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 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.

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.

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 XX^e 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).

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 XX^e et XXI^e 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).

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).

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.

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.

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).

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 <http://www.fabermusic.com/repertoire/speakings-5282>.

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.

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.

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.

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 1^st 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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, 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 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 <http://saariaho.org/works/nymphea/>

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.

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).

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).

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-Raphaelite 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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] 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

57.Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music, 278.

58.Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music, 278.

59.Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music, 288–89.

60.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.

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.