PART II

Appearing

4

Coming to presence

Apparition

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 An early work, composed when the composer was just 21 and unpublished until after his death, ‘Apparition’ nevertheless embodies a definitive theme of Debussy’s music.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

It is well known that Debussy wrote this song for the singer Marie Vasnier. Margaret Cobb calls her the composer’s ‘first great love’ and cites her as the inspiration for most of his early songs, twenty-five of which he dedicated to her.⁴ Debussy’s demand in ‘Apparition’ for the singer’s embodied jouissance was no doubt a way of choreographing through musical performance a desire that exceeded his music. And ‘the fairy capped with light’ was surely herself the dedicatee of the volume of thirteen songs he gave Madame Vasnier in 1885 before leaving for Rome.⁵ All this might seem a world away from the empty scene of ‘Soupir’ (1913) and yet, despite the gap of three decades, there are some striking musical and structural parallels.⁶ Indeed, one might hear ‘Soupir’ as a late reflection upon the earlier song, for all that its reticence contrasts so strongly with the effusiveness of ‘Apparition’. Beyond both the parallels and differences, what binds these songs together is their approach to the same theme – the appearing of the beloved. Except, of course, in ‘Soupir’ the beloved does not appear; or at least, the words stage an absence even while the sonorous ending of the music makes good its promise of presence.

We could draw an obvious conclusion: the 21-year-old composer, in love with the beautiful soprano he cannot have, writes a song which nevertheless conjures her bodily presence; three decades later, the 51-year-old (locked into a now unhappy marriage with another soprano he had courted from her first marriage) recalls wistfully a fullness of presence he no longer experiences. One might line up the songs against Debussy’s biography in that way, but to what end? The music presents something far more contradictory and of much greater interest. There is no simple trajectory here from lyrical fullness to declamatory sparseness, and neither biography (youthful effusion to middle-age reserve) nor style history (romantic expression to modernist detachment) provides an adequate account. Just as Mallarmé’s poetry is located on the border between the evocation of presence and absence, so too is Debussy’s music; the early works are no less concerned with an aesthetics of absence than the later works. From this point of view, Debussy’s settings of Apparition and Soupir, written thirty years apart, bookend a corpus of songs with a constantly recurring theme: the cultivation of emptiness as the flipside of an ecstatic moment of appearing. Mallarmé composed these two poems within a few months of each other, suggesting a close kinship in their exploration of different sides of the same theme;⁷ that Debussy set them thirty years apart betokens less a sense of separation and difference than a sense of return. Indeed, such an idea is reinforced by the intriguing suggestion that, at the same time as he was working on the Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, Debussy was also sketching out a new setting of Apparition. The evidence is a notebook from 1913, now sadly lost, containing sketches for both Soupir and a new version of Apparition.⁸

One could read the whole of Debussy’s work in terms of his gradual transformation of the enactment of appearing, moving from the presentation of a realised and fulsome presence to a fragile sense of appearing that flickers between presence and absence. His works repeatedly stage the act of appearing itself, a trajectory that defines both the musical material and the formal process. In relation to his early orchestral work, Printemps (1887), an essay in appearing, he wrote: ‘I would like to express the slow, laborious birth of beings and things in nature, then the mounting florescence and finally a burst of joy at being reborn to a new life, as it were.’⁹ A more complex enactment of appearing is already evident in the cantata La damoiselle élue, completed two years later in 1889, Debussy’s most extensive work to date, lasting around twenty minutes and scored for two soprano soloists, female chorus, and orchestra. A curiously archaic piece it was, nevertheless, the work of relative youth,¹⁰ the third of Debussy’s envois written in Rome. The entire piece is structured around the preparation of an arrival that does not take place, the summoning of someone who does not appear. It is made up of a succession of interleaved preparatory gestures: the orchestra prepares the arrival of the chorus, which sets up the arrival of the narrator. Together they prepare for the arrival of the Damozel who herself waits for the Beloved to appear. Each successive arrival is a new step in a process of expectation, a wave-like series of preparations, fold upon fold. Moving from past-tense narration, in the declamatory style of the chorus, to the present-tense expectation of the Damozel’s lyricism, the music is shaped by a sonorous and melodic expansion towards the threshold of arrival, only to collapse without fulfilment.

And yet, although the Beloved never arrives, his presence is powerfully evoked by the voice of the Damozel. When it is finally heard, her voice is itself a kind of realised presence: as the text has it, ‘Her voice was like the voice the stars had when they sang together’. She begins ‘doux et simplement’, her calm, syllabic setting, with its closed ambit of modal pitches, recalling the presence of the Beloved as he was on earth. But its rising contour, unfolding in a series of waves, outlines her anticipation of his arrival. The restrained beginning gives way to a richness of voice, orchestration, harmony, and melody that reaches an operatic intensity for the line ‘ensemble, moi et lui’. The voice, momentarily, remembers: it restores lost presence, reunites what is broken, before giving way once more to the empty present. The Damozel’s final, unaccompanied line is: ‘All of this will be when he comes’ (Tout ceci sera quand il viendra), to which the chorus add a blank stage direction: ‘She falls silent’ (Elle se tut). The strings offer a brief consolation and the chorus return with a wordless ‘ah’ that seems to echo the last syllable of the narrator’s ‘pleura’.

The voice, however, is singularly lacking in one of the most famous musical explorations of appearing, Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894), a lack all the more pointed given the centrality of the voice to Mallarmé’s poem. Where Mallarmé muses on the capacity of music and poetry to make lost presence (re)appear, siding with the voice (poetry) over music (the discarded flute) only to concede that the fullness of presence is what continually eludes language, Debussy’s Prélude takes a different turn. The music of the flute is precisely a prelude to appearance, the framing gesture that both anticipates presence and follows its departure. In between, the central section of Debussy’s ternary form stages a moment of appearing, ‘shocking’ in its plenitude; the D♭ major tonality, the achingly slow unison melody with its central leap upward of a compound 4th, heard first in a wind choir and then, until this point withheld, with the full tone of unison strings – all this adds up to a coming to presence for which Mallarmé’s Faun longs but cannot grasp. It is a powerful gap that was brought out in Nijinsky’s choreography of the piece in 1912. Despite Debussy’s negative assessment, the ballet captures something essential about this play between music and language, presence and absence. The infamous ending, as the faun climbs back to the solitude of his rock, holding a scarf dropped by one of the nymphs, offers a telling commentary. What is this scarf if not a veil (voile)? The artist ventures out into the world in search of presence, but cannot grasp the object of his desire (because it is ungraspable). Though presence was conjured, briefly, in all its over-abundant richness, afterwards there is only a trace – a mere veil. The much-discussed final gesture of Nijinsky’s faun – an angular jerking of the body simulating masturbation – anticipates Derrida writing on Rousseau.¹¹

A year after the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed Debussy’s new ballet score, Jeux (1913). Just as a fascinating comparison emerges across three decades between ‘Apparition’ (1884) and ‘Soupir’ (1913), a similar one can be found, across two decades, between the Prélude (1894) and Jeux (1913). There is a strange parallelism between their scenarios. In the Prélude, the faun pursues two nymphs; in Jeux, a young male tennis player pursues two young women. The later work, similarly, hinges on the arrival of (almost) nothing. In Jeux, the curtain rises on an empty park. A tennis ball falls on stage; a young man appears but then disappears. The ‘two timid and curious girls’ appear, and so on. The scenario is a framing of ‘nothing’, a lightness of being that the ballet as a whole will play out, positioning it as a wry twentieth-century take on Watteau’s fêtes, which had preoccupied Debussy since his Verlaine settings in the 1880s. Like the nymphs in Mallarmé’s L’après-midi d’un faune, like the sirens and water-snakes in Klimt’s paintings, the two young girls are self-sufficient, wrapped up in themselves. The young man watches them dance. He dances with each of them before all three dance together. A triple kiss ‘mingles them in one ecstasy’. A tennis ball falls at their feet; they run away into the depths of the nocturnal park. Debussy’s music serves this scenario only in the most general of ways; the extended passages of music between stage instructions highlight not material actions as such, but the vast gap between these and the infinite play of appearing and disappearing heard in the music.

Such an idea might equally sum up Debussy’s earlier anti-symphony, La mer (1903–05), a work he first called Trois esquisses symphoniques. On the one hand, since this work still has a foot in the tradition of the nineteenth-century symphony, both the first and last movements end with what seem like affirmative acts of arrival, with a brass chorale signalling a definitive moment of appearance.¹² On the other, nothing could be further from the acts of symphonic affirmation in Mahler with which La mer is broadly contemporary. Debussy’s work deploys all the outward material of a symphony – a full orchestra; a series of connected movements; processes of exposition, development, and return; recurrent motifs; and a structural weight accorded to the finale – and yet it seems to do so to an opposite end. The recurrence of motifs might suggest symphonic technique but they work quite differently here; as Mark DeVoto points out, Debussy’s practice ‘is as far as it could be from the Austro-German tradition of motivic development’.¹³ The use of a full orchestra might seem to suggest symphonic music, but often produces the same bewilderment Roger Nichols found in Jeux: ‘So much solid, material presence to produce sounds that are ethereal, evanescent, questioning.’¹⁴ Time and again, across the three movements of La mer, moments of climactic arrival turn out to be empty and short-lived, while far more striking are the unprepared acts of appearing. Compare, for example, in ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’, the brash and collapsing fifths motif at b. 76 which marks the climax of the whole of the first section, and the astonishing theme scored for divisi cellos (b. 84) which arises out of the nothingness that follows it.¹⁵

This focus on the process of appearing itself, rather than the substance of what appears, shapes a whole tradition of music ‘after Debussy’. It is the central theme, for instance, of Kaija Saariaho’s opera L’amour de loin (2000). The entire opera is structured around the idea of traversing the space designated by the French term Outremer – literally, overseas – in order to come to presence. In the medieval period in which the opera is set, the term designated the crusader states, including Tripoli, which is the home of the opera’s heroine, Clémence, hence her line: ‘I am the poet’s Outremer, and the poet is my Outremer’. But the yearning across distance of the songs of the troubadour Jaufré Rudel, transposed by Amin Maalouf’s libretto, is strung out over a musical soundscape which, from the beginning, already sounds the fullness of presence for which the entire ‘action’ longs. Jaufré’s opening scene thematises the essential absence at the heart of words: ‘My own words call only to other words, my verses call only to other verses.’ It is nevertheless through language that his desire is not only expressed but made. It is the distant beloved, as described by the Pilgrim, with whom Jaufré falls in love; or rather, he transposes his pre-existing but objectless desire onto the idea described by the Pilgrim. Words not only express his desire but provoke it: ‘Speak again, friend, speak to me of her’, Jaufré begs the Pilgrim.

In Act 2, Clémence will similarly be enchanted by one of Jaufré’s songs, related to her by the Pilgrim. The gap, the distance between them, is crucial to this sparking of desire between words and music. ‘Troubadour, I am not beautiful’, sings Clémence, ‘except in the mirror of your words’. Jaufré’s decision, in Act 3, to journey to Tripoli to see Clémence for himself, seals his fate. The sea-journey to full presence is necessarily the closing of the gap and therefore a death. His journey, in the middle of the third act of this five-act opera, divides the work like a central mirror. In order to travel across the sea Jaufré must quit his tower of language and enter into the broad expanse of the language-less sea.¹⁶ In this liminal and wordless space the Pilgrim dreams and sees, through the dreaming of music, his distant beloved (who appears through the presence of her rapturous vocal lines). But by the time Jaufré arrives in Tripoli he is critically ill. The parallels with Tristan are obvious enough, only here it is he that has journeyed across the sea to her, though it is she who will again sing a concluding Liebestod over his dying body. The central problem of the opera – to come to presence or to love from afar, to close the expansive sea of music or maintain the distance of language – is played out in the sustained final monologue of Clémence: presence is affirmed in the containment of a drawn-out resonance, but which nevertheless withdraws into the distance.

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

Jankélévitch’s opposition of apparence and apparition is mirrored in the distinction, underlined by Martin Seel, that aesthetic perception ‘is concerned not with some of its objects’ appearances [Erscheinungen] but with their process of appearing [Erscheinen]’. By the same token, he insists, ‘aesthetic perception is attentiveness to this appearing’.²¹ Music does this especially well because it presents no objects as such; since nothing visible appears, the focus is necessarily directed towards the process, on the movement of coming to presence itself. This is precisely ‘the condition of music’ to which Walter Pater famously suggested ‘all art aspires’. But of course, within its own conditions, music does seem to present objects – from the stable and recurring theme or motif to the material solidity of the orchestra; from the events of musical narratives to the emotions identified by listeners – and it is precisely those objects which music ‘after Debussy’ seems to gently dissolve and deconstruct. The opaque label ‘non-functional’, so often used about Debussy’s harmony, is wonderfully revealing: things do not work the way they used to here. But in gently refusing an earlier functionality, Debussy’s chords stop being things (objects to be ordered in a process of construction) and become the veils by which no-thing appears. This is equally true of Debussy’s orchestration.

In music ‘after Debussy’, philosophy is met by a kind of aesthetic practice that foregrounds the act of appearing, of becoming present rather than the familiar tasks ascribed to an art of mimetic representation or the expression of emotions. As Seel puts it:

concentration on the momentary appearing of things is always at the same time an attentiveness to the situation of perception of their appearing – and thus reflection on the immediate presence in which this perception is executed. Aesthetic attentiveness to what happens in the external world is thus an attentiveness to ourselves too: to the moment here and now. In addition, aesthetic attentiveness to the objects of art is frequently an attentiveness to situations in which we do not find ourselves and perhaps never will: to a moment now and never.²²

Contra Plato, this has nothing to do with the appearing of an idea or a truth in sensuous form. As Seel summarises it bluntly: ‘The basic concept of appearing is not the appearing of something, but appearing, period.’²³ This comes close to the way in which a good deal of music after Debussy works, presenting not objects but the process of coming to presence – the act of appearing itself. In this respect, there is a direct line running between Debussy’s lifelong fascination with the phenomenon of ‘apparition’ and composers’ exploration of sonic ‘spectra’ in the later twentieth century. But this focus on appearing rather than things is also central to an intellectual tradition that links Bergson through to Jean-Luc Nancy, in which the ‘fetishism of presence’, Derrida insists, gives way to a movement, to ‘the continuous advent of presence’. In words that pre-empt later formulations of Nancy, Derrida continues: ‘One must give an active and dynamic meaning to this word. It is presence at work, in the process of presenting itself. This presence is not a state but the becoming-present of presence.’²⁴

It is this insistence on thinking presence as a temporal process that throws a line between music ‘after Debussy’ and the reflexive turn of deconstruction: ‘the presence of the present’, argues Derrida, begins ‘from the fold of the return [ . . . ] from the movement of repetition’.²⁵ Boulez doubtless knew nothing of Derrida when he composed Pli selon pli, but his own musical écriture triangulates the language work of both Derrida and Mallarmé. Only in the fold of return, in repetition, does presence appear – which is to say, only in the poetic act of remaking, of rewriting, and the aesthetic act of rehearing. All three (poet, composer, and philosopher) mount a critique of the metaphysics of presence. But music necessarily does this differently, because it is not caught between the sign and the idea of presence it confers, nor is it thinkable outside of the time of its own temporal unfolding. And while all music is temporal, not all music foregrounds the ‘fold of the return’ in the same way.

Present absence

Jankélévitch’s formulation of music as both ‘present absence’ and ‘absent presence’²⁶ points to a quality of Debussy’s music foregrounded in his song settings of Paul Verlaine’s poetry. Debussy wrote twenty songs on poems by Verlaine, eleven of them drawn from Fêtes galantes (1869).²⁷ His fascination with these poems is often assumed to belong to a specific period of his work but, because many of the early songs were not published during Debussy’s lifetime and those that were often appeared several years after their composition, the prolonged extent of his engagement with them is often missed. Two published sets of three songs each, Fêtes galantes I and Fêtes galantes II, appeared in 1903 and 1904, suggesting these are relatively mature works. In fact, not only was the first a publication of songs written in 1891–92 but, even then, these were new versions of poems originally set in 1882. At that time, Debussy had conceived them as part of a group of five songs he had also titled Fêtes galantes.²⁸ In other words, rather than two sets published a year apart, there are really three sets of Fêtes galantes, each written approximately a decade apart – 1882, 1891–92, and 1904. Although there were no more song settings of Verlaine after 1904, there were unrealised plans in later years (1913–15) for an opéra-ballet titled Fêtes galantes²⁹ and suggestions that the characters of the commedia dell’arte, so ubiquitous in Verlaine’s poetry, still haunt the late instrumental sonatas.³⁰ In short, the elusive figures of Verlaine’s nocturnal landscapes flicker in and out of Debussy’s entire output.

Unpublished in Debussy’s lifetime, Fêtes galantes pour Madame Vasnier (1882) consists of five settings of Verlaine’s poetry which interleave presence and absence. ‘En sourdine’ and ‘Clair de lune’ (the second and fourth of the set) explore sensuous presence as a kind of ecstatic union of the lyrical subject and an absent beloved through a merging of the body with the containing landscape. By contrast, ‘Pantomime’, ‘Mandoline’, and ‘Fantoches’ (songs 1, 3 and 5) are detached and ironic, deploying a historicised musical style to evoke the commedia characters of Verlaine’s poems as distant and alienated figures. Where the two slower songs (nos.2 and 4) create a musical space of quiet interiority and plenitude, the framing songs present fleeting glimpses of multiple characters in swiftly moving and fragmented scenes. Long before Schoenberg turned to the commedia figures in Pierrot Lunaire (1912) or Stravinsky in Petrushka (1911), Debussy had repeatedly explored their uncanny displacements of subjectivity.

Carolyn Abbate has drawn attention, in the case of ‘Mandoline’, to how the whole song is framed by the gesture of the piano in the first and last bars – to all intents and purposes, the mimetic representation of a single plucked note on the mandolin. Like the opening and closing of quotation marks, the piano figure marks the content of the song as an indirect statement – one made in the absence of the speaker. But the device points to a whole series of moves by which both poem and song stage a sense of distance. As Abbate has it:

Verlaine’s Fêtes galantes are ekphrases of landscapes by Watteau. Both paintings and poems deal with the same series of images: courtiers in a garden, talking, singing, and playing, or listening to music. In ‘Mandoline’ Verlaine adopted an ironic voice that reflects the belated mood of Watteau’s iconography: these are not real shepherds and shepherdesses, but ‘givers of serenades’ and ‘pretty listeners’ playacting at pastoral identities, who talk in an eighteenth-century aristocratic garden far removed from prelapsarian Arcadia.³¹

How does Debussy evoke this sense of ‘human serenades past and silenced’ in a real and present song? As Abbate points out, ‘making a song out of this poem must resurrect the very singing it has dismissed as lost’. On one level, she suggests, Debussy ignores this in a song in which ‘innocence is everywhere’, but at the same time both song and singer are clearly framed through devices of ironic distancing. After the words run out, the voice continues with wordless vocalise across a rapidly spiralling series of modulations before the song closes with the ‘plucked’ string. Debussy’s song, Abbate concludes, ‘captures in real time at least two imaginary times: the absent past, when simple serenades were heard all the time, and the present of dead and silent gardens’.³²

Compared to the odd-numbered songs, with their fleeting appearing and disappearing of masked figures, the calm spaciousness of the even-numbered songs, ‘En sourdine’ and ‘Clair de lune’, delivers a sense of ecstatic presence. Verlaine’s En sourdine is a version of the topic of the union of lovers with the closed landscape which contains them. But while the progression of the first four stanzas offers an early version of Debussy’s musical enactment of the dynamics of appearing, the fifth stanza has to find a musical corollary for the poignant reversal of the last couplet of Verlaine’s poem: ‘The voice of our despair / The nightingale will sing’ (Voix de notre désespoir / Le rossignol chantera).

All five of these early settings remained unpublished during Debussy’s lifetime so, in 1903, when he finally saw the publication of Fêtes galantes I, there was no hint of any relation to songs composed twenty years earlier. But the songs published in 1903 were not only written much earlier, in 1891–92, but included revisitings of three of the texts he had set back in 1882 as Fêtes galantes pour Madame Vasnier. The omissions and new ordering are both significant. Where the earlier collection interleaved two songs of ecstatic presence between three songs of alienated absence, Fêtes galantes I reverses this pattern: ‘Fantoches’, the only commedia song to be retained, is now framed by ‘En sourdine’ and ‘Clair de lune’.³³ ‘Fantoches’ is the least changed. Debussy removes the earlier text repetitions and passages of vocalise at the end of stanzas 1 and 3 and replaces them with simpler passages of ‘la-la-la’ (a distant echo of the now absent ‘Mandoline’).

The other two songs, however, are essentially completely new versions which nevertheless retain some features of the earlier settings. The conclusion of those scholars who have made detailed studies of both settings is essentially that the later ones demonstrate Debussy’s development as a composer.³⁴ This is uncontroversial enough, but the relation between the two is more interesting than a progressive narrative alone suggests, not least in terms of what changes and what remains. The rewriting of ‘En sourdine’ is particularly telling. Although it is the earlier version that is marked ‘dans une sonorité très voilée’, it is the later song that is far more veiled. Where, in 1882, the opening vocal line glides down like a languorous sigh from its initial high F♯, ten years later the centre of gravity has definitively shifted; no longer the light, high soprano of Marie Vasnier, the later song is written for a darker toned mezzo who begins the song by declaiming the opening line on a single note, a low D♯ (ten years passing, it seems, is marked by a fall of a minor tenth). Where the structure and word-setting in the first version is conventional, the later one is far more asymmetric and without the rests in the vocal line that had earlier separated each phrase.

The syncopated rhythm of the accompaniment is common to both but whereas, in 1882, it is confined to the repeated right-hand chords, in the later version it generates the piano’s arabesque figure starting on the high G♯ which, in the closing bars, will be identified with the voice of the nightingale. This high G♯ was already heard in the 1882 version, picked out by the left hand in b. 2. In a similar fashion, the semiquaver-triplet figure that characterises the arabesque of the later song is a contraction of the triplet motif of the earlier one (b. 2, right hand; see Examples 4.1a and 4.1b). But, as David Code points out, the harmony is quite different: the 1891 version opens over a clear statement of the “Tristan” chord (in b. 5, in the exact position in which it appears at the start of Wagner’s opera; in b. 1, an octave higher).³⁵ The key of Debussy’s 1892 song is ostensibly B major but the repeated G♯ is like a spinning coin that might resolve either way. Unlike Wagner’s resolution through chromatic ascent, Debussy’s goes the other way – turning the G♯ into the triplet ornament that begins the arabesque, descending past B major (b. 6) to the dark sonority of D♯ minor, timed with the arrival on the final syllable of ‘notre amour’ in b. 8.

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

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

The broader shape of the two versions naturally shows some commonalities. The later version shares with the first a sense of rising motion through the middle section (stanzas 3 and 4), having in common the triplet rhythms and ostinato figures of the accompaniment and a broad sense of ascent in the vocal line. But it is in Debussy’s treatment of the final couplet of Verlaine’s poem that the two versions differ most profoundly. In the 1892 version the voice makes a gradual ascent from its low D♮ (‘laissons-nous persuader’, b. 26) to the high point of the vocal line so far, the E♯ in b. 31. After a re-ascent through bb. 33–35, this E♯ acts as a long-range leading tone for the high F♯ reserved for the climactic couplet of the final stanza – ‘Voix de notre désespoir, / Le rossignol chantera’ (b. 36). Only in this final descending phrase of the song (marked doux et expressif) does Debussy allow a lyrical intensity which, in 1882, had been present from the very start of the song (beginning on the same high F♯). What in 1882 was a pervasive lyrical excess is now withheld until the very end of the song (see Example 4.2). But here, precisely at the end, it is already a sign of what is lost and no longer present – an absence marked by the mournful singing of the nightingale which was, we now realise, present from the very beginning. There is no need to repeat the line of text.

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

The force of this gesture is underlined by the fact that it returns at the end of the third and final song of Fêtes galantes I. The new version of ‘Clair de lune’, like that of ‘En sourdine’, has a desolate quality not present in the earlier one. For all the delicate gamelan-like patterns in the piano, the mournful countermelodies in the middle of the texture (in bb. 9ff. and again at bb. 13ff.) are like the mute voices of the ‘paysages tristes’ of which the poem speaks. If Verlaine’s exquisitely dissonant image, of revellers who sing of love but in the minor key and who do not seem to believe in their own happiness, is not quite matched in Debussy’s first setting, it defines the entire mood of the later one. For all the calm continuity conferred by the regularity of the accompanimental figure, Debussy’s control of harmonic inflection allows for a poignant sense of distance throughout the song. The setting of ‘Ils n’ont pas de croire à leur bonheur’ (bb. 17–18) takes the mezzo voice to the highpoint of the song thus far, on the upper F♯, not just once but four times. And it is to this same F♯ that the voice rises in the closing lines. Three times in a row (in bb. 23, 24, and 25) a richly elaborated V⁷ of B major promises the fullness of presence for which the song desires and which ‘makes the birds dream in the trees and the fountains sob in ecstasy.’ The shift to B♭ major (b. 26) strains for transcendence but, instead, delivers an enharmonic turn to the darkness of D♯ minor (b. 27), just as the voice reaches its climactic F♯ (pianissimo). The link to the parallel moment in ‘En sourdine’ is powerfully made: both lines reach the height of their longing only to collapse back to emptiness (see Example 4.3).

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

This retreat from presence is pursued further in the mournfully empty Fêtes galantes II. The third and final song of that collection, ‘Colloque sentimental’, contains a lengthy quotation from ‘En sourdine’.³⁶ In an extended passage, the later song has the piano recall the song of the nightingale from the earlier one, while the voice delivers a dialogue about past presence and present absence. At the rising of the vocal line for ‘Ah! les beau jours de bonheur indicible’ (Those beautiful days of inexpressible happiness) the voice seems to want to rise towards the same climactic F♯ once more (though here it would be G♭^b). The line rises slowly from to E♭ to F♭ (bb. 35–37) as if it were pushing against the weight of the past. But it reaches no higher; in place of the former brightness of the F♯ it remains on F♭ for ‘indicible’ (unsayable) while the mournful song of the nightingale laments in the piano (see Example 4.4). No wonder Katherine Bergeron talks of ‘unsinging’; it is as if, in these songs, the voice renounces the very presence it should confer.

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

Appearing does not take place where there is too much saying; the noise of signifying obscures presence. Which is why saying nothing, holding oneself silent, is a precondition for mute presence to appear. In Act 4.ii of Debussy’s opera, after Pelléas’s passionate affirmation of finding, in Mélisande, all the beauty of the world, he suddenly stops and asks: ‘Where are you? I can’t hear your breathing anymore.’ She replies, unaccompanied: ‘That’s because I’m looking at you’ (C’est parce que je te regarde). The final syllable is timed with a lateral shift in the harmony and a rich return of orchestral tone. At face value, her answer is obscure. How does her looking at him account for his sense that he can no longer see her? The answer lies in the presence afforded by the music that displaces the apparent absence. In the intensity of the gaze, of an epiphanic encounter with the world, there is ‘no-thing’ to be seen because everything is seen. Debussy’s music flickers across the threshold between the rapturous fullness of Pelléas’s music a moment earlier, to the near silence of Mélisande’s, tracing the move across the threshold between embodied desire for the particular and an immersive sense of totality. This is Debussy’s fragile inversion of ‘the All’ of Isolde’s Liebestod.

Epiphany comes from the Greek epiphainō, to appear. More specifically its two etymological roots carry the sense of shining upon: it is not enough simply to shine, there has to be a surface, an object, an other, to shine upon. When Pelléas truly sees and truly hears Mélisande, he sees the whole of which she is part. The particularity of art functions in the same way: its materiality makes something immaterial become visible, audible, fungible. It makes present. Something similar is reflected in the stylistic shift between ‘Apparition’ and ‘Soupir’, or the early and later settings of Verlaine – a shift from attempting to embody appearing, in an epiphanic moment of fulsome sonic presence, to a later position in which appearing is manifest as luminous emptiness and voluminous silence. Pelléas is caught between the two; he flickers across a threshold where Mélisande comes to meet him from the other side.

It brings us back to Mallarmé’s rapturous account of Manet’s Le linge in which he found the objects dissolved into light and air, anticipating Monet, whose series of haystack paintings provide a good example of how particularity becomes the surface, the material instant/instance, that refracts back light and air – the necessary surface for the ‘shining upon’ of the epiphaneia.³⁷ The haystack caught in different lights highlights a sense of the incompleteness of immediacy; the painting, and the aesthetic encounter it offers, ‘redeems’ the fleeting moment. It is the idea at the centre of Proust’s recherche, that ‘one minute freed from the order of time has recreated in us, in order to feel it, the man freed from the order of time.’³⁸ But where the process of appearing is necessarily a temporal one, the epiphanic moment seems to suspend time. A point in time, it also fills time and, for a moment, redeems what is lost as presence pours itself out in time. Where tonal practice is shaped around a metaphysics of desire – of longing for the fulfilment of directed time, the appearance of a presence not yet arrived (the fate of Tristan) – Debussy quietly inverts this logic, suspending the restlessness of tonal lack, in order for Pelléas to finally hear the fragile voice of Mélisande (‘like a bird from far away’). This notion of the moment would become definitive for music after Debussy. Stockhausen’s idea of ‘moment form’ was traced back by Eimert and others to Debussy’s Jeux.³⁹ Kaija Saariaho thematises the idea in her Quatre instants for soprano and orchestra of 2002.

But isn’t all this talk of appearing and coming to presence simply a naïve reassertion of what Derrida castigates as the metaphysics of presence? It is the central problematic he locates in his critique of Rousseau, in the very essay in which Rousseau contrasts writing’s lack with the presence of speech, an essay powerfully derived from his idea of music. In ‘The Voice That Keeps Silent’, Derrida has in his sights one of the most powerful vehicles of music’s appearing – the human voice – and, in particular, the ‘apparent transcendence’ by which the voice appears to make the signified ‘immediately present to the act of expression’.⁴⁰ The immediacy and self-presence of the voice, for Derrida, masks the gap that always exists between signifier and signified. But Derrida is writing about speech and writing, not about music. His primary target is the idea that speech embodies a presence to which writing can only be secondary and supplementary. But music is not speech, even when it deploys the human voice, because it does not assert the world through language, even when it sets words.

It may seem facile to point out that Derrida, as all philosophers must necessarily do, pursues a question about absence and presence in language through the medium of language. It is striking, once again, that he ignores the question of absence and presence in the medium of music. So my question here is how music thinks through this question about language and music, presence and absence, from the other side. How does music reflect on the relationship between sense, language, and presence? My contention is that it has always done so but that, in the broad period of modernity, it does so with particular urgency. As an instrumental and abstract use of language became more central to the processes of modernity, so the role and status of music grew as a compensation for the loss of presence incurred by that use of language.⁴¹

Derrida’s critique of Rousseau constantly misses the opportunity to think about music. He may be right, that ‘The speech that Rousseau raised above writing is speech as it should be or rather as it should have been’, but then strangely ignores the fact that, in the age of Rousseau, music was already fulfilling a role as the compensation for speech ‘as it should have been’ – literally, in opera and song, figuratively in the instrumental music which imitated it. The extraordinary rise in the status of music from the late eighteenth century onwards is surely not disconnected from the crisis in language, as Derrida locates in it Rousseau, that ‘We are dispossessed of the longed-for presence in the gesture of language by which we attempt to seize it’.⁴²

For Derrida, contra Rousseau, speech can lay no more claim to presence than writing since ‘the phonic signifier is as conventional as the graphic’.⁴³ The spoken word has no more direct relation to what it designates than the written word; both denote a gap and mark an absence. ‘The structure of the sign is determined by the trace or track of that which is forever absent. This other is of course never to be found in its full being.’⁴⁴ But music is not a sign and it does not signify. To be sure, it can signify, but a semiotic function is the least sophisticated and least musical of its operations because it is based on the imitation of non-musical systems. In declining to signify music proceeds by a logic of sense without names and, for that reason, its presentation of presence and absence is different to that of language.

Of course, music is no stranger to marking absence (as every love song underlines) but there are no ‘signs’ in music that are not at the same time some kind of sonic presence. Even in the barest works, concerned solely with traces of emptiness, music still has to sound. Which is why Jankélévitch’s formulation of music as a ‘present absence’ is an apt way of understanding music’s difference to the ‘absent presence’ of language. Where signs point to something absent, musical sounds are defined by their constitutive act of coming to presence, their appearing and subsequent disappearing. But, at the same time, music is not a collection of separate and unrelated sounds. In music, the fragile mortality of each sound is recouped (redeemed, even) in the dynamic unfolding of relations (constellations) into which it is bound. The illusion of music is to keep this apparently infinite process in play – as line, melody, harmony, pulse, rhythm, musical form.

Sixty years before the formulations of Derrida, Debussy’s music richly explores the definitive gap between sound and sign, music and language. It does so neither metaphorically nor by some accidental parallel to the sophistication of Derrida’s later linguistic compositions. Debussy’s music is not just ‘a bit like’ Derrida’s philosophy; it offers a precisely differentiated counterpoint to that philosophy. Debussy’s highly articulate music approaches the same problems as does Derrida’s philosophy but from the other side of the equation, a thinking through sound that reconfigures a central aporia of language – the appearing of presence through signs that betoken absence. Such an idea goes back to an ancient myth of art’s origin – Pliny’s account of Dibutades, the Corinthian maid, who quite literally traced the outline of the shadow of her beloved so that, when he was gone, his presence would be preserved in the trace.⁴⁵ But art is also different to such a mere tracing: it is, as Jankélévitch insists, not just the mark of an absent presence but also the bodying forth of a present absence. The absent presence (of the beloved, the landscape, the still life) may be traced by the artwork, but it is also displaced, replaced, and embodied by the force of the artwork’s presence. This is why art ‘flickers’ between absence and presence; the fold of the return, as Derrida insists, is everything.

Music does something similar but also rather different, a difference signalled in the myth of Pan and Syrinx. Ovid’s story is about music as a compensation for the object of desire that cannot be grasped. Pan’s reed flute, made from the body of the transformed Syrinx, momentarily seems to restore her presence (just as the musician’s playing of the bone flute, in Mahler’s early cantata, Das klagende Lied, allows the voice of the murdered brother to sound once again). Between Mallarmé’s faun and Debussy’s faun something similar is played out. The poet’s version casts ‘mere’ piping aside for the sexualised thrill of materialised speech, but even at its climactic point it fails to grasp the plenitude of music that Debussy’s Prélude will later make manifest by not speaking.⁴⁶ When the music is over, it leaves behind not just a trace, but one that is repeatable.

Evanescence

Music, more than most, is the art of disappearing. It is always, to borrow Mallarmé’s phrase, a ‘dispersion volatile’.⁴⁷ Musical sounds appear from within things (bodies, instruments, speakers) only to disperse into thin air. Mallarmé’s aerial metaphor for the poem, as a disturbance of the air by a fan or a wing, is equally apt for music. Taken literally, music is a shaping of the air, a patterning of sound waves, a play of vibrations, but also the perturbation of mind and body they occasion. It is no thing. The material substance of instruments, speakers, voices, and scores, are merely amplifiers, traces, and representations of a pattern, a set of intervals, a constellation that eludes the grasp. So the proper object of musical attention is not exactly nothing, but (in Derrida’s words) ‘the way in which this nothing itself is determined by disappearing’.⁴⁸ While it lasts, the act of musical listening oscillates between the listener and the listened to, the sensuous materials and their patterning, the vibrating body of the music and that of the listener. And then it is gone, but not without leaving a trace. Struck and plucked sounds are shaped by a moment of attack followed by a process of decay; a visible action is followed by an invisible resonance. Sounds produced by the breath or the movement of a bow have the supernatural quality of appearing to reverse this temporal curve; not only can the voice or the violin grow in amplitude after its onset, heard ‘in concert’ with others it seems to have the capacity to sound infinitely. Music takes place between these two extremes, between the percussive attack with almost no resonance and the sustained tone with apparently no attack. All the musical complexities of rhythm, pitch, timbre, and harmony, take place within this space.

Music after Debussy foregrounds this character of being a ‘vision fugitive’ (to borrow a phrase from Prokofiev). In place of apparently solid musical objects (the tonic triad, the theme, the closed phrase, the brass chorale), this music presents sonic forms that are fleeting, momentary, and elusive. Debussy may have later shied away from the epiphanic intensity of presence staged in his early setting of Mallarmé’s Apparition, but he never lost interest in conjuring the presence, in the musical play of sound and silence, of ‘the fairy capped with light’ – witness not just the evanescent figures of ‘Éventail’ but all the fairy creatures of the Piano Preludes, both aerial and aquatic (Puck, the fairies who are ‘exquisite dancers’, Ondine), figures that Jankélévitch refers to as ‘Mélisandes of tulle, of muslin and mist’.⁴⁹ Debussy’s music is often characterised by this art of evanescent disappearance, from the shy nymphs of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, to their later instantiations as the two girls in Jeux, from the half-seen, half-heard sirènes of the Nocturnes to the already-departed naiads of the Chansons de Bilitis and, of course, Mélisande. These elusive beings of extraordinary lightness allow Debussy to present material that flickers between presence and absence, foregrounding art’s capacity to make the irreal appear and disappear. The perfect complement to the immaterial and insubstantial art of music, fairy creatures provide the veils (voiles) by means of which art deranges the merely empirical. Debussy undoubtedly enjoyed the childlike aspect of this fairy topic which became the means for one of the defining paradoxes of his music – its sophisticated naïvety.

Unlike most operatic heroines, Mélisande makes no entry in her first scene; when the curtain rises, she is already sitting by the edge of the well in the forest. Her first words, in reply to Golaud’s advances, are given ‘presque sans voix’,⁵⁰ and are a definitive statement of her resistance to being physically present to Golaud: ‘Ne me touchez pas! Ne me touchez pas!’. Her speech delineates her as a creature in flight: ‘Je me suis enfuie! . . . enfuie . . . enfuie . . .’. Evanescent like music itself, Mélisande defines herself as being lost, whereas the all-too-solid Golaud has no trouble naming himself and proudly setting out his provenance. Everything about Mélisande is ‘nue’ in the way that Jean-Luc Nancy says art itself is ‘nue’. Even her distinctive theme, a little arabesque floated over the accompaniment of off-beat quavers in divisi strings, seems to emphasise absence, since her melody is literally absent on the principal beats of the bar. Jankélévitch offers a beautiful way of hearing the fugitive Mélisande who, ‘in her flight, traces beyond the horizon a mystery of absence which presence has dislodged’.⁵¹

Before any question of shared compositional techniques or soundworlds, it is this evanescent play of presence and absence that binds Debussy most closely to his younger contemporary, Maurice Ravel. It is perhaps no surprise that the water fairy Ondine, before appearing in Debussy’s Préludes (Book 2) had already been given elusive form in Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit (1908). ‘Ecoute! – Ecoute! – C’est moi’, begins the text by Aloysius Bertrand, quoted by Ravel at the front of the score. An announcement of auditory appearance, it provokes in Ravel a world of strange and half-heard sounds, delineating the elusive and unreal presence/absence of Ondine. The same sense of a character that does not quite appear before disappearing is explored in ‘Scarbo’, a fantastical figure of the night, producing in Ravel’s music a study in vanishing and the dynamics of (dis)appearing. The famous repeated note motif is un-pianistic and unmusical – a kind of hyper-energy, a tremor rather than a thing, a physical urgency followed by silence. The same elusiveness of nocturnal landscapes is found too in the fluttering of moths in ‘Noctuelles’, the first of the five Miroirs, 1904–05, a piece which anticipates Ligeti in its ungraspable mobile textures. This evanescent music, which rarely rises above a dynamic of pianissimo, is often ‘groundless’. Ravel’s moths are the thin excuse for a mute music of ungraspable delicacy. Their circling is self-sufficient, unrelated to human purpose, hence inexpressive in any affective sense. One might analyse this piece, but only to show how the music slips through the fingers of any firm structure; it works, instead, by means of a logic of continuous transformation applied to small (generally one-bar) units whose musical paragraphs, such as they are, disappear in evanescent gestures (see bb. 7–9, 19–20, 36).

In ‘Oiseaux Tristes’, the following piece of Miroirs, the repeated note motif that would later be the source of the energy of ‘Scarbo’ is here presented as a kind of radical emptiness (utterly without energy where the later piece is massively energised). The changing harmonic ‘light’ serves here to emphasise the lack of discourse, presenting instead simply the same object constantly re-lit. The arabesque figure is a mute kind of saying, concerned with its own evanescence rather than making statements. So too in the next piece, ‘Une barque sur l’océan’, the lack of any ‘object’ makes for a wash of light and colour, a carefully shaped flow of rising and falling intensities through the control of texture, register, and harmony. In place of anything resembling musical material in a Germanic sense (or indeed ideas of subjective agency or argument) there is only the play of self-contained and sensual repetitions. ‘Alborada del gracioso’, a dialogue between lovers parting in the morning, is a song of disappearing. ‘La vallée des cloches’ once again focuses on the radical bareness of a single pitch – the absence of any subjective expressive voice that is the sound of bells.

Elsewhere, the evanescent quality of this repertoire has to do with its cultivation of a definitive lightness of touch. Fauré’s ‘La fée aux chansons’, Op. 27, no. 2 (1882), thematises a quality that pervades many of his songs in which poignancy of feeling is in direct proportion to lightness of touch. ‘Our love is a light thing/like the fragrances that the wind takes’, insists the singer in ‘Notre amour’, Op. 23, no. 2 (c.1879), only to concede at the end that ‘our love is an eternal thing’. The simple arpeggiated accompaniment figure (leggieramente), a hallmark of Fauré’s mélodies, suggests an ephemeral lightness tangential to the subtlety of its harmonic inflections: ‘What is told to the night, evaporates with the dawn’, as Armand Silvestre’s text has it in the song that follows it, ‘Le secret’, Op. 23, no. 3 (1881). If Fauré’s music has sometimes been overlooked it is perhaps because it is, par excellence, a music that stages its own evanescence. Few composers have matched Fauré in the art of disappearance – witness the way in which, in the Barcarolles for piano, small repetitive motifs are constantly in a state of dissolving – Nos. 7 in D minor (1905) and 8 in D♭ major (1906) provide rich examples. The G minor Barcarolle, No.11 (1913) is a study in musical entropy, a piece concerned with its own dissolution and collapse. While ‘lightness’ often has to do with a deliberate lack of definition in the musical substance (in terms of tonality, metre, orchestration), it sometimes also has to do with playing at the edge of audibility. As a pianist, Debussy was noted for his expertise in playing extremely quietly, at the borders of sound and silence,⁵² and it is not hard to find plenty of examples, in both his piano music and orchestral works, of passages which similarly cultivate the edges of the audible. He was by no means alone in this, of course; his younger Austrian contemporary, Anton Webern, defined a whole new soundscape for music in the exploration of shades of quiet, an aspect of modern music that continued on through Morton Feldman to the present.

But it is not a static condition (lightness or near-silence) that we are concerned with here, so much as a dynamic process – the process of disappearing captured by the idea of evanescence. A host of synonyms underlines the same idea of a motion from solidity to aerial vanishing: evaporation, disintegration, dissipation, dissolution, as well as ebbing, fading, receding, waning. But this motion is also, typically, rapid, sudden, and definitive. It suggests a brief gesture which frames the quality of silence that follows – a resonance, scent, tremor of what has departed. From Monet to Van Gogh, the vibrancy of light itself is often made the object of painting, one in which objects are dissipated into light. Just as the hard new materials of the nineteenth-century urban landscape enabled a whole new use of glass, so the solidity of tonal grammar and symphony orchestras gave way to a new play of sonic lightness. In music, of course, this is also a play with time. ‘After Debussy’, the materiality and particularity of the musical object finds itself in a symbiotic relation with its own evanescent, fugitive and ephemeral character. So the ‘impressionism’ of this art is not to do with the inherently insubstantial or immaterial, but precisely the flight between the two, with showing the evanescent quality of the concrete moment.

Francesco Spampinato, discussing the writings of Jankélévitch, puts it thus: ‘Music, the art of time par excellence, that dies at the same moment as it is born, has always fascinated by its ambiguous oscillation at the threshold of existence.’⁵³ What is left behind by evanescent presence? A trace, a scent, a rearrangement of the scene, a disturbance in the air, a resonance. Steven Rings discusses Debussy’s ‘Des pas sur la neige’ in terms of its presentation of ‘traces of a past subjective presence on (or in) the landscape’, in which we hear ‘not a process unfolding in time before our ears, a subject trudging in the here and now, but instead the record of that act – a frozen landscape marked off by rhythmic footprints’.⁵⁴ As with all Debussy’s pieces with titles, the extra-musical reference is the thinnest of veils that makes something appear. It is not that the prelude depicts footsteps in the snow, but foregrounds the presentation of musical traces – not simply to present them but, as Rings demonstrates, in order to reflect musically upon memory, absence and rekindled presence. Jankélévitch refers to this piece as ‘a long meditation on the vestiges of departed presence’.⁵⁵

A century after Debussy, his evocation of elusive fairy figures reappears in the disembodied flash of electronic sounds across a performance space. Otherworldly, iridescent, aerial, or aquatic, the ungraspable forms of electronic music weave in and out of the ‘real’ world of acoustic instruments and singers. Jonathan Harvey’s Advaya (1994) for solo cello and electronics, for example, is made on the sonic threshold between the acoustic instrument and electronic transformations of its sound, a dialogue between ‘real’ and ‘irreal’ which flickers constantly between the two. One of the many affordances of electronic technology was the capacity to both amplify evanescent sounds – to make more audible the details of its vanishing – but also to reverse the envelope of decay and thus to reverse time. Tristan Murail’s Le partage des eaux (also from 1994) begins from the ‘simplest’ of sonic events, a two-chord hit derived from a recording of a wave breaking on a shore and its backwash. But the simple moment is acoustically highly complex and allowed to resonate in the silence that follows. Repeatedly it re-emerges, not just because the resonance is prolonged but because its sonic space, the decay of the evanescent sound, is expanded into the duration of the whole piece. Murail’s earlier Sillages (1985) – ‘wakes’, as in the wake of a boat – is similarly a piece concerned with traces, tracks, presences passing into absences.

Writing of Saariaho’s orchestral diptych, Du cristal . . . à la fumée (1990), Daniel March comments ‘immediately, we are invited to hear this work as a remainder: a remainder of the fire that gave genesis to . . . à la fumée . . . as the earlier work’s supplement’.⁵⁶ In Saariaho’s later work, Cendres (1998) for three instruments, March hears a resonance of Derrida’s essay of the same title; both show a similar fascination with the idea of traces, remnants of a disappearing presence. A poem reveals the world, Mallarmé insists, ‘not to bestow these things on us but to deprive us of them, an idea that Jankélévitch finds embodied in the second movement of Debussy’s Ibéria – a piece, he suggests, that ‘is possibly the most troubling music anyone has ever written’, because it makes us listen to the silence.⁵⁷