Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya (1905). 37. Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sung Birds. Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007), 254. 38. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 132. 39. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 15. 40. Vladimir Jankélévitch, tr. Carolyn Abbate, Music and the Ineffable (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 3–​4. 41. George Steiner, Real Presences (London: Faber, 1989), 197–​98. 42. Steiner, Real Presences, 197–​98. 43. Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Die Insel der Sirena’ is from Part II of the Neue Gedichte (1907–​8) and thus written within a decade of Debussy ‘Sirènes’ and La mer. 44. Cavarero, For More than One Voice,  33–​35. 45. Laura Odello, ‘Waiting for the Death Knell:  Speaking of Music (So to Speak)’, in Keith Chapin and Andrew H. Clark, ed., Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 39–​48, 41. 46. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 49. 47. Jacques Rancière, tr. Steven Corcoran, Mallarmé. The Politics of the Siren (London: Continuum, 2011), 4. 48. Rancière, Mallarmé. 12. 49. Roger Pearson, Unfolding Mallarmé:  The Development of a Poetic Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 226. 50. Pearson, Unfolding Mallarmé, 229. 51. Pearson, Unfolding Mallarmé, 274. Pearson notes (275, n.7) that the phrase ‘mise en abyme’ was first used as a term of literary self-​reflexivity by André Gide in 1893. 52. Malcolm Bowie suggests that Un coup de dés ‘may be thought of as an amplification’ of the ‘sea-​sonnet’, ‘A la nu accablante tu’. ‘Sea and structure in fin-​de-​siècle France: Mallarmé and Debussy’, European Review 8, no. 1, (2000), 87–​94. 53. Michel Serres later developed the same metaphor of language as a ship. Language, he writes, ‘protects like the belly of the ship which separates us from the cold of the sea.’ Les cinq sens, 188. 54. Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? And Essays on Art, tr. Aylmer Maude (Oxford, 1930), 167. Cited in Stéphane Mallarmé, tr. E.  H.  and A. M. Blackmore, Collected Poems and Other Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 257.

Notes  321 55. Stefan Hertmans, ‘A hole in speech’, in Bart Verschaffel and Mark Verminck ed., Wordlessness (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993), 29 and 27. 56. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 97. 57. Messiaen was perhaps thinking about Debussy when he wrote of the seventh movement of the Turangalîla Symphony that it declines towards the depths, to monstrous creatures, and ‘the unspeakable, indescribable depth of the torture pit, in Edgar Allan Poe’s celebrated story The Pit and the Pendulum.’ CD liner note, tr. Paul Griffiths in Messiaen: Turangalîla-​Symphonie. Orchestre de l’Opéra Bastille, cond. Myung-​Whun Chung. Deutsche Gramophon 431 781-​82 (1991), 14. 58. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 44. 59. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 278. 60. McCombie, Mallarmé and Debussy, 119. 61. Malcolm Bowie, ‘Sea and Structure in Fin-​de-​siècle France: Mallarmé and Debussy’, European Review 8, no. 1 (2000), 87–​94, 87. Cf. Rimbaud in Le bateau ivre (1871): ‘the poet-​boat travels through the ocean as though an inexhaustible plurality of worlds, but as he presses forward he faces the constant threat of self-​loss and death’. See Bowie, 89. 62. See Howat’s ‘En route for L’isle joyeuse:  The Restoration of a Triptych’, in Cahiers Debussy 19 (1995), 37–​52. 63. Trezise, La mer, 9. 64. David Code, ‘The Song Triptych: Reflections on a Debussyan Genre,’ Scottish Music Review, 3 (2013), 1–​40, 16. 65. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le Je-​ne-​sais-​quoi et le Presque-​rien. Vol 1.  La manière et l’occasion (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980), 93. 66. Cited by James R. Briscoe in ‘Debussy’s Earliest Songs’, College Music Symposium 24, no. 2 (1984), 81–​95, 87. 67. Roger Nichols translates the key phrase as ‘drowning tonality’, in The Life of Debussy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 58. 68. Thomas Bösche hears the opening of Répons in relation to ‘Jeux de vagues’ from Debussy’s La mer, and the start of the 1st Improvisation of Boulez’s Pli selon pli, as a continuation of the harp figures from Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faun. See ‘ “. . . Des résonances obstinément myterieuses . . .”. Claude Debussy et Pierre Boulez ou le portrait des compositeurs en Roderick Usher’, in Maxime Joos, ed., Claude Debussy: Jeux de formes (Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2004), 145–​55, 146 and 150. 69. Peter O’Hagan, Pierre Boulez and the Piano:  A Study in Style and Technique (London: Routledge, 2017), 189. 70. Jacques Scherer, Le ‘Livre’ de Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1957). 71. Roger Pearson, Unfolding Mallarmé:  The Development of a Poetic Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 247. 72. The Sonata was first performed in 1958, published in two movements in 1963, and a fragment of another in 1967. See Peter O’Hagan, Pierre Boulez and the Piano, 185–​240. 73. See Pierre Boulez, Orientations, 150–​51. Boulez relates this to the plan of an unknown town in Michel Butor’s 1956 novel L’Emploi du temps.

322 Notes 74. Pierre Boulez, ed. Jean-​Jacques Nattiez and Sophie Galaise, Points de repère II: Regards sur autrui (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2005), 360.

Chapter 2 1. Elliott Antokoletz, Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bartók. Trauma, Gender, and the Unfolding of the Unconscious (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), ix and 6. 2. ‘Mélisande et un soufflé, un duvet, une apparition disparaissante’. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère de l’instant (Paris: Plon, 1976), 233. 3. Katharine Bergeron, ‘Mélisande’s Hair, or the Trouble in Allemonde:  A Postmodern Allegory at the Opéra-​Comique’, in Mary Ann Smart, ed., Siren Songs. Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 160–​85. 4. Jann Pasler, ‘Mélisande’s Charm and the Truth of Her Music’, in Rethinking Debussy, ed. Elliott Antokoletz and Marianne Wheeldon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 55–​75, 70. 5. Carolyn Abbate, ‘Debussy’s Phantom Sounds’, in In Search of Opera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 145–​84, 176. 6. I am indebted to Katherine Bergeron’s exploration of this idea in Voice Lessons, French Mélodie in the Belle Époque (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 7. Carlo Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2001). 8. Peter Szendy, Tristan Murail (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 138. 9. Conversation with Ernest Guiraud in October 1889, as recorded by Maurice Emmanuel. Cited in Robert Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 49. 10. Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre, 49. 11. Jean-​Francois Gautier, Claude Debussy: La musique et le mouvant (Arles: Actes Sud, 1997), 45. 12. ‘Est-​ce que c’est toujours comme cela? Rien de plus? . . . Il n’y a rien . . . Pas de musique’. See ‘Richard Strauss et Romain Rolland, Correspondance et Fragments de Journal’, Cahiers Romain Rolland no. 3 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1951), 159–​60. Pierre Boulez doubts it was said so brutally. See Boulez, ‘Preface’, in Regards sur Debussy, ed. Myriam Chimènes and Alexandra Laederich (Paris: Fayard, 2013), 9–​15. 13. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, tr. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (London: Sheed and Ward, 1987), 188. 14. Edmond Stoullig, writing in Le monde artiste. See Léon Vallas, Claude Debussy et son temps (Paris, 1958), 393–​94. Cited in Roger Nicholls, The Life of Debussy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 144. 15. ‘J’ai passé des journées à la poursuite de ce “rien” dont elle est faite’. Letter to Ernest Chausson, January 1894. Claude Debussy, ed. François Lesure and Denis Herlin, Correspondance (1872–​1918), (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 189.

Notes  323 16. Maurice Maeterlinck, ‘Silence’, in The Treasure of the Humble, tr. Alfred Sutro (London, George Allen, 1897). 17. Maeterlinck, ‘Silence’, 19. 18. Patrick M. McGuinness, Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 157. 19. McGuinness, Maurice Maeterlinck, 247. 20. Jacques Derrida, tr. Alan Bass, Writing and Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 8. 21. Mallarmé put it thus: ‘Ce sont ces blancs qui me donnent le plus de mal! Ils ont la valeur des silences en musique. Ce sont eux qui créent le rêve, l’ineffable . . .’. Reported by M. de Waleffe, Memoires, cited in Suzanne Bernard, Mallarmé et la musique (Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1959), 40. 22. McGuinness, Maurice Maeterlinck, 249. 23. McGuinness, Maurice Maeterlinck, 154–​55. 24. McGuinness, Maurice Maeterlinck, 253. 25. Chapter 2 of Jankélévitch’s book on Debussy is titled ‘La descente dans les souterrains’. The title of a single scene in Pelléas et Mélisande here becomes the starting point for his exploration of what he calls ‘the Debussyan obsession with the abyss’. Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère, 44. 26. A rare exception is Nicky Losseff and Jenny Doctor, eds, Silence, Music, Silent Music (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007). 27. Debussy made a rare change to Maeterlinck’s text here. The original is ‘Je les tiens dans les mains, je la touche des levres . . .’. 28. Carolyn Abbate discusses Pelléas’s rhapsodic voice as it appears in the later love scene (4.iv). See ‘Debussy’s Phantom Sounds’, in In Search of Opera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 176ff. 29. Abbate, ‘Debussy’s Phantom Sounds’, 177. 30. Cited in Kenneth Clarke, The Romantic Rebellion:  Romantic versus Classic Art (London: Faber, 1976), 259. 31. See Christopher Morris, Reading Opera Between the Lines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 32. Extra bars were required for the interludes in Acts 1, 2, and 4. These were originally very short (between 10 and 19 bars); the expansions resulted in increases of between 15 and 45 bars each. See Roger Nichols and Richard Langham Smith, Claude Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 53. 33. Letter to Reynaldo Hahn (4 March 1911). Cited in Jean-​Yves Tadié, ‘Proust et Debussy’, in Myriam Chimenes and Alexandra Laederich, Regards sur Debussy (Paris: Fayard, 2013), 111–​18, 112. 34. Act 1.ii, Rehearsal Figure 26. 35. First published in 1950, Debussy et le mystère de l’instant was one of a planned series of seven books on music entitled collectively ‘De la musique au silence’, reversing the common-​sense way in which music has habitually been thought.

324 Notes 36. James H. Rubin, Manet’s Silence and the Poetics of Bouquets (London:  Reaktion, 1994),  18–​19. 37. The poem Sainte is one of Mallamé’s most explicit poems on the relation of words and music. Originally titled Sainte Cécile jouant sur l’aile d’un chérubin, the patron saint of music here becomes, in the resonant last line of the poem, ‘musicienne du silence’. Written in 1865 but not published until 1883, it was set by Ravel in one of his earliest song settings in 1896. 38. Arthur Hacker’s painting, Musicienne du silence (1900) is very much in the pre-​ Raphaelite tradition –​one of several themes he painted that come close to Debussy’s artistic world (including Syrinx). He was a close contemporary of Debussy’s (1858–​ 1919) and studied in Paris at the Atelier Bonnat. 39. ‘La musique est le silence des paroles; tout comme la poésie est le silence de la prose. La musique, présence sonore, remplit le silence, et pourtant la musique est elle-​même une manière de silence . . . et de même il faut faire de la musique pour obtenir le silence.’ Carolyn Abbate, in ‘Debussy’s Phantom Sounds’, quotes the first line of this extract from Jankélévitch’s Music and the Ineffable, but it is the second that is key to my argument here. 40. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Ballets’, in Mallarmé in Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: New Directions, 2001), 111. 41. Mallarmé, ‘Ballets’, 112. 42. Mallarmé, ‘Ballets’, 113. 43. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Sketched in the Theatre’, in Mallarmé in Prose, ed. Caws, 104. 44. Mallarmé, ‘Ballets’, 108. 45. Mallarmé, ‘Ballets’, 109. 46. Les deux pigeons, choreographed by Louis Mérante to music by André Messager, was premiered in Paris in 1886. 47. Mallarmé, ‘Ballets’, 110. 48. Mallarmé’s review appeared in the London press, in the National Observer of July, 1893. See Nichols and Langham Smith, Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande, 4. 49. Stefan Hertmans, ‘A Hole in Speech’, in Wordlessness, ed. Bart Verschaffel and Mark Verminck (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993), 25–​35, 25. 50. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, eds, Languages of the Unsayable. The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), xi–​xii. 51. Budick and Iser, Languages of the Unsayable, xiii. 52. Budick and Iser, Languages of the Unsayable, xiv. 53. Budick and Iser, Languages of the Unsayable, xvii. 54. Jacques Derrida, tr. Ken Frieden, ‘How to Avoid Speaking:  Denials’, in Languages of the Unsayable, ed. Budick and Iser, 5. Pierre Boulez quotes Novalis to a similar end: ‘Speaking for the sake of speaking is the formula for deliverance’. See ‘Sound, Word, Synthesis’, in Pierre Boulez, ed. Jean-​Jacques Nattiez, tr. Martin Cooper, Orientations (London: Faber, 1986), 177–​82, 182. 55. Martin Heidegger, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 208.

Notes  325 56. For Heidegger, merely ‘gossiping and passing the word along’ is ‘idle talk’  –​essentially groundless in relation to Being itself. Thus: ‘Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing one’s own.’ Being and Time, 213. 57. Jean-​Luc Nancy, tr. Richard A. Rand, Corpus (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 118. 58. Nancy, Corpus, 128. 59. Nancy, Corpus, 152. 60. T. S. Eliot, ‘Preludes’, in Collected Poems, 1909–​1962 (London: Faber, 1980), 25.

Chapter 3 1. Debussy’s Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé were composed at the same time as Ravel’s work of the same title, both composers presumably responding to the publication of Mallarmé’s Oeuvres complètes in 1913. It is striking that, in selecting just three poems each, the two composers chose two in common (Soupir and Éventail). 2. Translation from E. H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore, Stéphane Mallarmé: Collected Poems and Other Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 3. I am by no means the first to point out many of the features of this song. See Arthur B. Wenk, Claude Debussy and the Poets (Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 1976), 243–​ 71, and, for an excellent comparative analysis of Debussy’s musical response to the syntactical and semantic qualities of Mallarmé’s Soupir and Apparition, see Marie Rolf, ‘Semantic and Structural Issues in Debussy’s Mallarmé Songs’, in Debussy Studies, ed. Richard Langham Smith (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1997), 179–​200. Marianne Wheeldon analyses ‘Soupir’ in relation to a Boulezian idea of permutational form in ‘Debussy’s “Soupir”: An Experiment in Permutational Analysis’, Perspectives of New Music 38, no. 2 (2000), 134–​60. Elizabeth McCombie discusses Debussy’s settings of ‘Soupir’ and ‘Éventail’ in Chapter 4 of Mallarmé and Debussy: Unheard Music, Unseen Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). 4. Marie Rolf traces out this rising and falling arch-​form in a diagram. See Figure 8.4 in Rolf, ‘Semantic and Structural Issues in Debussy’s Mallarmé Songs’, 194. 5. Rolf reads a harmonic symmetry in the A♭ to E move in the first half of the song being mirrored by the symmetrical motion from A♭ to C in the second half of the piece. The resulting augmented triad (symmetrical in itself) also gives the pitches for the setting of ‘Fidèle’ in b. 15. See Rolf, ‘Semantic and Structural Issues in Debussy’s Mallarmé Songs’, 198. 6. ‘Debussy nous fait sentir surtout l’effondrement de ces châteaux liquides. Le jet d’eau debussyste s’élance et se tord, hésite, oscille, vacille et finalement retombe sans avoir touché son but.’ Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère de l’instant (Paris: Plon, 1976), 78. 7. Wenk, Claude Debussy and the Poets, 92. 8. ‘une espèce de glissement vers le silence et le non-​être’. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 79.

326 Notes 9. McCombie, in her discussion of the Trois poèmes, underlines this quality of non-​ equivalence, insisting that poem and music have ‘fundamentally different frameworks of organization’. See McCombie, Mallarmé and Debussy, 176. 10. Wenk, for example, suggests that ‘Debussy’s setting of this poem may be regarded as an attempt to sort out the various phrases and clauses that complicate its grammatical structure’. See Claude Debussy and the Poets, 249. Rolf similarly shows how Debussy uses rhythm and vocal tessitura to separate out principal and dependent clauses of the poem. See ‘Semantic and Structural Issues in Debussy’s Mallarmé Songs,’ 196. 11. From Stéphane Mallarmé ‘The Impressionists and Edouard Manet’, published in English in Athenaeum, March 1876 and reproduced in James H. Rubin, Manet’s Silence and the Poetics of Bouquets (London: Reaktion, 1994), 235–​6 (my emphasis). 12. The lecture was given at Oxford University and repeated in Cambridge. For a translation by Rosemary Lloyd, see Mary Ann Caws, ed., Mallarmé in Prose (New York: New Directions, 2001), 31–​45. 13. Caws (ed.), Mallarmé in Prose, 34 and 37–​38. 14. Caws (ed.), Mallarmé in Prose, 36 and 44. 15. Caws (ed.), Mallarmé in Prose, 38. 16. Peter Szendy, ed., Tristan Murail (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 48. 17. Szendy ,ed., Tristan Murail, 133. 18. Anni Oskala, ‘Dreams about Music, Music about Dreams’, in Tim Howell, Jon Hargreaves and Michael Rofe, Kaija Saariaho:  Visions, Narratives, Dialogues (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 41–​60. 19. Two versions of the piece exist –​one for four singers and live electronics (1991), another for a cappella singers in which the voices imitate the electronic transformations of the earlier version (1996). The instructions to the performers in the later version set out a kind of typology of the plural modes of the voice Saariaho deploys between speaking and singing. 20. In the collected works the poem has the title Autre Éventail to distinguish it from the poem dedicated to Mallarmé’s wife from 1890. The opening of the poem is a reference to Geneviève’s pet name, ‘La Rêveuse’ (the dreamer). Debussy dedicated his Trois Poèmes ‘to the memory of Stéphane Mallarmé and in most respectful homage to Madame E. Bonniot (née G. Mallarmé).’ For a detailed discussion of the close relation between the poem and the particular fan on which it was inscribed, see Roger Pearson, Mallarmé and Circumstance:  The Translation of Silence (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2004), 199–​202. 21. Two substantial fan poems date from 1890 –​one a gift to his wife Marie, which was published, and the other to his mistress Mery Laurent, which was not. 22. Translation from E. H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore, Stéphane Mallarmé: Collected Poems and Other Verse. 23. ‘Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer’ is the opening line of Mallarmé’s poem. 24. Jacques Derrida, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 65. 25. Mallarmé’s other published Éventail, the one ‘pour Madame Mallarmé’ from 1890, is also a study in the aerial fragility of what the fan/​poem makes appear by means of its

Notes  327 delicate hinge between two worlds. It closes with an image of the fan, perfectly poised between the two hands of its holder like Rodin’s Le secret: ‘Toujours tel il apparaisse /​ Entre tes mains sans paresse.’ But this appearance of the fan/​poem (or perhaps, what the fan/​poem makes appear) is here in the subjunctive –​expressing the sense that appearance might take place. 26. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 69. 27. For a discussion of the role of music in Proust, see Jean-​Jacques Nattiez, tr. Derrick Puffett, Proust as Musician (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 28. ‘la flame de l’instant ne peut jaillir qu’à travers les dechirures et fractures du discours: elle a donc besoin du silence pour apparaître’. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 250. The verb ‘jaillir’, which has strong sexual overtones, is the same word Mallarmé uses in the third stanza of Éventail to describe the quivering of the air in the moment of vertige. 29. Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, tr. Alphonso Lingis, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 64. 30. Lines 3–​4 are: ‘Comme furtive d’elle et visible je sens /​Que se dévêt pli selon pli la pierre veuve’ (As, furtively and visibly, I feel the widowed stone let fall her veils, fold on fold). 31. Mallarmé’s poem dates from 1893, the same year he wrote his review of the dancer Loïe Fuller and the folds of her swirling veils (see Chapter 8). It was also the year in which Oscar Wilde’s Salome was published (in French), surely the most famous dancing divestment of veils. One of Wilde’s influences was Mallarmé’s Hérodiade. Written in 1865, with only a fragment published in 1871, it was an unfinished project to which he returned throughout his life. 32. Boulez, Orientations, 175. 33. See Pearson, Mallarmé and Circumstance, 147. Theodore de Banville’s Petite Traité de Poésie Française (1872) stipulates this as the correct rhyme scheme for a Petrarchan sonnet. Mallarmé wrote 21 in this form between 1872 and 1892. 34. Pearson, Mallarmé and Circumstance, 149. 35. Pearson points out that the German terms ‘Aufgesang’ and ‘Abgesang’ (upsong and downsong) ‘are eloquent in conveying the principal effect of this combination, an effect which Mallarmé also achieves economically in his “non-​sonnet” “Soupir” ’. Mallarmé and Circumstance, 149, n.17. 36. Boulez, Orientations, 179–​80. 37. Cited in Mary Breatnach, Boulez and Mallarmé:  A Study in Poetic Influence (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 9. 38. See Preface to the musical score: Boulez, Le marteau sans maître (Vienna: Universal, 1957), v. 39. Roger Pearson suggests a link between ‘Le vierge’ and ‘Une dentelle’. Although they are drawn from two different sets, these may have been developed together and are ‘born of the same thematic preoccupations and lexical predilections’. Unfolding Mallarmé. The Development of a Poetic Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 200–​01. 40. See Tim Ingold, Lines (Abingdon:  Routledge, 2016), 54. The term ‘punto in aria’ comes from a tradition of Venetian lacemaking that shares the same techniques as local fishermen used to make their nets.

328 Notes 41. Pearson, Mallarmé and Circumstance, 21. 42. These are the same writers on whose work Julia Kristeva focuses in La révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974). 43. For a discussion of this idea, and further discussion of the pleat and the fold, see Mary Ann Caws, The Presence of René Char (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1976), 8. 44. René Char, Le poème pulvérisé (1947) 45. Mallarmé described his poem as ‘a Louis XV style sonnet’, a knowing play with past styles and poetic language in the tradition of Verlaine’s Fêtes Galantes (1869). Debussy’s treatment similarly deploys archaic musical elements to frame this song as a play with historical forms of language. 46. As Derrida asserts in ‘The Double Session’, whenever ‘Mallarmé was pretending to describe “something”, he was in addition describing the operation of writing.’ Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson (London:  Bloomsbury, 2013), 260. 47. Katherine Bergeron, Voice Lessons:  French Mélodie in the Belle Époque (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 181. 48. Bergeron, Voice Lessons, viii. 49. The phrase is used by Debussy as a performance direction in the Chansons de Bilitis. 50. Bergeron, Voice Lessons, 176. 51. Bergeron, Voice Lessons, 128. 52. ‘Something more vague instead, something lighter /​Dissolving in air, weightless as air’ is the translation by Martin Sorrell in Paul Verlaine. Selected Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 123. 53. Gustave Flaubert, letter of January 16, 1852, to Louise Colet in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 2 vols, ed. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), I:154. 54. Paul Valéry, tr. Denise Folliot, ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’, in Paul Valéry:  An Anthology, ed. James R. Lawler (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1956), 158–​59. 55. Susan Youens, ‘A Gradual Diminuendo: Debussy and the “Trois Ballades de François Villon”,’ in Perspectives on Music, ed. Dave Oliphant and Thomas Zigal (Austin, TX: The University of Texas, 1985), 69–​99, 70. 56. The original appears in Musica 101–​02 (February–​March 1911), 38–​40, 58–​60. Cited by Youens, ‘A Gradual Diminuendo’, 80. 57. Lawrence Kramer, Franz Schubert:  Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11. 58. Elizabeth McCombie, Mallarmé and Debussy:  Unheard Music, Unseen Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), xiii. 59. Peter Dayan, ‘Nature, Music, and Meaning in Debussy’s Writings’, 19th-​Century Music 28, no. 3 (2005), 214–​29, 228. 60. Claude Debussy, ‘The Orientation of Music’, Musica (October, 1902), in Claude Debussy, ed. Francois Lesure, tr. Richard Langham Smith, Debussy on Music (London: Secker and Warburg, 1977), 85.

Notes  329 61. David J. Code, ‘Hearing Debussy Reading Mallarmé:  Music après Wagner in the Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faune’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 54, no. 3 (2001), 493–​554. 62. Abbate, ‘Debussy’s Phantom Sounds’, 164. 63. As Arthur Wenk points out, the waltz was not by Weber but by Reissiger. Claude Debussy and the Poets, 13. 64. I  have explored this topic at length in Julian Johnson, ‘Present Absence:  Debussy, Song, and the Art of (Dis)appearing’, 19th-​Century Music 40, no. 3 (2017), 239–​56. 65. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 249 and 243. 66. See Robert Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1982). 67. As Code outlines, Mallarmé failed with his first version to find the balance he sought between theatre and poetry and set it aside, returning to it in the 1870s, revising one of the Faun’s monologues as the Improvisation d’un faune (1875). When this was rejected for publication it was revised again and published independently as L’après-​ midi d’un faune in 1876. Mallarmé and Debussy first conceived their collaboration as a theatre piece to be titled Prélude, interludes et paraphrase finale pour “L’Après-​midi d’un faune”. See Code, ‘Hearing Debussy Reading Mallarmé’, 504. 68. See Wenk, Claude Debussy and the Poets,  17–​18. 69. See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). 70. ‘grace à la presence de l’absence, qui est absence presente, presence absente, presence musicienne, presence multi-presente, la presence de la presence devient elle-​même evasive; le constat de presence devient entrevision; la prose se fait poésie’. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 191. The idea is simply illustrated by the metaphor of scent. The invisible trace of a departed presence, scent, like sound, insists on presence with an intensity that often exceeds the visual (witness Proust), and insists on the powerful reality of the non-​visual as a component of experience.

Chapter 4 1. Translation from E. H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore, Stéphane Mallarmé: Collected Poems and Other Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 2. Marie Rolf points out the ‘abruptness’ of this key line of poetic text, separated from the rest of the poem visually and rhythmically by a hyphen, but also sonically by means of its strong plosive consonants that ‘underscore the physicality of the memory’ in contrast to the liquid consonants of the poem’s ‘mellifluous opening’. ‘Semantic and Structural Issues in Debussy’s Mallarmé Songs’, in Debussy Studies, ed. Richard Langham Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 179–​200, 183. 3. The setting of the last phrase, ‘d’étoiles parfumées’, traces out a chord of E𝄫 major, as ghost of the bright D major vision within the G♭ tonality (see bb. 55–​57). 4. Marie-​ Blanche Vasnier (1848–​ 1923) was the wife of a civil servant, Eugène-​ Henri Vasnier. Debussy met her around 1880 and befriended her husband soon

330 Notes after. Debussy was a regular visitor to their home in Paris and also at Ville d’Auray in southern Brittany. It was while staying there that he wrote ‘Apparition’ (dated 8 February 1884). See Margaret C. Cobb, The Poetic Debussy. A Collection of His Song Texts and Selected Letters (Boston: Northwestern University Press, 1982), xvii. 5. The title page bore the dedication: ‘À Madame Vasnier. Ces chansons qui n’ont jamais vécu que par elle, et qui perdront leur grace charmeresse, si jamais plus elles ne passent par sa bouche de fée mélodieuse. L’auteur éternellement reconnaissant. ACD.’ See Cobb, The Poetic Debussy, xviii. The so-​called ‘Vasnier songbook’ does not include ‘Apparition’, despite its being written a year earlier. It was published posthumously in 1926 in La Revue Musicale and later issued as one of the Quatre Chansons de Jeunesse (Editions Joberts, 1969). 6. Marie Rolf points out that ‘Apparition’ and ‘Soupir’ are similar in a number of ways: they are both in two parts and both written in alexandrine verse and rhymed couplets. But, she adds, Soupir ‘presents complexities both as a poem and as a song that go far beyond the interpretative challenges posed by the earlier work’, ‘Semantic and Structural Issues in Debussy’s Mallarmé Songs’, 180, 192. There are a number of material points of contact: the piano accompaniment at the start of ‘Apparition’, with its ostinato octave Bs, anticipates the same device in ‘Soupir’ (bb. 13–​17); the F to D♭ movement in ‘Apparition’ (bb. 4–​5) anticipates the C to A♭ movement in ‘Soupir’ (bb. 15–​16); the earlier song is marked ‘reveusement’ whereas the later one no longer states what is self-​evident. 7. Mallarmé’s Apparition dates from 1863, the same period in which he wrote both Soupir and Placet futile, but it was not published until 1883 when Paul Verlaine included it in his essay on Mallarmé published in the journal Lutèce (24–​30 November, 1883, 2). This was only the second of Mallarmé’s poems to be published. 8. Cobb discusses it thus: ‘A small notebook entitled “Musical Notes,” whose location is now unknown, contains several pages of sketches for a new version of this song. The only words given are those of lines 1, 3, 4, and 9. Because this notebook also contains sketches for Soupir (the first of the Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé) and for La Boîte à joujoux, both composed in 1913, the sketches for Apparition can be presumed to have also been made at the same time. This supposition is borne out by quotations from this song in two letters of this period.’ See Cobb, The Poetic Debussy, 75 and 220. Rolf cites a description of this notebook found under item 182, on pp. 34–​35, in Georges Andrieux, Catalogue du vente de livres précieux anciens, romantiques, modernes, manuscrits, documents et lettres autographes: Collection Jules Huret [1–​154] et collection Claude Debussy [174–​224], sold between 30 November and 8 December 1933. See Rolf, ‘Semantic and structural issues in Debussy’s Mallarmé Songs’, 191. 9. ‘Je voudrais exprimer la genèse lente et souffrante des êtres et des choses dans la nature, puis l’épanouissement ascendant et se terminant par une éclatante joie de renaître à une vie nouvelle en quelque sorte.’ Debussy (1887) cited in Jean Barraqué, Debussy (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962), 64. 10. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was just 18 when he wrote the poem in 1847. First published in 1850, and revised in 1856, it was republished in 1870 and 1873. Rossetti used the same title for a painting of 1875–​78.

Notes  331 11. See ‘ “. . . That Dangerous Supplement . . .”,’ in Jacques Derrida, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 141–​64. 12. Brian Hart suggests that La mer might be understood in relation to the contemporary French ‘message symphony’ exemplified in works from the early 1900s by Vincent d’Indy, Guy Ropartz, Charles Tournemire, Théodore Dubois, Charles-​ Marie Widor. See ‘The Symphony in Debussy’s World. A Context for his views on the genre and early interpretations of La Mer’, in Debussy and His World, ed. Jane F. Fulcher (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 181–​201. Simon Trezise similarly points to a broader context for La mer in a contemporary genre of sea symphonies. He points to Victorin de Jonciéres’s four-​movement symphony (La mer) from 1881 and Paul Gibson’s cyclic orchestral work La mer of 1892, subtitled ‘symphonic sketches’. Vincent D’Indy’s second symphony (1902–​3) is a cyclic work in four movements, while his Jour d’été à la montagne (1905) is a ‘symphonic triptych’ clearly divided by three moments of the day –​sunrise, daytime, evening. See Simon Trezise, Debussy: La mer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 33–​35. 13. Mark DeVoto, Debussy and the Veil of Tonality:  Essays on His Music (New  York: Pendragon Press, 2004), 145. 14. Roger Nichols, The Life of Debussy (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1998), 64. 15. The tension between the two is discussed in detail in Chapter 6. 16. In the production by Finnish National Opera (2004), the set designs by George Tsypin accentuates the distance between the two principal characters by placing them in towers separated by a flooded stage, an effect that underlines the link to Pelléas et Mélisande. 17. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le Je-​ne-​sais-​quoi et le Presque-​rien. Vol 1.  La manière et l’occasion (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980), 18. 18. Jankélévitch, Le Je-​ne-​sais-​quoi, 32. 19. Jankélévitch, Le Je-​ne-​sais-​quoi, 35 (‘c’est l’avènement-​ à-​ l’autre qui est la seule substance’). 20. Jean-​Luc Nancy, tr. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 14. A wonderful, if surprising embodiment of this idea, is found in the dome of Florence cathedral. Standing beneath it, one follows the representation of earthly life rising in circles through to the heavenly realm to finally reach the apex of the dome where representation gives way to light and the open sky seen through the lantern that crowns the dome. Representation literally gives way to the ‘nothing’ that is the light flooding through the lantern. 21. Martin Seel, tr. John Farrell, Aesthetics of Appearing (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2005), 4. German original, Ästhetik des Erscheinens, 2000. 22. Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, 15. 23. Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, 54. 24. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 262–​63. 25. Jacques Derrida, tr. Leonard Lawlor, Voice and Phenomenon (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 51.

332 Notes 26. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 191. 27. My discussion of these songs here abbreviates material found in Julian Johnson, ‘Present absence: Debussy, song, and the art of (dis)appearing’, in 19th-​Century Music 40, no. 3 (2017), 239–​56. 28. See James R. Briscoe, Songs of Claude Debussy, vol. I  (New  York:  Hal Leonard, 1993),  12–​17. 29. See Robert Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1982), 204–​16. Though Debussy never wrote an opera-​ballet based on Verlaine, Fauré did. His Masques et Bergamasques, Op. 112, comprised of movements of previously composed music, was first performed in 1919. 30. See Marianne Wheeldon, Debussy’s Late Style (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2009), 153, n.43. 31. Carolyn Abbate, ‘Debussy’s Phantom Sounds’, in In Search of Opera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 145–​84; at 162–​3. 32. Abbate, ‘Debussy’s Phantom Sounds’, 168. 33. One source, from 1891, has the order ‘En sourdine’, ‘Clair de lune,’ ‘Fantoches,’ but the order had changed by the time they were published. See Briscoe, Songs of Claude Debussy, 11. 34. See Roger Nichols, ‘Debussy’s Two Setting of “Clair de Lune” ’, in Music and Letters 48, no. 3 (1967), 229–​35; Marie Rolf, ‘Debussy’s settings of Verlaine’s “En Sourdine” ’, in Perspectives on Music, ed. Dave Oliphant and Thomas Signal (Austin: University of Texas at Austin, 1985), 205–​33. 35. David Code, ‘The Song Triptych: Reflections on a Debussyan Genre’, Scottish Music Review 3 (2013), 1–​40, 16. 36. The relation between the two is discussed by Stephen Rumph in ‘Debussy’s Trois Chansons de Bilitis: Song, Opera, and the Death of the Subject,’ Journal of Musicology 12, no. 4 (1994), 484–​85 and 489. It should be clear that my own reading of these songs differs from Rumph’s view that, in these songs, ‘Debussy pronounced the death of the subject’ (490). 37. Murail has a piece that takes up the same idea. In Vues aériennes (1972) he explored the idea of four aspects of the same musical object seem from different angles and in different lights, rather like Monet’s series of paintings of the same object (such as Rouen Cathedral or haystacks) where the act and mode of appearing is more important than the object itself (or rather, the object dissolves into the infinite sums of its appearances which are not separable from the act of looking). 38. Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, tr. Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003), 181. 39. See Jann Pasler, ‘Debussy, “Jeux”: Playing with Time and Form’, 19th-​Century Music 6, no. 1 (1982), 60–​75. 40. Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon, 66. 41. Tracing this definitive tension at the heart of modernity is central to a number of recent studies, including Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2012), Charles Taylor, The Language Animal. The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press), and Julian Johnson,

Notes  333 Out of Time. Music and the Making of Modernity (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2015). 42. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 141. 43. Derrida, Of Grammatology, xvii. 44. Derrida, Of Grammatology, xvii. 45. The maid of Corinth tale and the origins of painting are found in Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 35, written in c.79AD. 46. David J. Code, ‘Hearing Debussy Reading Mallarmé:  Music après Wagner in the Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faune’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 54, no. 3 (2001), 493–​554, 533. 47. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘La Musique et les Lettres’, in Stéphane Mallarmé, ed. Bertrand Marchal, Igitur, Divagations, Un coup de dés (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 368–​89. In relation to the act of writing, Mallarme’s writes: ‘Son sortilège, à lui, si ce n’est libérer, hors d’une poignée de poussière ou réalité sans l’enclore, au livre, même comme texte, la dispersion volatile soit l’esprit, qui n’a que faire de rien outre la musicalité de tout’ (372) [‘What is its own magic, if it is not to set free, from a handful of dust or reality without enclosing it within the book, even in the form of a text –​a volatile dispersion –​the spirit, which has nothing to do with anything except for the musicality of everything?’] Tr. Rosemary Lloyd in Mary Ann Caws (ed.), Mallarmé in Prose (New York: New Directions, 2001), 34. 48. Jacques Derrida, tr. Alan Bass, Writing and Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 8. Derrida is talking here of the ‘proper object’ of the critic. 49. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 230. 50. This direction appears in the vocal score but not the full orchestral score. 51. ‘Le fuyard, dans sa fuite, poursuit au déla de l’horizon un mystère d’absence que la presence a delogé.’ Jankélévitch, Debussy, 59. 52. See Nichols, The Life of Debussy, 132. 53. Francesco Spampinato, Debussy, poète des eaux. Métaphorisation et corporéité dans l’expérience musicale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), 26. 54. Steven Rings, ‘Mystères limpides: Time and Transformation in Debussy’s Des Pas sur la neige’, 19th-​Century Music 43, no. 2 (2008), 178–​208, 184–​85. 55. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 152. 56. Daniel March ‘From the Air to the Earth:  Reading the Ashes’, in Kaija Saariaho: Visions, Narrative, Dialogues, ed. Tim Howell, Jon Hargreaves, and Michael Rofe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 15–​40, 17. 57. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 61.

Chapter 5 1. Arthur B. Wenk, Claude Debussy and the Poets (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 102–​03. 2. Wenk, Claude Debussy and the Poets, 108. Wenk similarly discusses the second of the Bilitis songs in terms of its reflective symmetries (190). For a detailed study see

334 Notes In-​Ryeong Choi-​Diel, ‘Parole et Musique dans “L’ombre des Arbres”:  Verlaine et Debussy’, Langue Française 110 (1996), 16–​34. 3. See Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 22ff. 4. Michel Foucault, ‘Different Spaces’, tr. Robert Hurely, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 2, ed. J. D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 1988), 175–​85, 178. French original: ‘Des espaces autres’, Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984), 46–​49. For a wider discussion, see Nicholas Reyland, ‘The Spaces of Dream: Lutosławski’s Modernist Heterotopias, Twentieth-​Century Music 12, no. 1 (2015),  37–​70. 5. Leonard Lawlor, ‘Introduction’, in Jacques Derrida, tr. Leonard Lawlor, Voice and Phenomenon (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), xxvii. 6. Roger Pearson points out that André Gide first used the phrase ‘mise en abyme’ as a term for literary reflexivity in 1893; see Lucien Dällenback, Le Récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme (Paris, 1977), 15. Cited in Pearson, Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) 275, n.7. 7. ‘Le monde lui-même que l’eau reflète n’est pas un autre monde, c’est notre monde à l’envers, duplicatum illusoire du monde à l’endroit. Le monde dans un miroir n’est pas le monde lui-même, mais son double et son image oneirique! Dans la mer immobile Debussy découvre un double inverse de ce monde, une cathédrale engloutie, une cité sous-​marine peut-être, comme la cité d’Ys.’ Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère de l’instant (Paris: Plon, 1976), 121. 8. See Steven Huebner, ‘Ravel’s Poetics. Literary Currents, Classical Tales’, in Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music, ed. Peter Kaminsky (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011), 9–​40, 31. 9. Huebner, ‘Ravel’s Poetics’, 32. 10. Huebner, ‘Ravel’s Poetics’, 32. 11. Katherine Bergeron draws out Ravel’s ironic take on this pervasive metaphor of French poetry, in his setting of ‘Le Cygne’ from Histoires naturelles (1906). Far from some serene figure on the mirror of the water, this swan (in a poem by Jules Renard) is merely digging for worms (a play on the French vers meaning both verse and worms). See Bergeron, Voice Lessons: French Mélodie in the Belle Époque (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 280–​94. 12. The link was often made during Debussy’s lifetime. See, for example, Camille Mauclair, ‘La peinture musicienne et la fusion des arts’, La Revue bleu, 10 (1902), 293–​303. 13. See 14. Saariaho often explores this technique in her instrumental music. See Taina Riikonen, ‘Stories from the Mouth:  Flautists, Bodily Presence and Intimacy in Saariaho’s Flute Music’, in Kaija Saariaho: Visions, Narratives, Dialogues, ed. Tim Howell, Jon Hargreaves and Michael Rofe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 63–​80. 15. Christopher Butler, Early Modernism:  Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900–​1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 27–​28.

Notes  335 16. Butler, Early Modernism, 28. 17. Butler, Early Modernism, 27. 18. In addition to further examples by Matisse, there are examples by Edouard Vuillard, Juan Gris, Pierre Bonnard, Raoul Dufy, and many others. 19. Monet painted in Cabourg too, though also further up the Normandy coast at Trouville and at Pourville, where Debussy also used to holiday. 20. See Julian Johnson, ‘Webern, Metaphysics and Musical Thresholds’, in Webern_​21, ed. Dominik Schweiger and Nikolaus Urbanek (Vienna: Böhlau, 2009), 73–​97. 21. Hugues Dufourt writes of spectral music that it is ‘the exploration of continuous transitions between domains traditionally understood as heterogeneous; it creates mixtures and works to cross the thresholds of perception.’ La musique spectrale. Une révolution épistémologique (Paris: Editions Delatour, 2014), 15. 22. Peter Szendy, ed., Tristan Murail (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 72. 23. Szendy, ed., Tristan Murail, 108. 24. Szendy, ed., Tristan Murail,  66–​67. 25. I  explore these in Julian Johnson, Webern and the Transformation of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 168–​84. 26. Risto Nieminen, CD Liner note (p. 4) to Kaija Saariaho: Du cristal . . . à la fumée (Ondine, 1992) ODE 804-​2. 27. Jean-​Luc Hervé, Dans le vertige de la durée. Vortex Temporum de Gérard Grisey (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 10. 28. Grisey’s own notes suggest these four songs are all meditations on death. The text for the third movement is taken from the ancient Greek poetess ‘Erinna’, ‘of whom one knows almost nothing’ –​rather like the case of Pierre Louÿs and the Chansons de Bilitis. See Timothy Sullivan (PhD diss., ‘Gérard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil: Spectral music on the threshold’, University of Michigan, 2008) for a study of the three major vocal works Grisey wrote in the last fifteen years of his life. 29. See ‘De l’aube a midi sur la mer’ (La mer, 1), bb. 122–​31. 30. In Mallarmé’s eclogue, the flute is quite literally the pan-​pipe of the faun –​a musical voice which he will later quit for speech. 31. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (London: Vintage, 2004). 32. Paul F. de Castro, ‘Nicolay Tcherepnin’s Narcisse and the aesthetic promise of self-​presence’, in Musical Receptions of Greek Antiquity:  From the Romantic Era to Modernism, ed. Katerina Levidou, Katy Romanou, and George Vlastos (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2016), 114–​35, 134. 33. In Webern these concerns become central tenets of his use of twelve-​tone music and it is precisely in the points of contact between Debussy and Webern that the two different traditions find their most substantive overlap. Boulez’s fascination with this pairing points to the same idea, as he underlines in his 1955 Darmstadt lecture ‘Claude Debussy et Anton Webern’. See Points de repère II:  Regards sur autrui, ed. Jean-​ Jacques Nattiez and Sophie Galaise (Paris:  Christian Bourgois, 2005). 34. See Jean-​Luc Nancy, tr. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).

336 Notes 35. As Paul Roberts underlines, part of the importance of the gamelan for Debussy was the way in which it led him to rethink the sonority of the piano: ‘Unlike Bartok, who exploits the percussive nature of the piano through rhythm and accents, articulated the moment the hammer hits the string, Debussy explores the resources created after the impact of the hammer, as the sounds are dying away.’ Paul Roberts, Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1996), 157. 36. Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice. Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, tr. Paul A. Kottman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 165. 37. Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 167. 38. Gaston Bachelard, L’eau et les rêves: Essai sur l’imagination de la matière (Paris: José Corti, 1941), 33–​34. 39. See Julian Johnson, ‘Webern, Metaphysics and Musical Thresholds’. Also ‘Schoenberg, Modernism and Metaphysics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg, ed. J. Auner and J. Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 108–​19. 40. Francesco Spampinato, Debussy, poète des eaux: Métaphorisation et corporéité dans l’expérience musicale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), 53. 41. Spampinato, Debussy, poète des eaux, 49. 42. ‘l’abîme mystique qui sépare le monde idéal du monde réel’. Suzanne Bernard, Mallarmé et la musique (Paris: Libraire Nizet, 1959), 34. 43. ‘transposer un fait de nature en sa presque disparition vibratoire’. ‘Crise de Vers’, cited in Bernard, Mallarmé et la musique, 40. 44. Jessica Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought:  Art, Literature, and Music after Merleau-​ Ponty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 92. 45. Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought, 93. 46. Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought, 101. 47. Merleau-​Ponty, Visible and Invisible, cited in Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought, 109. 48. Merleau-​Ponty ‘Notes du cours’, cited in Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought, 113. 49. Brian Kane, ‘Jean-​Luc Nancy and the Listening Subject’, in Contemporary Music Review 31, nos. 5–​6 (2012), 444.

Chapter 6 1. Debussy on Nuages, in Harry Halbreich and Edward Lockspeiser, Claude Debussy (Paris: Fayard, 1980, 670). 2. The performance at the BBC Proms was given by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ivan Volkov, with the Hornroh Modern Alphorn Quartet. I quote from reviews that appeared online: Curtis Rogers writing for Classical Source and Gavin Dixon writing for the Artsdesk. 3. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère de l’instant (Paris: Plon, 1976), 221. 4. Michel Serres, Les cinq sens (Paris: Pluriel, 2014), 138. 5. Jean-​Luc Nancy, tr. Jeffrey S. Librett, The Sense of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 131. 6. Matthieu Guillot, Dialogues avec l’audible:  La neige, la voix, présences sonores (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006).

Notes  337 7. Guillot, Dialogues avec l’audible, 10. 8. Guillot, Dialogues avec l’audible,  11–​12. 9. Guillot also explores Sofia Gudaidulina’s Jetzt immer Schnee (1993), Costin Miereanu’s Voyage d’Hiver II (1982–​85), Kaija Saariaho’s Lichtobogen (1986) and Neiges (1998), and Jakob Ullmann’s Schwarzer Sand/​Schnee (1991). Furrer’s interest continues in more recent works –​see intorno al bianco (2016) for clarinet and string quartet. 10. Guillot, Dialogues avec l’audible, 21. 11. Guillot, Dialogues avec l’audible, 25. 12. Guillot, Dialogues avec l’audible, 111. 13. Serres: ‘la voix nue des choses de l’univers’. Cited in Guillot, 114. 14. Guillot, Dialogues avec l’audible, 116. 15. Guillot, Dialogues avec l’audible, 123. 16. Guillot, Dialogues avec l’audible, 125. 17. Claude Debussy, ed. François Lesure, Monsieur Croche et autre écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1987),  45–​46. 18. Martin Seel, tr. John Farrell, Aesthetics of Appearing (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2005), 143. 19. Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, 144. 20. Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, 144. 21. Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, 146. 22. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage, 1997), 53. 23. The second movement of Vortex temporum opens out a space of both bells and birds, in which the regular tolling of ‘bell’ chords in piano to dissolve any sense of pulse or metre. See Jean-​Luc Hervé, Dans le vertige de la durée. Vortex Temporum de Gérard Grisey (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 52. 24. Graham Johnson sees Fauré’s relation to the poetry of Van Lerberghe as the divergent parallel to Debussy’s relation to Maeterlinck. In this poetry, Johnson suggests, Fauré found ‘a kind of pre-​R aphaelite language of idealised feminine beauty and grace where the mysterious imagery discourages a story line. (There is a very loose narrative in La Chanson d’Eve, none at all in Le jardin clos).’ Graham Johnson, Gabriel Fauré. The songs and their poets (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 329. 25. I discuss this topic at greater length in Julian Johnson, ‘Present Absence: Debussy, Song, and the Art of (Dis)appearing’, 19th-​Century Music 40, no. 3 (2017), 239–​56. 26. Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, tr. Donald A. Landes, Phenomenology of Perception (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 296. 27. Katherine Bergeron. Voice Lessons:  French Mélodie in the Belle Époque (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 12. 28. See Carl E. Schorske, Fin-​de-​siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1981), Chapter 7. 29. Makis Solomos, De la musique au son: L’émergence du son dans la musique des XXe –​ XXIe siècles (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013), 235. 30. It is interesting to note that the Nocturnes started out as Trois scénes au crepuscule, a work for solo violin and orchestra. There is very little trace of such origins in the

338 Notes finished work which might be heard not only as without the sense of individual voice a soloist would have conferred, but one in which the individual voice has literally been extracted in the process of composition. 31. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, tr. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 35–​36. 32. ‘Dans La Mer de Claude Debussy rien n’est plus à la ressemblance de l’homme: la mer inhumaine, loin des côtes, des arbres et des maisons, a cessé d’être au “paysage”! On entend seulement le fracas des éléments amorphes, anonymes, acéphales qui s’affrontent depuis l’origine des mondes.’ Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy, 203. 33. Jean-​ François Lyotard, tr. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon, Discourse, Figure (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 231. 34. See Jean Barraqué, Debussy (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1962), 150. 35. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 73. He makes a further comparison between the aquatic realm of ‘Sirènes’ and the aerial realm of ‘Nuages’. 36. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, tr. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 36–​37. 37. Pierre Boulez, ed. Jean-​ Jacques Nattiez, tr. Martin Cooper, Orientations (London: Faber, 1986), 154. 38. Letter to André Messager, 12 September, 1903. Claude Debussy, Correspondance (1872–​1918), ed. François Lesure and Denis Herlin (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 780. 39. The idea is further suggested by Debussy’s piano piece D’un Cahier d’esquisses (1903) which shows a number of similarities with La mer (of motif, key, and texture), such that it may have been a kind of sketch for the orchestral one. 40. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 200. 41. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 200. 42. Jean Marnold, ‘Concerts Lamoureux –​Claude Debussy: La Mer’, Le Mercure de France LVIII(1905), 131–​5, 134. Cited in David J. Code, Claude Debussy (London: Reaktion, 2010), 121. 43. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 125. 44. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 75. 45. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 140. 46. Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, tr. Donald A. Landes, Phenomenology of Perception (London and New  York:  Routledge, 2014), 219. Cited by David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage, 1997), 55.

Chapter 7 1. Jean-​François Gautier, Claude Debussy: La musique et le mouvant (Arles: Actes Sud, 1997), 120. 2. Gautier, Claude Debussy, 120. 3. Gautier, Claude Debussy, 119. 4. In 1915 Debussy edited Chopin’s Études. Mixing up his Shakespeare plays, he wrote of Chopin’s pieces that their characters were like the fairies of As You Like It.

Notes  339 5. He was later persuaded differently by his pupil and friend Marguerite Long. 6. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Sketched in the Theater’, in Mallarmé in Prose, ed. and tr. Mary Ann Caws (New  York:  New Directions, 2001), 104. The passage is discussed in Suzanne Bernard, Mallarmé et la musique (Paris: Libraire Nizet, 1959), 55. 7. Barthes’s essays on music from the 1970s are collected in Part II (Music’s Body) of The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays in Music, Art and Representation, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985). They include ‘Musica Practica’ (1970), ‘Loving Schumann’ (1979), and ‘Rasch’ (1975). 8. Barthes, ‘Rasch’, in The Responsibility of Forms, 305–​06. 9. The larger statement is: ‘no more grammar, no more musical semiology: issuing from professional analysis –​identification and arrangement of ‘themes’, ‘cells’, ‘phrase’ –​ it risks bypassing the body; composition manuals are so many ideological objects, whose meaning is to annul the body’. ‘Rasch’, in The Responsibility of Forms, 307. 10. Muzio Clementi’s Gradus ad Parnassum, Op.  44, includes a five-​finger exercise marked ‘veloce’ (No. 16). 11. Carl Czerny’s ‘Études de Mécanisme’, Op. 849, provide a good example. See Jim Samson, ‘Of maps and materials’, in Virtuosity and the Musical Work. The Transcendental Studies of Liszt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 29–​65. 12. Charles-​Louis Hanon published his famous five-​finger exercises in 1873. 13. François Couperin’s L’art de toucher le clavecin (1716) is resolutely practical, dealing with matters as fundamental as the physical position of the musician at the instrument and the movement of hands and wrist. 14. In the original text (‘Eye and Mind’), Merleau-​Ponty has ‘organ’ not keyboard. See Amy Cimini, ‘Vibrating Colors and Silent Bodies. Music, Sound and Silence in Maurice Merleau-​Ponty’s Critique of Dualism’, Contemporary Music Review 31, nos. 5–​6 (2012), 353–​70, 366. 15. Roger Moseley, Keys to Play:  Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2016), 1. 16. I explore this perspective, of a much longer history of music shaped by sonority rather than a mimesis of language, in Chapter 8, ‘Le corps sonore’ of Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 17. Reading Debussy’s Préludes in terms of representation is the default position of most commentators. See, for example, Siglind Bruhn, Images and Ideas in Modern French Piano Music: The Extra-​Musical Subtext in Piano Works by Ravel, Debussy and Messiaen (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 1997). 18. See, for example, Richard S. Parks, ‘Pitch Organization in Debussy: Unordered Sets in “Brouillards” ’, Music Theory Spectrum 2, no. 1 (1980), 119–​34. 19. Paul Roberts says something similar about ‘Feux d’artifice’, that it is a piece apparently dictated by the fingers and the hands which become ‘the guiding principle of the music, its inspiration, almost irrespective of any harmonic, melodic, or rhythmic considerations’. Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1996), 184. 20. See Daphne Leong and David Korevaar, ‘Repetition as Musical Motion in Ravel’s Piano Writing’, in Unmasking Ravel:  New Perspectives on the Music, ed. Peter Kaminsky (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011), 111–​42.

340 Notes 21. A good example is provided by Tristan Murail’s Tellur (1977) for guitar –​an astonishing exploration of sound through the physicality of the hands on the instrument. This close study of the art of touch is generated from the motions of the fingers on instrument and takes as its principal material the interface between human hand and instrument. 22. Michel Serres, Les cinq sens (Paris: Pluriel, 2014). Original edition: Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle, 1985. 23. Serres, Les cinq sens, 30. 24. Serres, Les cinq sens, 31. 25. Serres, Les cinq sens, 32. 26. Serres, Les cinq sens, 36. 27. See Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in Simmel on Culture, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997). 28. Serres, Les cinq sens, 37. 29. Serres, Les cinq sens, 38. 30. Serres, Les cinq sens, 40. 31. The essay was written in the summer of 1960, which Merleau-​Ponty spent in a rented house near Aix-​en-​Provence in the same landscape that had preoccupied Cézanne in his later years. 32. Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit (Paris:  Gallimard, 2014 [originally 1964]),  58–​60. 33. Jessica Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought:  Art, Literature, and Music after Merleau-​ Ponty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 53–​54. 34. Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought, 18. 35. Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, ‘The Intertwining  –​The Chiasm’, in The Visible and the Invisible, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 130–​55. 36. Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought, 53. 37. Susan Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 2009), 3–​14. 38. Susan Sontag, ‘On Style’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 21. 39. Christopher Norris in ‘Small Change When We Are to Bodies Gone?: Response to Gary Tomlinson’, The Opera Quarterly 29, nos. 3–​4 (2013). Special Issue: ‘Opera and Philosophy’, 203–​11, 203. 40. I borrow the phrase from Esther Perel. 41. Søren Kierkegaard, ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical Erotic’, in Either/​Or. A Fragment of Life, tr. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 2004), 59–​135. 42. Cited in Stephen Downes, The Muse as Eros: Music, Erotic Fantasy and Male Creativity in the Romantic and Modern Imagination (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), 185. Downes cites Barthes’s ‘The Pleasure of the Text’. 43. ‘ “Jouissance” and “significance” invoke the sense of an ecstatic loss of the subject in a sexual or textual coming –​a textasy’. Robert Young, Untying the Text. A Post-​ structuralist Reader (New  York:  Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 32. Cited in Graham Allen, Intertexuality (London: Routledge, 2000), 56.

Notes  341 44. Colin MacCabe, ‘Introduction’ to Georges Bataille, tr. Mary Dalwood, Eroticism (London: Penguin, 2001), x. 45. Georges Bataille, tr. Mary Dalwood, Eroticism (London: Penguin, 2001), 15. French original: Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1957. 46. Jean-​Luc Nancy, tr. Richard A. Rand, Corpus (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 134. 47. See Jean-​Luc Marion, tr. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud, In Excess. Studies of Saturated Phenomena (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), xxi. 48. See Jean-​Luc Marion, tr. Stephen E. Lewis, The Erotic Phenomenon (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), and also Christina M. Geschwandtner, Reading Jean-​Luc Marion. Exceeding Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 49. See Robert Fink, ‘The Culture of Eros’, in Repeating Ourselves:  American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 2005). 50. The Daily Telegraph (London: 1931). 51. The theme is heard nineteen times; the rhythmic cell given in the side drum some 169 times. There is no modulation, only harmonisation of the melody in parallel thirds. 52. ‘Le plaisir est la règle’. Debussy’s remark to Ernest Guiraud is reported in Harry Halbreich and Edward Lockspeiser, Claude Debussy (Paris: Fayard, 1980), 754. 53. Julie McQuinn, ‘Exploring the Erotic in Debussy’s Music’, in The Cambridge Companion to Debussy, Simon Trezise (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2013), 117–​36. 54. McQuinn, ‘Exploring the Erotic’, 132. 55. Katherine Bergeron, ‘Melisande’s Hair, or the Trouble in Allemonde. A Postmodern Allegory at the Opéra-​Comique’, in Siren Songs:  Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, ed. Mary Ann Smart (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 160–​85, 169. 56. Bataille, Eroticism, 15. 57. ‘Non seuelement ce mystère englobe et captive la conscience, mais il l’entraîne vers l’infinie profondeur, –​car il est profond et attirant comme la mer [ . . . ] Non seulement la chevelure défaite submerge Pelléas sous les vagues de la volupté, mais elle l’emporte dans son raz-​de-​marée vers la profondeur d’une volupté insondable [ . . . ].’ Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère de l’instant (Paris: Plon, 1976), 56. 58. Matisse gave the idea pictorial form in Luxe, Calme et Volupté (1904), a painting that takes its title from ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ from Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal. Henri Duparc’s well known setting of that poem dates from 1870. Voluptas was the Greek goddess of pleasure. 59. ‘Il arrive très fréquemment que la femme est beaucoup plus lente que l’homme à parvenir au paroxysme de la volupté. Dans cet amoureux voyage au pays du Tendre, il n’avancent point de compagnie, et l’amant touche déjà au port alors que son amie apparait tout juste à l’horizon.’ Jean Marestan, L’Éducation Sexuelle (Paris: Éditions de la Guerre Sociale, 1910). 60. Bergeron, ‘Mélisande’s Hair’, 178.

342 Notes 61. See Julian Johnson, ‘Precarious Rapture: The Recent Music of Jonathan Harvey’, in Aspects of British Music, ed. Peter O’Hagan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 63–​84. 62. Nancy, Corpus, 133. 63. Nancy, Corpus, 134 (translation altered). The French term ‘enchainement’ refers, as in ballet, to the lacing together of a sequence of moves. It is thus quite distinct to the emphasis of the English word ‘enchainment’.

Chapter 8 1. Jean-​Luc Nancy, tr. Richard A. Rand, Corpus (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 7. 2. Don Ihde, Bodies in Technology (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xi. 3. Linda Phyllis Austern, ed., Music, Sensation, and Sensuality (New  York and London: Routledge, 2002), 3. The contributions to this edited volume deal with material as far back as Descartes. 4. Bernard Vecchione says of ‘l’écriture musicale’ that it is a ‘refiguration’ of experience. See the Introduction to Francesco Spampinato, Debussy, poète des eaux:  Métaphorisation et corporéité dans l’expérience musicale (Paris:  L’Harmattan, 2011), 9. See also Joseph Delaplace and Jean-​Paul Olive, eds, Le corps dans l’écriture musicale (Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2019). 5. Mary Ann Caws, ed., Mallarmé in Prose (New York: New Directions, 2001), 109. See also Suzanne Bernard, Mallarmé et la musique (Paris: Libraire Nizet, 1959), 54. 6. Caws, Mallarmé in Prose, 114–​15. 7. Bernard, Mallarmé et la musique, 55. 8. In addition to many still photographs, a short film extract of her famous ‘Serpentine dance’ (performed by another dancer) by the Lumière brothers survives from 1897. Appearing first in Paris in 1893, Loïe Fuller went on to attract the attention of a whole generation of dancers, poets and painters. 9. Mallarmé’s ‘Autre Étude de Danse’ came out of an article he wrote for the National Observer on 13 May 1893. See Bertrand Marchal, Igitur, Divagations, Un coup de dés, ed. Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 494. 10. Caws, Mallarmé in Prose, 114. 11. Jacques Rancière, tr. Zakir Paul, Aisthesis (London:  Verso, 2013). French original, 2011. The photo of Fuller by Frederick Glasier appears on the front cover of the book. 12. Rancière, Aisthesis, 96. 13. Rancière, Aisthesis,  96–​97. 14. Rancière, Aisthesis, 98. 15. Paul Adam, ‘Critique des moeurs’, Les entretiens politiques et littéraires, 10 February, 1893, 136. Cited in Rancière, Aisthesis, 99. 16. Rancière, Aisthesis, 99. 17. Rancière, Aisthesis, 100 (emphasis added). This idea goes back to the Impressionists of course. George Rivière wrote, in 1877: ‘to treat a subject for the colours [les tons]

Notes  343 and not for the subject itself, that’s what distinguishes the impressionists from other painters’. See Michel Fleury, L’impressionnisme et la musique (Paris: Fayard, 1996), 38. 18. ‘Ne dit rien mais porte tout.’ Michel Serres, Musique (Paris: Le Pommier, 2011), 24. 19. Rancière, Aisthesis, 116. 20. The distinctive style of Isadora Duncan’s dancing was partly drawn from her study of the imagery of ancient Greek vases and bas reliefs in London (1898–​99). Vaslav Nijinsky looked to similar sources in the Louvre, in 1912, for the lexicon of static poses he employed in choreographing Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faune. 21. David J. Code relates the piece not only to Mallarmé but also to the physicality of the keyboard. See ‘Parting the veils of Debussy’s “Voiles” ’, Scottish Music Review 1, no. 1 (2007). See also Siglind Bruhn, Images and Ideas in Modern French Piano Music. The Extra-​Musical Subtext in Piano Works by Ravel, Debussy and Messiaen (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 1997). 22. Carolyn Abbate, ‘Debussy’s Phantom Sounds’, in In Search of Opera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 164–​65. 23. Steven Rings, ‘Mystères limpides: Time and Transformation in Debussy’s Des pas sur la neige’, 19th-​Century Music 32, no. 2 (2008), 178–​208, 200. 24. This rhythmic motif is sometimes referred to as a ‘scotch snap’, at other time as a ‘Lombard rhythm’; both terms are equally unhelpful. For a detailed exploration of the relations between this rhythm and stress patterns in different languages see Nicholas Temperley and David Temperley, ‘Music-​Language Correlations and the “Scotch Snap” ’, Music Perception 29, no. 1 (2011), 51–​63. 25. The figure can also be heard in Act 5 when Arkel asks Mélisande if the windows should be closed: ‘No’, she replies, ‘leave them open until the sun has gone down in the sea’. 26. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère de l’instant (Paris: Plon, 1976), 91. 27. See James R. Briscoe, ‘Debussy “d’après” Debussy:  The Further Resonance of Two Early “Mélodies” ’, 19th-​Century Music 5, no. 2, 110–​116. 28. A  similar attempt to concretize the present through an arrival at E♭ major can be found in Reflets dans l’eau (b. 57), though the moment is equally brief. 29. ‘La terre est engloutie dans le bruit, comme sous la mer, jadis, la cathédrale.’ See Michel Serrres, Les cinq sens (Paris: Pluriel, 2014), 111. 30. See also Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for La Motte Fouqué’s Ondine, and also for J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. An illustration for the latter is referenced in the title of Debussy’s prelude ‘Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses’ from Book II. 31. Le visible et l’invisible was first published in 1964 (English translation, 1968), but La nature, notes from Merleau-​Ponty’s lectures given in 1956–​60, was not published until 1995 (English translation, 2003). 32. Amy Cimini, ‘Vibrating Colors and Silent Bodies:  Music, Sound and Silence in Maurice Merleau-​Ponty’s Critique of Dualism’, Contemporary Music Review 31, nos. 5–​6 (2012), 353–​70, 354. 33. Edmund Husserl, tr. W. R.  Boyce Gibson, Ideas:  General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2012), xvi. 34. ‘Author’s Preface to the English Tradition’ (1931). See Husserl, Ideas, xxxiv.

344 Notes 35. As Amy Cimini points out, while Merleau-​Ponty himself had little to say about music, his work was coterminous with directions in music that might seem to complement his work: musique concrète, the spatialization of music in Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and the directions taken by French spectralism. See Cimini, ‘Vibrating Colors’, 360. 36. Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, tr. Donald A. Landes, Phenomenology of Perception (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 230–​31. 37. Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 222. 38. Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 204–​205 (my emphasis). 39. Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 205. 40. Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 236. 41. Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 333. 42. Jessica Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought:  Art, Literature, and Music after Merleau-​ Ponty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 4. 43. Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought, 92. 44. Merleau-​Ponty, Visible and Invisible, 149–​50. 45. Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought, 109. 46. Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought, 101. 47. Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought, 113. 48. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage, 1997), 66. 49. Ibid.,  57. 50. David E. Wellberry in ‘Foreword’ to Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1880/​ 1900, tr. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1990), xv. 51. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), in which Derrida discusses language as a pharmakon –​ both a remedy and a poison. Michel Serres is more direct  –​language is a drug (pharmacie) to which our addiction makes us ill. Serres, Les cinq sens, 118ff. 52. Julia Kristeva, ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’, in Toril Moi, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Julia Kristeva (Blackwell: Oxford, 1986), 30. 53. Jacques Derrida, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 142. 54. Derrida, Of Grammatology 167. 55. Derrida, Of Grammatology 167. 56. Jean-​Luc Marion, tr. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud, In Excess. Studies of Saturated Phenomena (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 54–​70. 57. Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms:  Critical Essays in Music, Art and Representation, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 279. 58. Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, 306. 59. Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, 307. 60. Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, 307. 61. Gilles Deleuze, tr. Daniel W. Smith, Francis Bacon:  The Logic of Sensation (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 62. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 37.

Notes  345 63. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 44. 64. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 39. 65. Jean-​Luc Nancy, tr. Richard A. Rand, Corpus (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 9. 66. Nancy, Corpus, 85. 67. Abram, ‘The Flesh of Language’, in The Spell of the Sensuous,  73–​92. 68. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 154. 69. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 176. 70. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 187. 71. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 185.

Chapter 9 1. Claude Debussy, ed. François Lesure, Monsieur Croche et autre écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 325. Originally in ‘Est-​ce une renaissance de la musique religieuse?’ Excelsior, 11 February, 1911. 2. Simon Trezise refers to the flutes’ figure as ‘the dive of the seabird’, in Debussy, La Mer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 62. 3. Francesco Spampinato, Debussy, poète des eaux: Métaphorisation et corporéité dans l’expérience musicale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), 161. 4. Jean Barraqué, ‘La Mer de Debussy, ou la naissance des formes ouvertes’, Analyse musicale 12 (1988), 15–​62, 29. 5. André Boucourechliev, Debussy: La révolution subtile (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 114–​15. 6. Spampinato cites Bernard Vecchione, La realité musicale:  Éléments d’épistémologie musicologique, PhD diss. (Paris, 1985). See Spampinato, Debussy, poète des eaux, 169. 7. Spampinato cites André Souris, Conditions de la musique et autres écrits (Paris: CNRS, 1976), 216. See Spampinato, Debussy, poète des eaux, 164. 8. Gaston Bachelard, L’eau et les rêves:  Essai sur l’imagination de la matière (Paris: Corti, 1942). 9. Spampinato, Debussy, poète des eaux, 209–​10. 10. Spampinato, Debussy, poète des eaux, 210. 11. Jean Barraqué, Debussy (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1962), 180. 12. Barraqué, Debussy, 169. 13. See Jann Pasler, ‘Debussy, “Jeux”: Playing with Time and Form’, 19th-​Century Music 6, no. 1 (1982), 60–​75. 14. Barraqué, Debussy, 180. 15. Barraqué, Debussy, 181. 16. Stephen Zank, Irony and Sound: The Music of Maurice Ravel (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2009), 51–​53. 17. See, for example, Karen Painter, ‘The Sensuality of Timbre: Responses to Mahler and Modernity at the Fin de Siècle’, 19th-​Century Music 18, no. 3 (1995), 236–​56. 18. Gurminder K. Bhogal, ‘Not Just a Pretty Surface. Ornament and Metric Complexity’, in Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music, ed. Peter Kaminsky (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2011), (272–​305), 272.

346 Notes 19. Bhogal, ‘Not Just a Pretty Surface’, 276. 20. Bhogal, ‘Not Just a Pretty Surface’, 276. 21. Bhogal, ‘Not Just a Pretty Surface’, 286. 22. See Steven Huebner, ‘Ravel’s Poetics. Literary Currents, Classical Tales’, in , Unmasking Ravel, ed. Kaminsky, 9–​40, 32. 23. In 2016, the French pianist Helène Grimaud shaped a whole recital programme, and subsequently a CD recording, on the idea of ‘Water’, including pieces by Berio, Takemitsu, Janáček, Liszt, and Debussy. 24. Bhogal, ‘Not Just a Pretty Surface’, 287. 25. Fritz Mauthner, Beitrage zu einter Kritik der Sprache (Berlin, 1901–​02). ‘We must only know that the most profound language is only the stammering of a child.’ Volume III, 650. 26. The recent rise of ludomusicology places centre stage the idea of music as play. For a study of the relation between the keyboard and the wider idea of play in western culture see Roger Moseley, Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2016). 27. Bachelard, L’eau et les rêves, 178. 28. Gérard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (1998), a piece that explores the thresholds between life and death, ends with a dream-​like berceuse in all but name, the singer’s slow phrases floating over the gently turning kaleidoscope of the ensemble. 29. Bachelard, L’eau et les rêves, 178. 30. For a discussion of the heterotopic function of dreamspace in Lutosławski’s piece see Nicholas Reyland, ‘The Spaces of Dream: Lutosławski’s Modernist Heterotopias’, Twentieth-​Century Music 12, no. 1 (2015), 37–​70. Les espaces du sommeil (1972–​ 5) is a setting for baritone and orchestra of Robert Desnos’s ‘The Spaces of Sleep’ (1930). 31. See, for example, Halina Goldberg, ‘Chopin’s Oneiric Soundscapes and the Role of Dreams in Romantic Culture’, in Chopin and His World, ed. Jonathan D. Bellman and Halina Goldberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 15–​43. 32. Mary Ann Caws, ed., Mallarmé in Prose (New York: New Directions, 2001), 109. See also Suzanne Bernard, Mallarmé et la musique (Paris: Libraire Nizet, 1959), 54. 33. Gaston Bachelard, tr. Daniel Russell, The Poetics of Reverie. Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 17. French original 1960. 34. Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie, 29 and 62. 35. Mary Breatnach, Boulez and Mallarmé: A Study in Poetic Influence (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 58. 36. Jean-​ François Lyotard, tr. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon, Discourse, Figure (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 58. 37. Jean-​Yves Tadié, Le songe musical: Claude Debussy (Paris: Gallimard, 2008). In the sense of Bachelard, ‘il y a chez Debussy une imagination matérielle des éléments’ (122). 38. ‘accords appartenant à plusieurs tonalités heterogènes qui agissent l’une sur l’autre à distance, s’attirent l’une à l’autre à travers le vide . . .’. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère de l’instant (Paris: Plon, 1976), 101.

Notes  347 39. See Julia Kristeva, tr. M. Waller, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 25. 40. The term ‘semiotic chora’ is used in the writings of Julia Kristeva to denote a mobile and pre-​linguistic space of signification, unstructured by the grammatical ‘law’ of language. It was first introduced in La révolution de langage poétique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974). 41. ‘à la fois, informe et multiforme, l’eau n’est-​elle pas la forme informe par excellence?’. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 76. 42. ‘le mouvement perpétuel de la mer à chez Debussy quelque chose de secrètement statique: non qu’il soit mouvement immobile, mais parce qu’il est agitation informe.’ Jankélévitch, Debussy, 125. 43. Jankélévitch, Debussy, 127. 44. Tristan Murail in Peter Szendy, ed., Tristan Murail (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 124. 45. See Anni Oskala, ‘Dreams about Music, Music about Dreams’, in Kaija Saaraho. Visions, Narrative, Dialogues, ed. Tim Howell, Jon Hargreaves, and Michael Rofe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 47. 46. Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think:  Towards an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013). 47. See, for example, Jerrold Levinson, ‘Musical Thinking’, in Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 209–​19. 48. Mauro Carbone, The Thinking of the Sensible:  Merleau-​ Ponty’s A-​ Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004). 49. Carbone, The Thinking of the Sensible, xiii. Merleau-​Ponty’s late essay ‘L’Oeil et L’Esprit’ (1960) is, in part, an exploration of the painting of Cézanne as a kind of thought. 50. Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011), 106. 51. Charles Baudelaire, tr. P. Charvet, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Literature (London: Penguin, 1992), 390–​435. 52. Many of Rodin’s contemporaries called him ‘a thinker in stone’. See Kenneth Clarke, The Romantic Rebellion. Romantic versus Classic Art (London: Fontana, 1976), 335. 53. See Julian Johnson, ‘Le Corps Sonore’, in Out of Time:  Music and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 275–​313. 54. Henri Bergson, tr. Mabelle L. Andison, The Creative Mind:  An Introduction to Metaphysics (New York: Citadel Press, 1946), 14. 55. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 16. 56. Bergson, The Creative Mind,  34–​35. 57. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 32. 58. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 59. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 80. 60. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 87. 61. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 61. 62. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 61. 63. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 79.

348 Notes 64. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 106. 65. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 108–​109. 66. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 109. 67. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 134. 68. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 135. 69. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 138. 70. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 136. 71. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 147. 72. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 188. 73. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 147. 74. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 148. 75. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 161–​62. 76. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 190. 77. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 190. 78. Gilles Deleuze, tr. Richard Howard, Proust and Signs:  The Complete Text (London: Continuum, 2008), 11–​12. French original, Proust et Signes (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 1964). 79. Jean-​Yves Tadié, Le songe musical: Claude Debussy (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 193. 80. Jean-​François Gautier, Claude Debussy: La musique et le mouvant (Arles: Actes Sud, 1997), 99. 81. Gautier, Claude Debussy, 96. 82. Jean-​Claude Risset, Du songe au son:  Entretiens avec Matthieu Guillot (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008), 13. 83. Risset, Du songe au son, 13. 84. Jean-​Luc Hervé, Dans le vertige de la duré:  Vortex Temporum de Gérard Grisey (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 15. 85. T. W. Adorno, tr. Edmund Jephcott, Beethoven. The Philosophy of Music (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 11. 86. Caws, Mallarmé in Prose, 113. The French original is ‘silencieusement écrira ta vision à la façon d’un Signe, qu’elle est.’ See ‘Ballets’, in Mallarmé, Igitur, Divagations, Un coup de dés, 206. 87. Gilles Deleuze, tr. Daniel W. Smith, Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

Epilogue 1. Jean-​Luc Nancy, tr. Richard A. Rand, Corpus (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 62. 2. George Steiner, Real Presences (London: Faber, 1989), 93–​94. 3. See Julian Johnson, Out of Time:  Music and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 4. Georg Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (Berlin: Aufbau, 1954). The passage is cited in Lukács’ Preface to his Theory of the Novel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974).

Notes  349 5. See Johnson, Out of Time, Part I. 6. See Jean-​François Lyotard, ‘Music, Mutic’, in Lyotard, tr. Georges van den Abbeele, Postmodern Fables (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 217–​33. 7. Steiner, Real Presences, 11. 8. Jean-​Luc Nancy, tr. Jeffrey S. Librett, The Sense of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 10. French original, 1993. 9. Vladimir Jankélévitch discusses the phenomenon of ‘bearing a grudge against music’, an attempt to resist music which he sees as a pathology in the same way that misogyny is pathological. But it is a pathology that can take an eminently ‘rational’ form and thus goes undetected precisely because it is reasonable, objective, and scientific, grounded as it is in the unquestioned and unchallenged priority of language as a way of knowing the world. See Jankélévitch, tr. Carolyn Abbate, Music and the Ineffable (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2003), 10. French original, 1961. 10. Martin Heidegger, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 216. German original, 1927. 11. Heidegger, Being and Time, 223. 12. Jean-​Luc Nancy, tr. Peggy Kamuf, The Muses (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1996), 22. French original, 1994. 13. See, for example, Mark Evan Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2006); Mark Evan Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric:  Music Form and the Metaphor of Oration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 14. See Julian Johnson, ‘Le Corps Sonore’, in Out of Time:  Music and the Making of Modernity, 275–​313. 15. Corinne Enaudeau in her introduction to Jean-​Francois Lyotard, tr. Andrew Brown, Why Philosophize? (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2014), 2. The French original (2012) is based on the texts of four lectures given at the Sorbonne in 1964. 16. Lyotard, Why Philosophize?, 62. 17. ‘Je travaille à des choses qui ne seront comprises que par les petits enfants du vingtième siècle.’ Claude Debussy letter to Pierre Louÿs, 22 February 1895. Claude Debussy, ed. François Lesure and Denis Herlin, Correspondance (1872–​1918) (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 242. 18. Michel Serres, Les cinq sens (Paris: Pluriel, 2014), 264. 19. Robert Macfarlane, ‘Introduction’ to Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain (Edinburgh: Canonsgate, 2011). 20. Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2015), 104. 21. See Editorial Note to Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, ed., Claude Lefort, tr. Alphonso Lingis, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, IL:  Northwestern University Press, 1968), xxv–​xxvi. 22. Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, xxviii. 23. Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, xxix. 24. Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 103. 25. Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, xlvi.

350 Notes 26. Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, tr. Donald A. Landes, Phenomenology of Perception (London and New York: Routledge, 2014) 27. Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 130–​31. 28. Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 137. 29. Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 137–​38. 30. Jean-​ François Lyotard, tr. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon, Discourse, Figure (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 6. 31. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 3. 32. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 107. 33. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 7. 34. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 214. 35. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 7. ‘Figure’ in English lacks the resonance of the French figure, which means not only image, form, picture, pattern, but also the human face. The figure is not only material and bodily, it has the particularity of another person. As an intransitive verb, figurer, means to appear; as a transitive verb, it means to represent. In other words, Lyotard’s use of the term figure brings with it the absolute particularity of the human face and the act of appearance, but also the idea of a representation, an act of the imagination given sensuous form. 36. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 8. 37. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 9. 38. Jean-​Luc Marion, tr. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud, In Excess:  Studies of Saturated Phenomena (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 54–​71. 39. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 40. 40. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 40. 41. See Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 102. 42. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 71. 43. Marcel Proust, The Prisoner and the Fugitive, tr. Carol Clark and Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003), 237. 44. Patrick Rebuschat, Martin Rohrmeier, John A. Hawkins, and Ian Cross, eds, Language and Music as Cognitive Systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xiii. 45. Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005), 26. 46. Gary Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music:  The Emergence of Human Modernity (New York: Zone Books, 2015). 47. Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music,  13–​14. 48. Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music, 23. 49. Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music, 79. 50. Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals, 3. 51. Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music, 102 and 108. 52. Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music, 141. 53. Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music, 203. 54. Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music, 203. 55. Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music, 258. 56. Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music, 259.

Notes  351 Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music, 278. Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music, 278. Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music, 288–​89. Steiner, Real Presences, 6. Steiner goes on to cite Lévi-​Strauss’s affirmation that ‘the invention of melody is the supreme mystery of man’ (19). 61. Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music, 196. 62. Michel Serres, Musique (Paris: Le Pommier, 2011), 131–​32. 63. Serres, Les cinq sens, 142. 64. Serres, Les cinq sens, 143. 65. Serres, Les cinq sens, 145. 66. Serres, Les cinq sens, 151. 67. Serres, Les cinq sens, 157. 68. Serres, Les cinq sens, 111. 69. Serres, Les cinq sens, 188. 70. Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis, ed. Christopher Prendergast, The Way by Swann’s (London: Penguin, 2002), 139. 71. Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 194 (emphasis added). 72. Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 12. 73. G. W. F. Hegel, tr. William Wallace, Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 6–​7. 74. Novalis, Monologue (1798) in Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 1997), 65. 75. Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3 vols (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1901–​2). Vol. I, 713. 76. Barbara Johnson, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Jacques Derrida, tr. Barbara Johnson, Dissemination (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), xvi. French original, 1972. 77. Martin Seel, tr. John Farrell, Aesthetics of Appearing (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2005), 20. German original, 2000. 78. Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, 25. 79. Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, 33. 80. Peter Szendy, ‘Parole, parole:  Tautegory and the Musicology of the (Pop) Song’, in Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous, ed. Keith Chapin and Andrew H. Clark (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 186–​92, 189. Szendy invokes Carl Dahlhaus’s claim that speaking about music ‘affects the substance of the thing itself ’. 81. Guido Adler, ‘Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft’, in Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 1885. The historical and systematic study he outlined there anticipates his later book, Methode der Musikgeschichte of 1919. 82. It might have been different. Carl Stumpf (1848–​1936), a pioneer of musicology and what was to become ethnomusicology, was both a precociously talented musician and a philosopher (a pupil of Franz Brentano, he was also one of Husserl’s teachers). His Tone Psychology was begun in 1875, making it contemporary with key developments in the art of Manet, Monet, and Mallarmé. Its central tenet, that musical tone should be ‘instrumental’ for a philosophy of knowledge and perception of the world, anticipates the entire project of this book. 57. 58. 59. 60.

352 Notes 83. Jean-​Francois Lyotard, Music, mutic’, in Postmodern Fables, 217–​33, 217. 84. Marcel Proust, tr. Ian Patterson, Finding Time Again (London:  Penguin Classics, 2003), 201. 85. Albrecht Wellmer argues that our vast literature of writing about music and art, far from being some terrible historical error, arises from a fundamental connection between art’s muteness and the language of critical reflection it provokes: ‘the question about the concept of art is, in a peculiar way, related to art itself ’ (‘die Frage nach dem Begriff der Kunst in eigentümlicher Weise mit der Kunst selbst verbunden ist’). See Versuch über Musik und Sprache (Munich: Carl Hauser Verlag, 2009), 104. 86. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le Je-​ne-​sais-​quoi et le Presque-​rien. Vol 1.  La manière et l’occasion (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980), 11–​12.

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Index Figures are indicated by an italic f following the page numbers For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages.   Abbate, Carolyn, 55, 67, 114, 129–​30, Baudelaire, Charles, 45, 89–​90, 112, 150, 239–​40,  247–​48 222–​23, 223n.58, 225–​26, 271, 274 Abram, David, 178, 198, 251, 256–​57 Baumgarten, Alexander, 22, 26 abyss, 36–​38, 40, 41–​46, 59, 102, 165, Beethoven, Ludwig van, 12, 300–​1 169–​70, 185, 194, 197, 284 bells, 102–​4, 107, 143, 177–​78, 179, Adler, Guido, 304 179n.23, 271 Adorno, T. W., 3, 12–​14, 27, 35–​36, 37–​39, Berberian, Cathy, 38n.35 56–​57, 168, 177, 268–​69, 281–​82, Berg, Alban, 71 285–​86, 288–​89,  300 Bergeron, Katherine, 17–​18, 36–​37n.25, aesthetics, 5–​6, 12–​13, 17–​18, 22 55, 110–​11, 134–​35, 152–​53n.11, 183, Albéniz, Isaac, 244 222–​23,  225 Andersen, Hans Christian, Bergson, Henri, 19–​20, 21–​22, 23–​24, 26, 37–​38,  241–​43 49, 126, 127–​28, 169–​70, 183–​85, Apollinaire, Guillaume, 108, 255 251–​52, 257, 275–​82, 284–​85,  289–​90 Aristotle, 40 Berlioz, Hector, 274 art as appearing, 7–​8, 14–​16, 19–​20, 22, Berio, Luciano, 13, 34–​35, 38n.35, 211–​12 44, 47, 53–​54, 67–​68, 82–​83, 115–​16, Bernard, Suzanne, 168–​69, 230–​31 120–​28, 130, 135–​37, 138, 177, 189, Bertrand, Aloysius, 264–​65 190–​94, 213–​14, 225–​26, 233–​34, Bhogal, Gurminder, K., 263–​65 244–​46, 286–​87, 297,  298–​99 birdsong, 38–​39, 179 Austern, Linda, 229 Bonnard, Pierre, 23–​24, 168–​69, 212–​15,   213f, 217 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 210–​11 Bonds, Mark Evan, 17–​18 Bachelard, Gaston, 168, 259–​60, 266–​68 Borges, Jorge Luis, 40–​41 Bacon, Francis, 23–​24, 27, 206–​7, Borodin, Alexander, 10 255–​56,  281–​82 Boucher, Maurice, 10n.42 de Banville, Théodore, 99–​100n.33, 112, Boucourechliev, André, 10n.49, 259–​60 114–​15,  246–​47 Boulez, Pierre, 11, 14–​15, 32–​33n.1, 37, Ballets Russes, 165–​66, 234 48–​49, 50–​51, 56, 108, 115, 166n.33, Bardac, Emma, 36–​37 255–​56, 259–​60,  284 Barraqué, Jean, 11, 189, 259–​61, 278 Dialogue de l’ombre double,  166–​67 Barthes, Roland, 5–​6, 18, 20–​21, 23–​24, Le marteau sans maître, 43–​44, 50, 100–​9 206–​8, 219, 221, 222, 229, 254–​55, Pli selon pli –​portrait de Mallarmé, 42–​ 271–​72,  290–​91 43, 50, 99–​100, 102–​7, 128 Bartók, Béla, 10–​11, 156, 176–​77 Répons, 50, 107, 167–​68 Bataille, Georges, 221, 223 Third Piano Sonata, 50–​51,  195–​96

366 Index Bowie, Andrew, 4–​5n.16, 16n.69, 24n.103, 24–​25n.104 Bowie, Malcolm, 42n.52, 47 Breatnach, Mary, 268 de Brimont, Renée, 152–​53 Briscoe, James. 243–​44 Bruckner, Anton, 193–​94, 233–​34 Butler, Christopher, 156–​58   Caballero, Carlo, 56 Cage, John, 13, 79–​80, 302–​3 Campbell, Edward, 11, 19–​20n.83 Carbone, Mauro, 273–​74 Carter, Elliott, 10–​11 de Castro, Paulo, 165–​66 Cavarero, Adriana, 5, 35, 36–​38, 39, 40–​41,  168 Cézanne, Paul, 11, 23–​24, 51, 155, 168, 188, 215–​17, 216f, 250, 255, 276–​77 Chagall, Marc, 266 Char, René, 100–​2, 108, 255–​56 Chausson, Ernest, 56 de Chavannes, Puvis, 222–​23 chiasm, 153–​54, 155, 157–​58, 160–​61, 183–​84, 188–​89, 208, 216–​17, 226–​ 27, 250, 257 Chopin, Frédéric, 10, 36–​37, 201, 203–​ 4n.4, 208–​9, 210–​11, 262–​63, 267 Cimini, Amy, 247–​48, 248n.35 Claudel, Paul, 2n.7 Clementi, Muzio, 208 Cobb, Margaret, 121, 121–​22n.8 Code, David, 48–​49, 113, 115, 131 Collioure,  157–​58 colour, 25, 82, 111, 154–​55, 164–​65, 198, 215–​16, 217, 248–​49, 250, 274 conceptual determination, 4–​5, 16, 21–​22, 26, 265–​66, 281–​82, 302 Connor, Steven, 36–​37n.24 constellation, 47–​52, 79, 92–​93, 107, 108, 149–​50, 168–​69,  197 Corot, Jean-​Baptiste-​Camille, 23–​24,  277–​78 Couperin, François, 204–​5, 208, 209, 211 Czerny, Carl, 201–​2, 208   Dalcroze, Émile-​Jaques,  233–​34 dancers, 78–​79, 147, 154, 175–​76, 204, 206, 214–​15, 230–​34, 235–​36, 239–​40, 245–​46, 260–​61,  267–​68

Darmstadt avant-​garde,  12–​13 Dayan, Peter, 112–​13 Debussy, Claude Apparition, 119–​22, 123–​24,  141–​42 Ariettes oubliées, 150, 237–​38 Chansons de Bilitis, 113–​14, 141–​42,  222–​23 Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire, 150,  237–​39 Douze Études, 201–​10,  214–​15 D’un cahier d’esquisses, 48, 196n.39 Estampes, 177–​78,  214–​15 Fêtes galantes,  128–​40 Ibéria, 145–​46, 176–​78,  272–​73 Images for piano, 167–​68, 176–​78 Reflets dans l’eau,  217–​18 Jeux, 47, 123–​24, 137–​38, 141–​42, 218, 234,  259–​61 La Boîte à Joujou, 121–​22n.8,  235–​36 La chute de la maison Usher, 44–​45, 59 La damoiselle élue, 122–​23,  222–​23 La mer, 37–​38, 42–​43, 44–​45, 47–​ 48, 51n.69, 124, 164, 168–​69, 177–​78, 186–​98, 187f, 217, 240–​41, 244–​45, 259–​60, 263, 269–​70,  279–​80 L’isle joyeuse, 36–​37, 44–​45, 48, 203 Pelléas et Mélisande, 8–​9, 44–​45, 53–​ 84, 115, 135–​38, 141–​42, 160, 164–​65, 181, 188, 194–​95, 221, 222–​25,  240–​41 Pour le piano, 211 Prélude à l’après-​midi d’un faune, 10, 45, 50n.69, 113–​14, 115, 123–​24, 140, 141–​42, 163–​64, 165, 234 Préludes pour Piano, 56–​57, 141–​43, 168–​69, 173, 175–​77, 198, 203–​4, 211, 234–​47, 251–​52, 256, 271 Printemps, 33, 122 Syrinx,  113–​14 The Children’s Corner, 175–​76, 236 Trois Nocturnes, 31–​33, 37n.29, 37n.30, 37–​38, 48, 102, 141–​42, 161–​62, 164, 165–​66, 171, 186, 186n.30, 235–​36, 263–​64, 279–​80 Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, 85–​116, 120–​22, 123–​24,  243–​44  Degas, Edgard, 174–​75 Delacroix, Eugène, 274

Index  367 Deleuze, Gilles, 23–​24, 27, 206–​7, 250, 255–​56, 257, 279, 281–​82 Derrida, Jacques, 4–​5, 15–​16, 18–​20, 23–​ 24, 26, 27, 43–​44, 58, 81, 82, 97–​99, 115–​16, 123, 127–​28, 138–​40, 145–​ 46, 169–​70, 183–​84, 205–​6, 230, 252–​ 54, 265–​66, 284, 288, 289, 297, 305 Descartes, René, 7, 149–​50, 168, 215, 247–​48, 249, 250, 285 desire, 9–​10, 17, 46, 61–​66, 97–​98, 108–​9, 113–​14, 120–​22, 125–​26, 135–​37, 140, 164–​65, 178, 220, 221, 223–​25, 259 DeVoto, Mark, 37–​38n.31, 124 différance, 2, 49–​50, 97–​98, 168, 230, 288, 301 D’Indy, Vincent, 197, 237 dreamimg, 94, 125–​26, 206, 225–​26,  266–​72 Dufourt, Hugues, 13, 26, 281 Dukas, Paul, 112 Duncan, Isadora, 233–​34, 236n.20, 255 Duparc, Henri, 223n.58 Dutilleux, Henri, 14–​15, 48–​49, 267 Tout un monde lointain, 225–​26, 271   echo, 31, 50, 64–​66, 158–​59, 165–​70 Eco, Umberto, 165 écriture, 10–​11, 13–​14, 20–​22, 26, 128, 161–​62, 261–​62, 267–​68, 273, 275, 280–​81, 302–​3,  305 as writing of the body, 204–​12, 229–​57,  285 electronic music, 10–​11, 13, 34–​35, 93–​94, 145, 161–​63, 166–​68, 176–​77, 196, 241–​43, 271–​72,  280–​81 empathy, 251 Enaudeau, Corinne, 287–​88 epoché, 19–​20, 173–​74, 175–​76, 248 erasure, 43–​44, 50, 82, 186, 188, 196, 288,  304–​5 erotics of art, 209–​10, 218, 219–​27, 229,  263–​64 evanescence, 85, 141–​46, 169, 178, 184–​85, 225–​26, 231, 239–​40, 263, 272–​73,  308 Expressionism, 55, 188–​89, 214–​15,  255–​56  Fauré, Gabriel, 10, 14–​15, 37–​38n.33, 45, 75–​76, 107, 110–​11, 128–​29n.29,

143–​44, 160–​61, 185, 196–​97, 212–​13, 226, 233–​34, 262–​63, 265, 267, 270 Chansons de Venise, 226 La chanson d’Ève, 111, 182–​85, 233–​34,  289 L’horizon chimérique, 45–​46, 152, 153, 181, 270 Le jardin clos,  179–​83 Mirages, 152–​54, 182, 270 Feldman, Morton, 10–​11, 13, 143–​44 Fink, Robert, 221–​22 Flaubert, Gustave, 111–​12 Foucault, Michel, 150–​51, 162–​63 fountains, 86–​90, 151–​52, 154, 179, 197, 262, 264 Franck, César, 10 Freud, Sigmund, 12, 50, 229, 252–​53, 267–​68, 290–​91,  292 Fuller, Loïe, 99–​100n.31, 231–​35, 232f, 255 Furrer, Beat, 175–​76   gamelan, 19, 56, 134, 167–​68n.35, 220–​21 gardens, 89–​90, 129–​30, 154, 177–​78, 179–​85,  214–​15 Gauguin, Paul, 19 Gautier, Jean-​François, 10, 279–​80 Gautier, Théophile, 45, 111, 160–​61 George, Stefan, 184–​85 Gide, André, 41n.51 Goehr, Lydia, 15n.63 grammar, 17–​18, 24–​25, 35–​36, 40, 42–​43, 44–​45, 50, 96–​97, 108, 112, 144, 169–​ 70, 197, 205, 206–​8, 217, 254, 259, 268–​69, 270, 271–​72, 274, 278, 281, 292, 294 Grayling, A. C., 24–​25 Grisey, Gérard, 14–​15, 20, 163, 169–​70, 274, 281 Les chants de l’amour,  34–​35 Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil, 163, 163n.28, 266–​67n.28 Vortex temporum, 163, 167–​68, 179, 179n.23 Guillot, Mathieu, 78, 175–​76 Guiraud, Ernest, 50 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 7   Haas, Georg Friedrich, 172 Hahn, Reynaldo, 110

368 Index Handel, George Frideric, 221–​22 Hanon, Charles-​Louis, 208 Hart, Brian, 124, 124n.12 Harvey, Jonathan Advaya, 145, 225–​26 Birdconcerto with Pianosong, 35n.15,  162–​63 Cello Concerto, 225–​26 Death of Light, Light of Death,  162–​63 From Silence, 162–​63, 189 Mortuos plango, vivos voco,  167–​68 Speakings,  34–​35 Haydn, Joseph, 189, 254–​55, 265 Hazlitt, William 67–​68 Hegel, G. W. F., 4–​5n.16, 12, 17–​18n.73, 19–​20n.83, 40, 83–​84, 286–​87, 291,  300–​1 Heidegger, Martin, 4–​5n.16, 19–​20, 19–​ 20n.83, 23–​24, 81–​82, 115–​16, 126, 195, 247, 285–​86, 289–​90 Hertmans, Stefan, 44 Hervé, Jean-​Luc, 163, 281 heterotopias, 150–​51, 154–​55, 162–​63, 182–​83, 185, 194, 267n.30, 270–​71 Hodeir, André, 11 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 15–​16 Hokusai, Katsushika, 186–​88, 188f Hölderlin, Friedrich, 23–​24 Honegger, Arthur, 222 Howat, Roy, 189–​90, 191 Huebner, Stephen, 151–​52 Hugo, Victor, 196–​97 Husserl, Edmund, 19–​20, 19–​20n.83, 24, 229, 248, 257, 287–​88   Ihde, Don, 229 Impressionism, 11, 92–​93, 144, 147–​48, 155, 188–​89, 214–​16, 234n.17, 292 ineffability, 2, 5–​6 infant directed speech, 38, 39, 46, 294 IRCAM (Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/​musique), 34–​35n.12 Ives, Charles, 10–​11, 33n.5   Janáček, Leoš, 10–​11, 33n.5, 211–​12, 235–​36,  255

Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 2–​3, 32–​33, 36, 37–​ 40, 44–​45, 49, 55, 76, 78, 80, 89–​90, 99, 111, 115, 126, 128–​29, 139–​40, 141–​42, 144–​46, 151, 173, 186–​88, 194–​95, 196, 197–​98, 211, 223, 241–​ 43, 254–​55, 259–​60, 268–​70, 271, 277, 278, 285n.9, 288, 307–​8 Johnson, Graham, 179n.24 Jone, Hildegard, 162–​63 jouissance, 36–​37, 121, 174, 193, 203, 221–​22,  236–​37 Joyce, James, 51, 108, 195–​96 Jung, Carl, 220   Kafka, Franz, 40 Kagel, Mauricio, 10–​11 Kandinsky, Wassily, 19, 233–​34, 276–​77 Kane, Brian, 169–​70 Kant, Immanuel, 4–​5, 12, 16, 17–​18n.73, 22, 67–​68, 173, 294–​95, 296–​97 Kerman, Joseph, 7 Kierkegaard, Søren, 27–​28, 43–​44, 220, 221, 289 Klee, Paul, 149–​50, 188, 266, 291 Klein, Michael, 36–​37 Klimt, Gustav, 123–​24, 222–​23, 263–​64 Klingsor, Tristan, 271 knowing, 17, 22, 23–​24, 25, 26, 96–​97, 247–​57, 285, 287, 291 Kohn, Eduardo, 273 Kramer, Lawrence, 3–​4, 112 Kraus, Karl. 183 Kristeva, Julia, 18, 20–​21, 23–​24, 206–​7, 252–​53, 254–​55, 267–​68, 269,  290–​91   de La Ville de Mirmont, Jean, 45 Laban, Rudolf, 230–​31, 233–​34 Lacan, Jacques, 20–​21, 256, 267–​68,  290–​91 Lachemann, Helmut, 10–​11, 13, 211–​12,  255 landscape, 22–​23, 78, 129, 130, 144–​45, 147–​48, 171–​79, 186–​98, 208–​9, 226–​ 27, 235–​36, 256–​57, 273–​74, 288 Laporte, Roger, 97–​98 Leach, Elizabeth Eva, 38–​39 Leiris, Michel, 15

Index  369 Lévy-​Bruhl, Lucien, 251 Ligeti, György, 10–​11, 13, 142–​43, 254–​55,  260 Études, 208, 211–​12 Lux aeterna,  34–​35 de Lisle, Leconte, 237–​38, 243–​44 listening, 4–​5, 4–​5n.16, 8–​9, 28, 40, 55, 64–​66, 73–​74, 79–​80, 83–​84, 115–​16, 141, 156, 162–​63, 169–​70, 173, 176, 178–​79, 182, 183, 188–​89, 196–​97, 216–​17, 220, 231–​32, 248, 249, 264–​ 65, 285–​86, 291, 298–​99, 301, 303–​4 Liszt, Franz, 10, 89–​90, 208, 210–​11, 267 logic of sense, 93, 139, 235–​36, 281–​82 Long, Marguerite, 201, 204–​5n.5, 236 Louÿs, Pierre, 114, 222–​23, 287–​88 Lukács, Georg, 284 Lutosławski, Witold, 150–​51, 267 Lyotard, Jean-​François, 9, 20–​21, 36–​ 37n.24, 268, 287–​88, 289–​92, 306   Macfarlane, Robert, 18n.78, 273–​74, 288 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 56–​59, 61–​66, 68–​ 69, 74, 75–​78, 79–​80, 81, 82, 147, 160, 182–​83, 214–​15, 244–​45,  268 Magritte, René, 126 Mahler, Gustav, 12, 27, 55, 124, 140, 159–​ 61, 168, 184–​85, 196, 233–​34, 288–​89 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 11, 14, 15–​16, 19–​20, 23–​25, 41–​52, 71–​72, 75–​80, 81, 85–​116, 119–​22, 126, 137–​38, 141, 145–​46, 147, 148–​49, 169–​70, 174–​ 77, 183–​84, 188–​89, 195–​96, 206, 214–​15, 219, 223, 230–​33, 234, 248, 250, 267–​68, 269, 276–​77, 281–​82, 284, 288, 289–​90, 298–​99, 304, 305 L’après-​midi d’un faune, 108–​10, 113–​14, 115n.67, 123–​24, 140, 163–​64, 183–​84, 235–​36,  268 Un coup de dés, 42–​43, 42f, 47, 50–​51, 102, 108, 176, 186, 194–​95, 197, 221, 223, 260–​61, 275 Mallet, Marie-​Louise, 4n.15 Manet, Édouard, 76–​78, 77f, 92, 137–​38, 217,  253–​54 March, Daniel, 145–​46 Marestan, Jean, 223

Marion, Jean-​Luc, 23–​24, 26, 115–​16, 221, 253–​54,  303–​4 Marnold, Jean, 197 Masahide, Mizuta, 47 Matisse, Henri, 156–​58, 157f, 223n.58 Matthews, Max, 280–​81 Mauthner, Fritz, 266, 300–​1, 305 McCombie, Elizabeth, 47–​48, 87n.3, 90–​91,  112 McGilchrist, Iain, 1–​2n.4, 22n.93, 276, 278 McGuinness, Patrick, 57–​59 McQuinn, Julie, 222–​23 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice, 19–​20, 23–​24, 25, 26, 99, 115–​16, 126, 149–​50, 157–​ 58, 168, 169–​70, 178, 181, 182, 198, 208, 214–​17, 226–​27, 247, 248–​51, 257, 273–​74, 276, 277, 288–​90, 291–​ 92, 297, 300 Messager, André, 79 Messiaen, Olivier, 10–​11, 14–​15, 48–​49, 155, 176–​77, 179, 185, 235–​36 Des canyons aux étoiles, 179 Éclairs sur l’au-​delà,  162–​63 Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum,  167–​68 Poèmes pour Mi,  33–​34 Quatour pour le fin du temps,  33–​34 Réveil des Oiseaux, 35n.15, Turangalîla Symphony, 33–​34, 45n.57, 182 Vingts regards sur l’enfant Jesus,  48–​49 Michelangelo, 2 microtones,  34–​35 mirrors, 51, 86–​87, 125–​26, 147–​56, 158–​59, 161–​63, 164, 166, 225–​26, 256–​57,  292 mise-​en-​abîme, 98–​99, 304 Mithen, Steven, 293–​94, 296 modernity, 4–​5n.16, 7, 17–​18, 24, 138–​39, 173, 183–​84, 217, 256–​57, 267, 283–​ 84, 300–​1, 307 modernism, 12–​15, 17–​18, 19, 101, 126, 159–​61, 166, 252–​53, 261, 266, 274, 276–​77, 279, 283–​84,  286–​87 Mompou, Federico, 259–​60 Mondrian, Piet, 255

370 Index Monet, Claude, 137–​38, 144, 147–​51, 148f, 149f, 154–​56, 158–​59, 159f, 167, 168, 187f, 217, 292 Monteverdi, Claudio, 11 Moseley, Roger, 208, 266n.26 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 185, 220,  254–​55 Murail, Tristan, 14–​15, 33–​34n.7, 56, 93–​ 94, 115, 161–​62, 169–​70, 185, 260, 265, 271, 274 Au-​delà du mur du son,  162–​63 Bois flotté, 161 Estuaire, 161 Gondwana, 161–​62, 271 Le partage des eaux, 145, 161, 279–​80 Les miroirs étendus, 33–​34n.7,  161–​62 L’Esprits des dunes, 161 Les septs paroles du Christ en croix, 34–​35,  93–​94 Reflections/​Reflets,  161–​62 Sillages, 145, 196 Tellur, 211–​12n.21 Vues aériennes,  137–​38 music and the body, 1–​3, 4, 5–​6, 12–​14, 16, 25, 64, 229–​30 music and the brain, 2–​3, 276 music and evolution, 2, 293–​94 musical logic, 3, 4–​5, 13–​14, 16, 27, 50, 266–​72,  281 musical sense, 14, 17–​18, 49, 197, 281–​82 musicology, 1, 2, 4–​5, 6–​9, 20–​21, 24, 50, 205, 254, 265–​66, 278–​79, 287, 289, 291–​92, 301,  303–​7 musique concrète, 10–​11, 13, 196, 248n.35 Mussorgsky, Modest, 10, 262–​63 muteness (of music), 1–​2, 4, 9, 12–​13, 59–​ 61, 75–​84, 93, 101–​8, 111, 142–​43, 154, 169, 174, 175–​76, 180, 181, 234, 254, 287, 290–​91, 306–​7   naïvety, 4, 8–​9, 141–​42, 201–​2, 266, 287–​ 88, 289, 297–​98 Nancarrow, Conlon, 208 Nancy, Jean-​Luc, 4–​5, 19, 23–​24, 26, 83, 115–​16, 126, 127–​28, 142, 157–​58, 166–​67, 169–​70, 174–​75, 221, 226–​ 27, 229, 249, 256, 276–​77, 283, 285, 286, 288, 297, 301, 305

narrative, 27, 76–​78 Neoclassicism, 56 Neubauer, John, 20n.87 Nichols, Roger, 124 Nieminen, Risto, 162–​63 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7–​8n.31, 12, 24, 43–​ 44, 168–​69, 266, 276, 284 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 123–​24, 233–​34, 236n.20 non-​identity, 2, 3, 250, 256, 304–​5, 307 Norris, Christopher, 219–​20 Novalis,  300–​1   Odello, Laura, 9, 40 O’Hagan, Peter, 50–​51 Ohana, Maurice, 208 ondes martenot, 33–​34, 161–​62 Ondine, 37–​38, 142–​43, 245–​46n.30, 263,  264–​65 ornament 209–​10,  263–​64 Oskala, Anni, 34n.9, 94 ostinato, 45, 87–​88 Ovid, 113–​14, 140, 165–​66   Paris Exhibition of 1889, 19, 56 particularity, 4–​6, 13, 16, 20–​22, 25, 26–​ 27, 137–​38, 155, 169–​70, 173–​74, 213–​14, 220, 226–​27, 248, 254, 277, 278, 281–​82, 285, 289–​90, 291, 301, 303–​4, 306, 308 Pasler, Jann, 55 Pater, Walter, 126–​27 Pearson, Roger, 41, 99–​100, 99–​100n.35, 104–​5n.39,  107 perception, 4–​5, 14–​15, 21–​23, 25–​26, 126–​27, 156–​58, 175–​76, 177–​78, 188–​89, 215, 281, 296–​97 phenomenology, 25, 162–​63, 173, 175–​76, 229–​30, 247–​53, 281, 289 Plath, Sylvia, 271–​72 Plato, 4–​5, 9, 15–​16, 17–​18, 40–​41, 127–​28,  265–​66 pleasure, 36, 50–​52, 209–​11, 218, 222–​23,  263–​64 Picasso, Pablo, 19 Pissarro, Camille, 217 Poe, Edgar Allen, 44–​45, 59, 168 Pre-​Raphaelites,  222–​23

Index  371 presence, 7, 18–​19, 26, 38, 61, 64–​67, 70–​ 71, 74, 88–​89, 90–​91, 94–​96, 98–​100, 110, 113–​15, 120–​23, 125–​28, 130, 134–​40, 142–​43, 144–​45, 157–​58, 169, 171–​72, 173–​74, 175–​76, 177, 180, 181, 183–​84, 189, 218, 221–​22, 226, 230, 240–​41, 244–​45, 250–​51, 253–​54, 255–​56, 264–​65, 285–​86, 299, 308 Proust, Marcel, 5, 19–​20, 23–​24, 70–​71, 98–​99, 137–​38, 158–​59, 169, 239–​40, 250, 254–​55, 279, 293, 296, 297, 299–​300,  306–​8   Rackham, Arthur, 245–​46, 245–​46n.30 Raffman, Diana, 17n.70 Rancière, Jacques, 14–​15, 23–​24, 41, 232–​33,  234–​35 Ravel, Maurice, 14–​15, 33, 50, 85n.1, 89–​90, 110, 142–​43, 169–​70, 185, 220–​21,  261–​65 Bolero, 222 Daphnis et Chloé, 33n.5, 165–​66, 189 Gaspard de la nuit, 142–​43, 263, 264–​65 Histoires naturelles, 152–​53n.11 Jeux d’eau, 151–​52, 211–​12, 259–​60,  261–​64 L’enfant et les sortilèges, 185, 235–​36 Miroirs, 142–​43, 167–​68, 263, 266–​67 Shéhérazade, 164–​65, 271 Redon, Odilon, 271 de Régnier, Henri, 151–​52, 263–​64 Reich, Steve, 211–​12 Renoir, Pierre-​Auguste, 217 representation, 27, 35, 37–​38, 50–​51, 67–​ 68, 79, 82, 99–​100, 111–​13, 126n.20, 147–​48, 151, 155–​56, 173, 188–​89, 211, 215, 217, 220, 233, 235, 246–​47, 248, 251–​52, 255, 264–​65, 271, 279–​ 80, 286–​87, 292, 296–​97 resonance, 64–​66, 82, 107, 115, 141, 168, 177, 201, 216–​17, 239–​40, 244–​45 Reyland, Nicholas, 150–​51, 267n.30 rhapsody, 64–​67, 224 Riikonen, Taina, 34n.9 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 40 Rimbaud, Arthur, 11, 47n.61, 283–​84 Rimsky-​Korsakov, Nikolai, 10, 38–​39

Rings, Steven, 2–​3n.9, 144–​45, 240–​41 Risset, Jean-​Claude, 13, 176, 265, 280–​81 Sud, 167–​68, 176–​77, 265 Roberts, Paul, 167–​68n.35, 211n.19 Rodenbach, Georges, 168 Rodin, Auguste, xxf, 1–​2, 40–​41, 67–​68, 76–​78, 80, 164, 210–​11 Rolf, Marie, 87n.3, 87n.4, 87n.5, 91–​92n.10, 120–​21n.2, 121n.6, 121–​22n.8 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 122n.10, 222–​23 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques, 18–​19, 20n.87, 123, 138, 139, 252–​53 Rubin, James, 76–​78 Rumph, Stephen, 134–​35n.36   Saariaho, Kaija, 14–​15, 33, 48–​49, 93–​94, 155, 162–​63, 169–​70, 185, 265, 267, 271–​72,  274 Cendres,  145–​46 Du cristal…à la fumée, 145–​46,  162–​63 From the Grammar of Dreams,  271–​72 L’amour de loin, 34, 125–​26, 279–​80 Lonh, 94 Nuits, adieux, 94, 94n.19 Nymphéa/​Nymphéa Reflection, 94, 155–​56,  162–​63 Oltra Mar, 34, 196 Quatre instants,  137–​38 Satie, Erik, 246–​47 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 18, 18n.78, 183–​84,  256–​57 Scelsi, Giacinto, 10–​11, 13 Schaeffer, Pierre, 13, 176 Schaeffner, André, 11 Schenker, Heinrich, 262–​63 Scherer, Jacques, 50–​51 Scherzinger, Martin, 24 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 19 Schnebel, Dieter, 13 Schneider, Édouard, 263–​64 Schoenberg, Arnold, 11–​12, 13, 49–​50, 55, 75–​76, 129, 159–​60, 166, 184–​85, 214–​15, 233–​34, 262–​63, 265,  276–​77 Schubert, Franz, 262–​63 Schumann, Robert, 10, 160–​61, 206–​8, 254, 255, 262–​63 Sciarrino, Salvatore, 13

372 Index Seel, Martin, 22–​23, 26, 126–​28, 177, 276–​ 77, 291, 302 serialism, 12–​13, 34–​35, 49–​50, 100 Serres, Michel, 8–​9n.33, 21–​24, 26, 42n.53, 169–​70, 173, 176, 183–​84, 212–​15, 230, 234–​35, 252–​53, 276–​77, 288, 291,  297–​99 Seurat, Georges, 158–​59, 217 Shakespeare, William, 185, 203–​4n.4,  245–​46 Shepherd, Nan, 273–​74, 288 Sibelius, Jean, 10–​11, 12–​13, 75–​76 silence, 8–​9, 44, 46, 56–​58, 59–​61, 67–​68, 76–​82, 99, 104, 108–​10, 164, 175–​76, 183, 283–​84,  290–​91 Simmel, Georg, 214–​15 sirens, 31–​52, 33n.4, 113–​14, 123–​24, 153–​ 54, 165, 177, 194–​95, 197, 271, 298 Solomos, Makis, 13, 185 sonnet form, 51, 99–​100, 99–​100n.33, 104, 108–​9,  151 Sontag, Susan, 6–​8, 219–​20, 229 sound synthesis, 13 Souris, André, 259–​60 Spampinato, Francesco, 144–​45, 168–​69,  259–​60 spectralism, 1n.1, 13, 26, 49, 127–​28, 155, 161–​62, 259–​60,  280–​81 Steiner, George, 5–​6, 39–​40, 283–​85, 296 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 50–​51, 137–​38 Stoullig, Edmond, 56–​58, 96–​97 Strauss, Richard, 55, 56–​57, 67–​68, 172 Stravinsky, Igor, 11, 12–​13, 19, 48–​49, 115, 129 Le Rossignol, 33–​34, 38–​39, 42–​43,  102–​4 Le sacre de printemps,  233–​34 Stumpf, Carl, 304n.82 swans 79, 102–​4, 152–​53, 231–​32, 281–​82 Symbolism, 8–​9, 53–​55, 67–​68, 111–​13, 155, 179, 180–​85, 267 symmetry, 51, 86–​87, 150, 236–​37, 292 symphony, 48–​49, 124, 124n.12, 175, 186, 193–​94,  196 Szendy, Peter, 303–​4   Tadié, Jean-​Yves, 268–​69,  279–​80 Takemitsu, Toru, 10–​11, 182, 185, 267

Tarkovsky, Arseny, 93–​94, 156 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 262–​63 Tcherepnin, Alexander, 33n.5, 165–​66 Thomas, Downing A., 20n.87 thresholds, 64–​67, 81, 82–​83, 99–​100, 110, 113, 135–​37, 151, 153, 156–​65, 166–​67, 168, 174–​75, 176–​77, 181, 191, 225 Tomlinson, Gary, 293–​96 tonality, 3, 13, 17–​18, 44–​45, 48–​49, 50, 82, 137–​38, 179, 197, 218, 220–​21, 226, 254–​55, 261–​64,  270 touch, 38, 64, 66–​68, 76, 201–​27, 237, 238, 251, 256, 298 Trezise, Simon, 37, 48, 124, 124n.12, 259n.2 Turner, J. M. W., 23–​24, 67–​68, 277–​78   Valéry, Paul, 111–​12 Van Gogh, Vincent, 11, 144, 248, 299, 299f Van Lerberghe, Charles, 179n.24, 180–​85,  233–​34 Varèse, Edgard, 14–​15, 56, 152–​53, 167–​68 Vasnier, Marie-​Blanche, 121, 121n.4, 129, 130–​31,  243–​44 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 33n.5, 35n.15,  235–​36 Vecchione, Bernard, 259–​60 veils, 32–​33, 126–​27, 141–​42, 144–​45, 147, 175–​76, 214–​15, 217, 232–​33,  234–​37 Verlaine, Paul, 14, 111, 112, 114, 121–​ 22n.7, 123–​24, 128–​40, 150–​51, 213–​ 15, 231, 237–​38, 239–​40, 244, 246–​47 vertige, 95–​99, 113, 223, 225–​26, 231, 260, 284 Viennese classicism, 17–​18 vocalise, 33–​35, 38–​39, 42–​43, 100–​2,  129–​30 vocality, 36–​37n.24, 37–​38, 38n.35 voice, 5, 15, 18–​19, 31–​41, 42–​43, 55, 59–​ 62, 66–​67, 83–​84, 90–​91, 101–​2, 104, 110–​11, 120–​21, 122–​23, 130–​31, 138, 156, 163, 179, 183–​84, 186, 194–​ 95, 221–​22, 271–​72, 298 Vuillermoz, Emile, 201   Wagner, Richard, 10, 12, 19, 56, 68–​69,  75–​76,

Index  373 Das Rheingold, 74, 189 Parsifal, 35–​36, 160 Siegfried,  33–​34 Tannhäuser,  35–​36 Tristan und Isolde, 97–​98, 125–​26, 131, 135–​37, 191, 226, 244–​45 Wesendoncklieder, 226 Waterhouse, John William, 165–​66 Watteau, Jean-​Antoine, 36–​37, 123–​24, 129,  213–​14 Webern, Anton, 104, 143–​44, 159–​61, 162–​63, 166n.33, 168, 255, 262–​63 Wellberry, David, 251–​52 Wellmer, Albrecht, 1, 13, 17–​18n.71, 305, 307–​8n.85 Wenk, Arthur, 87n.3, 89–​90, 91–​92n.10, 115,  149–​50 Wheeldon, Marianne, 10n.48, 87n.3

Whittall, Arnold, 10–​11 Wilde, Oscar, 99–​100n.31 Wiesenthal, Grete, 233–​34 Wigman, Mary, 233–​34, 255 Wiskus, Jessica, 23–​24, 168, 169, 215–​17, 250 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 23–​25, 24n.104, 25n.106, 25–​26n.107, 247, 256–​57,  283–​84 wordless voices, 31–​41, 32–​33n.1, 33n.4, 33n.5, 165–​66, 183   Xenakis, Iannis, 10–​11, 13, 34–​35, 176, 254–​55,  260   Youens, Susan, 112   Zank, Stephen, 261–​62 Zbikowski, Lawrence M., 9–​10