5

Mirrors

Reflection

Figure 5.1 Claude Monet, Régates à Argenteuil (1872)

Monet’s Régates à Argenteuil (Figure 5.1) divides into two halves. A literal reading understands these as the reflection in the lower half of the painting (the surface of the river) of the real objects depicted in the upper half (the sailing boats, trees, buildings, and sky). But, of course, the river is no less real than the sky and, taken as a whole, the painting is suffused with the same blue that barely distinguishes between the appearance of water and air. The distinction between the two spaces (which allows us to know ‘which way up’ the painting should go) is achieved by the rendering of the objects as relatively solid and their reflections as broken, with gaps turning solid colour blocks (like the white of the sails) into fragmented horizontal lines. On the one hand, Monet’s painting allows us to read it in a realist manner (it depicts the broken effect of reflections on the moving surface of the water); on the other, it presents a quite radical reordering of the ‘real’ (in the almost abstract play of the ‘reflected’ lower half). Taken together, the painting presents the substance of the ‘real’ and the insubstantiality of its reflection as two facets of the same thing. Indeed, the absence of hard outlines blurs the distinction between one and the other. Just as, in Mallarmé’s account of the ballet dancer, it is through the movement of the dancer’s veils (voiles) that the dance appears, so too, it is through the reflection of the boats’ sails (voiles) that the river appears. Just as, in Maeterlinck, a patterning of words allows the gaps between them to emerge, so too does the patterning of objects here allow something other to take place. The insubstantial play of reflected forms and colours is, on the one hand, a kind of ‘nothing’ compared to the real objects above the water, but the painting gives both equal weight and brings both into a new relation.

The Impressionists’ fascination with reflections might be taken as part of a wider enquiry into ways of seeing and knowing the world. It is the act of seeing, the participation of the viewer in the appearing of the world, that is the concern of the painting, not the representation of its objects. This is made explicit in another of Monet’s studies of reflections on the surface of the water – Sur les bords de Seine à Bennecourt (1868) (see Figure 5.2). The figure in the foreground is herself contemplating the scene before her, so that the painting is less the depiction of a river view than a study in the act of contemplative perception. We are not simply looking at a landscape, but the act of viewing a landscape. The reflective self-consciousness of this is highlighted by the way in which Monet has echoed the foreground figure and boat with a group of figures and another boat on the opposite shore of the river. One might even say that having three figures rather than one across the river underlines our own presence positioned just behind the foregrounded woman in the striped dress.

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

The composition of this painting is more complex than Régates à Argenteuil. Instead of the division of the canvas into two halves, the reflective surface of the water here fills the central space, with ‘real’ objects in the vertical space above and below it and framed on the left-hand side by the solid and darker mass of the two trees. The execution, however, is less radical – the reflected images are presented as a smooth surface without the choppy, broken quality found in the later painting. Nevertheless, a remarkable thing takes place. While some of the real objects are not reflected in the surface of the water (those in the foreground), others only become visible by means of the reflection. In the surface of the water seen beneath the foliage of the trees we see the whole of the large white house in reflection, though its ‘real’ image is largely obscured by the foliage. To the left, we see the reflection of another house whose ‘real’ form is completely obscured. The reflection has, quite literally, made the invisible visible – so too with the sky, which is largely absent from the painting of the ‘real’ (other than fragments of blue between the leaves of the tree) but abundantly present in the reflection, complete with white clouds that cannot be seen except here. As Mallarmé might have said, rendering objects in their hard ‘thingness’ obscures the view of the whole; only in the spaces, the gaps, the no-thingness of the reflection, do we get a vision of the ‘eternal blue’ of the sky.

Monet’s painting is a painting about looking, exploring the way the world appears when viewed from a certain attitude. It is, in that sense, a painting about painting. The contemplation of the relation between the physical objects of sight and the embodied act of perception is that of visual art itself. It is also a philosophical exploration that anticipates Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Cartesian optics in favour of embodied perception. The business of art, as Paul Klee later underlined, ‘is not to reproduce the visible but to make visible’ – to make appear not some ‘thing’ that hides behind the surfaces of objects like some supernatural or metaphysical presence, but a way of seeing things. Mallarmé’s constellation is just this: the stars were always there, they become a constellation when we find in their spacing a certain kind of pattern. Art takes place when the hard objects of the world enter into a new kind of relation with the viewer.

Music has played with the metaphor of reflection for hundreds of years – from the reflective symmetry of ascent and descent, to motivic inversions and retrogrades and the fascination with palindromic forms, through to the possibilities of electro-acoustic music to invert harmonic spectra or reverse the decay of sounds. Debussy’s interest in the idea undoubtedly begins with the poetry he set. Arthur Wenk discusses reflective symmetries in ‘La mort des amants’ (Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire, 1887), which ‘incorporates the principle of reflection into every element of the music’.¹ A stronger case, perhaps, is the Verlaine setting, ‘L’ombre des arbres’ (Ariettes oubliées, 1885). In the poem, the trees are literally reflected in the water, the lover’s drowned hopes are metaphorically embodied in the weeping foliage. The reader is both immersed and reflected in the landscape as a whole. But reflection is also present at the sonic and timbral level in the play of certain sounds in the poem, to which Debussy responds, such that, as Wenk suggests, ‘Debussy’s setting of the poem contains fully as many mirrors as Verlaine’s text’.² Around the musical interval of a tritone, Debussy establishes from the start a definitive axis of tonal symmetry to mirror the poetic symmetries – the traveller reflected by the bird, the tree by the river. But the larger movement of the poem is that only in the irreal space of the reflection does the real come to self-awareness. Only in the doubling of the mirror image does self-consciousness recognise itself.

As Nicholas Reyland has explored in relation to the music of Lutosławski, the reflected image is one of Foucault’s prime examples of a heterotopic space – not a utopia (an unreal place) but a real space that nevertheless acts as a counter-site for the everyday.³ The garden is another, and the space of the boat at sea is a third. If visual art, poetry, and music ‘after Debussy’ have often cultivated these heterotopic spaces that is surely because they are emblematic of the space of artworks themselves, as sites in which culture can be ‘at the same time, represented, contested, and reversed’.⁴ But, as my brief examples from painting and song already suggest, the reflected image is not a static, utopian other space. It is, rather, a dynamic space that moves against the apparently ‘real’, in order to put both in a kind of vibration that displaces the common-sense view of real/unreal. In this, such artworks anticipate the trajectory of deconstruction whose instinct is to open out towards another space. As Leonard Lawlor writes, ‘not oriented by the value of presence, this matrix or terrain, this plane or land, is not an enclosure. It looks like no place that has ever been inhabited before. When one engages in a deconstruction, one is dismantling in the name of this unnameable place.’⁵ But the reflective plane of artworks does not dismantle in order to quit one world for another; neither Monet’s painting of a view from the riverbank, nor Verlaine’s contemplation of the reflective surface of the river, invites us to quit the bank to plunge into the water. Rather, artworks set in motion a movement, to and fro, between the two that leaves both changed.⁶ As Jankélévitch puts it:

The world itself which the water reflects is not another world, it is our world in reverse, a duplicated illusion of the world the right way up. The world in a mirror is not the world itself, but its double and dream image! In the immobile sea Debussy discovered a double inversion of this world, a submerged cathedral, an underwater city perhaps, like that of Ys.⁷

How does music set up such heterotopic spaces through reflection? In the first instance, as we have already seen, music plays across the threshold of real and irreal just like poetry and visual art. The fondness for titles of a music that, at the same time, distances itself from representation, is a way of drawing attention to this aspect. Take the case of Ravel’s Jeux d’eau. As an epigraph at the head of the piece, Ravel quotes a line from Henri de Régnier’s poem, ‘Fête d’eau’: ‘Dieu fluvial riant de l’eau qui le chatouille’. Steven Huebner suggests that it may have been inscribed on the manuscript by Regnier himself.⁸ The poem, from an anthology of Régnier’s poems, published in 1902, titled La cité des eaux, refers to the Latona fountain in the park at Versailles. As Huebner shows, the sonnet moves from the activity of the fountain to the calm pool beneath it, an axis located at the formal divide of the poem: ‘The hinge of the sonnet becomes the deep silence that follows at dusk, as the waters flatten into a mirror that reflects the cypress and yew, mute surrogates for the fountains.’⁹

Huebner is in no doubt that Ravel’s piece draws on the representational aspects of the poem: ‘Ravel’s Jeux d’eau is manifestly about the real sound of the Latona fountain, complete with mimetic effects that trace upward surges of water and vertiginous cascades.’ But at the same time the piece is constructed to point beyond itself, as where ‘the fluid evaporation on an unstable chord that seems to ask the listener to “complete” the sound in her mind’s ear’. He goes on:

To bridge sound and silence in this way validates the latter as engendering an aesthetic experience on its own terms, an invitation to reach beyond the articulating frame of sounding music. Régnier’s fountains structure his experience in the first part of ‘Fête d’eau,’ but the truly moving moment occurs in silence as the trees become the unheard echo of Latona’s waters.¹⁰

Fauré’s two song cycles, Mirages, Op. 113 (1919) and L’horizon chimérique (1921) signal their heterotopic sights within their titles. Both sets of four songs are ‘after Debussy’ in a literal way. Indeed, one might read the first as a homage to the younger composer who, at the age of 55, had just pre-deceased the older one (then aged 72), while at the same time being a critical self-reflection upon his legacy. Both late works, these song cycles hinge on a poignant tension between the undiminished tug of distant horizons and the calm acceptance of one’s dwelling place. I discuss L’horizon chimérique in Chapter 9, but many of the themes explored below, in Mirages, return in the later set.

The first of the four songs of Mirages is ‘Cygne sur l’eau’, the archetypal image of mirror reflection in late nineteenth-century French poetry.¹¹ The swan is a mute, speechless presence, caught in his own reflection. On the one hand, Renée de Brimont’s poem presents the swan as the smooth gliding of a dream-like thought, a poetic impulse towards unknown horizons; on the other, the poet counsels himself to stay here, to maintain the clarity of thought as undisturbed as the calm reflection of swan in the limpid waters of the lake. The poem thus warns against journeying towards the illusions of distant and unknown horizons (‘Renoncez, beau cygne chimérique, A ce voyage lent vers de troubles destins’). The distant promise of ‘perfumed bays’ and ‘immortal islands’ would all be perilous reefs. The obvious conclusion is that the choice of text reflects that this song cycle is the work of an older composer, a definitively conservative one at that, disinclined to venture to distant horizons. From this perspective, it is a neat historical fact that, as Fauré set the line ‘Nul miracle chinois, nulle estrange Amérique, / Ne vous accueilleront en des havres certains’, his much younger compatriot Edgard Varèse (then 25) had not only been living in the USA for the past four years but had recently begun work on his orchestral work Amériques, a piece whose title, in the composer’s words, had to do with ‘discoveries – new worlds on earth, in the sky, or in the minds of men’ – precisely the new horizons that the poet of ‘Cygne sur l’eau’ counsels against. Varèse’s opening out of a new world of ‘organised sound’ could hardly be more different from Fauré’s turn inwards to the contained space reflected in the surface of his musical lake. And yet the poem juxtaposes thoughts that cleave a free space, proceeding in darkness towards the unknown, with the counsel to remain on these lakes which mirror ‘these clouds, flowers, stars and eyes’. Fauré’s poignant expression of the tug between the two is found in the tension between the apparent simplicity of the setting, with its oddly minimal texture, and the disquieting complexity of the harmonic colouring. The latter moves by a constant re-harmonising of each scale degree and the four distinct sections are marked by four different accompaniment patterns (crotchets, semiquavers, quavers, crotchets).

The second song, ‘Reflets dans l’eau’, continues the theme of mirror reflection. Here, the reflective surface of the water is a kind of threshold to a different world. It is the past that appears, tempting the poet to make one further voyage (the idea that haunted the first song, and will later haunt the last song of L’horizon chimérique). In the third stanza the poet moves from merely reflecting his own melancholic self to suddenly seeing himself as part of a wider whole. The contemplation of the past, however, is also a temptation to slip into the deep pool of the past. The astonishing ending of the last verse (‘if I slip’) has the voice answered by repeated ‘echoing’ sonorities in the piano, its different harmony presenting the ‘other reality’ suggested by the pool’s mirror, a different space to the one which returns for the final three lines. If I slip, the cold water closes around me and I am reabsorbed into the waters of the past. This is the temptation of the depths which the mirrored surface both conceals and offers, hence the silence of the final verse, ‘froide et sereine’.

Fauré’s mesmeric accompaniment and the narrow range of the vocal line makes for a peculiar stasis. Until the third verse the song is largely diatonic but then becomes increasingly chromatic, a deepening of the vision in the pool of past desire. The seductive repetition of the accompaniment continues beneath the telling of the singer, with ripples of greater intensity achieved through harmony and the rhythm of the vocal line. The play of calm objective exterior and the inward vision externalised in the mirror creates a chiasmic intertwining of inner and outer worlds, the singer’s line and the piano’s depth. The water/past draws one in, until the amazing change in the final stanza: ‘si je glisse’ is unaccompanied, but followed by the piano in triplets. The elaboration of a repeated figure based on the dyad B–C♯ in A major acts as a kind of siren call, like the beckoning of a deathly calm, before slipping flatwards to end with the heterotopic space of the piano’s mirror.

The third song, ‘Jardin nocturne’, has the same quality of mesmeric seduction as the previous song, but the poem suggests no resistance to it – only that ‘I know your peace’ and ‘I hear/listen to the kiss singing from the lips of the night’. A host of key poetic topics are assembled here – night, garden, silence, moon, veils, distance, fountain, foliage, the sound of water, scent. The ‘jardin muet’ is not strictly a silent garden, as most translations have it, but a speechless one – a garden that holds itself in silence, like the vocal line which, for all the capacity of the singer, is often confined to a monotone. The narrow ambit of the line is marked by falling thirds and a kind of weary, self-enclosed quality. It is the subtle melody in the right hand of the piano that seems to offer something more songlike, the voiceless piano sounding the speechless song of the mute garden. Beneath it, the oscillating pattern of the accompaniment produces a sense of the gentle pulsing of time, the breathing in and out of a self-contained time that ‘goes’ nowhere. It makes for an impersonal foil to the melancholy of the voice, with its wavering between moments of rising desire and collapse.

‘Danseuse’, the fourth and last of the Mirages, is an astonishing song. Fauré’s repetitive rhythm is limping, based on variants of a single repeating pattern that makes for a curiously restricted motion, a little contained figure within a stasis. The poem urges the sister to dance to free herself, to take flight, ‘unleashed by Eros’. The second stanza, with its references to a vase and fresco, seems to locate the poem in an ancient Greek scene as a ghost of the past. But the music wants to tug this figure into the present, hence the gradual enlivening of the music, turning to quavers in the third stanza: take flight, light the flame, it seems to urge. But it comes to nothing and disappears, leaving the figure as no more than a ‘vaine danseuse!’.

It is impossible to discuss the idea of reflection in this cultural milieu without encountering the extraordinary phenomenon of Monet’s paintings, made in his own jardin muet at Giverny, of water lilies (nymphéas) – around 250 in total, painted across the last three decades of his life. The often vast canvasses remain, a century on, some of the most powerfully immersive works of visual art, in which not only is the distinction between flower and reflection, water and sky blurred, but with it the separation of the viewer and the profusion of colour and forms presented on the canvas. The sense of a heterotopic space, and of a reflective surface that draws one in, explored in the poetry and music of Monet’s contemporaries, is made manifestly visible here.

The vast scale of the largest canvasses effectively present to the viewer a picture without borders. They come close to blurring the difference between the framed painting, with clearly demarcated boundaries, and the experience of unbounded space in nature, not just on account of their size but also because these paintings are neither structured to the edges of the canvas, nor drawn to converge on the eye of the viewer. The movement of the eye and the body of the viewer is built into these huge spaces – it is necessary to stand back in order to move through the whole, while at the same time one is drawn in to the particular, creating a constant to-and-fro motion of particularity and whole. The flat expansiveness, like a rich but self-contained harmonic space in Debussy, Messiaen, or Saariaho, both immerses the viewer and suspends linear motion. Instead, what takes place in the introversive space of the work is a kind of infinite invention through permutation, both within each of these paintings and across multiple ones. It is curious how this restoration of visual and spatial plenitude seems to anticipate photographic images of outer space captured by astronomy a century later.

Taken together, Monet’s water lily paintings constitute an astonishing recherche. Like Cézanne’s fascination with Mont St. Victoire in his later years, Monet’s devotion to a single idea, to the elaboration and exploration of the particularity of his own environment, is less about representation than the act of seeing itself, an exploration of chiasmic being through the particularity of the world. It is easy to say that his approach is ‘musical’, as a way of designating that his concern is with the free play of colour and form and texture more than with representation; it is easy too to collapse these pictures back into a generic idea of impressionism by which Debussy and Monet are both closed down. But far more interesting, and more productive, is the reverse – asking what it is that is made visible in Monet’s paintings that gives us access to something at the heart of Debussy’s music.¹² Something similar happens here as in the case of literary Symbolism. Just as music needed poetry to become more musical, in order to enable music to do so, so too did the visual arts explore before music a quality of music that was only finally emancipated in the twentieth century – witness the concerns of the French spectralists, nearly a century later.

In Saariaho’s Nymphéa (1987) for string quartet and electronics (subtitled Jardin secret III), and its later complete rewriting for string orchestra as Nymphéa Reflection (2001), the composer takes up this relation in a deliberate way. There is no question of representation here, nor of any reference to the work of Monet, other than the resonance of the title and Saariaho’s programme note, which refers to

the image of the symmetric structure of a water lily, yielding as it floats on the water, transforming. Different interpretations of the same image in different dimensions; a one-dimensional surface with its colours, shapes, and, on the other hand, different materials that can be sensed, forms, dimensions, a white water lily feeding from the underwater mud.¹³

What the musical works have in common with Monet’s canvasses is an intense fascination with colour, texture, light, and their infinitely variegated play within a contained space.

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

Threshold

Matisse’s La fenêtre ouverte à Collioure (1905) is not a painting of boats in a harbour; it is a painting of the act of seeing boats in a harbour (see Figure 5.3). The open window framing the view foregrounds the viewing of the painter and the viewer. The frame that surrounds this picture, as it hangs in a gallery, foregrounds what the painting already declares, that art is itself a framing, the making of a threshold between the act of perception that goes out to the world and the world that comes to meet it. As Christopher Butler points out, rather than the viewpoint vanishing into the distance, nature seems to flow through the window into the bright room – this is as much a case of an access onto the world as the world, flowing back towards us, finding access into.¹⁵

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

Matisse’s painting is thrice framed: once by the frame in which the painting is placed, once more by the open double doors, and a third time by the foliage on the veranda. As Butler has shown, the paintings from Matisse’s summers in Collioure (1905 and 1907) focus on the materiality of painting, on ‘the use of a pure high-keyed oil paint’, on brushstroke, the canvas, the act of painting itself.¹⁶ Like other Collioure pictures (Woman at the Window, The Siesta, Woman in Japanese Robe by the Water) this painting ‘focuses our attention on the surface of the canvas, and so threatens to give primacy to its own articulation, over the attempt to see it as the record of an empirical perception’.¹⁷ The open window draws attention not only to the meeting of the world and our perception of it, but also to the act of painting as a remaking of the world precisely through its re-perception. Matisse’s painting forms one example of a whole genre of ‘open window’ pictures whose central concern is this threshold between two spaces, a threshold that marks a dynamic passing from one space to the other but in both directions at the same time.¹⁸ Such a threshold is not a line one crosses or where one thing definitively becomes another, but rather the chiasmic site of a coming to presence, an access (Nancy), an exchange or intertwining (Merleau-Ponty).

The mirror reflection of artworks, in which the reflected content is a transformed version of its other (or vice-versa), is a way of foregrounding this idea of the threshold. Reflections in visual art, like echoes in music, are ways of defining a point of cross-over or transformation. Literature, visual art and music around 1900 were very often concerned with such liminal spaces – coastlines, riverbanks, horizons, twilight, the edges of dream – witness all those paintings of the water’s edge, by the river, on the beach, bathers, children playing on the sand or in the waves. Where does a highly industrialised and highly linguistic society look for its re-creation? It looks to the a-linguistic borders of water, sky, earth. As Seurat captured in Une baignarde à Asnières (1884), the pleasure of the holiday is to be a free body again, in the sunshine, on the grass, by the water. As so often in beach paintings, the human figure is caught in silhouette against the water, the fluid mediating space between earth and sky. In Monet’s Femme à l’ombrelle tournée vers la gauche (1886), the artist’s wife Camille has her feet on the ground, but her position on the horizon and the low viewpoint of the painter, looking up to the figure silhouetted against the brightness of the sky, makes her belong more to the air than to the earth (see Figure 5.4). The same blurring of human figures and elements is found in Monet’s beach paintings. Since Proust’s fictional artist, Elstir, is generally understood to be modelled on Monet, it is perhaps no surprise that the whole of Proust’s novel A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (1919), set in the fictional coastal resort of Balbec, has this same liminal aspect. Proust’s Balbec was itself modelled on the Normandy town of Cabourg, where he spent many summers, including that of 1911 when Debussy was on holiday in the adjacent resort of Houlgate.¹⁹ Debussy’s coastal song ‘De grève’ (one of the Proses lyriques, songs to his own prose texts) is an earlier work from 1893 but has something of the same quality of Proust’s novel with its mock drama of the busy daylight world, the waves of the sea like young girls coming out of school, versus the silent wonder of the nocturnal, playing across the threshold between land and sea, day and night (marked by the ‘Plus lent’ section from b. 40).

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

Around 1900, there are two distinct modalities of this concern with liminality. On the one hand, there is the border that is constantly traversed – the tidal margin of land and sea, exchanged between the elements of earth and water in the rhythm of the tides, being both and neither. On the other, there is the border that is a threshold – the sacred region that one must cross in order to leave one space to enter another – the outside into the inside, in the case of the threshold of the house or the temple. Crossing such a threshold suggests a linear transformation by which the music gives access to a new kind of space. This is a definitive idea of musical form in Mahler, Webern, and Schoenberg.²⁰ In Debussy, and the tradition of music that comes after him, however, the threshold works more like the first – a perpetual to-and-fro, like the tides, a flickering of presence and absence, a constant sparking across the gap between words and music, visible and invisible. The two models could not be more different. One proposes a linear and irreversible transformation, the other acknowledges that this move is not final or complete, that being human is necessarily to move constantly between the two. This is perhaps a decisive difference between the (German) idealism of Mahler or Schoenberg and the (French) materiality of their contemporary Debussy.

In adapting Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande in order to make his opera, one of the scenes that Debussy cut was the opening scene of the play. The serving women (the same who silently enter Mélisande’s chamber in the final scene of the play) have come to wash the threshold of the castle and have to ask the porter to open the huge old wooden door (a form of vantail). The porter is not sure he can open the door, or even that it has ever been opened (‘Elle ne s’ouvre jamais’). It does eventually open but makes a huge noise as it does so (‘Comme elle crie! / elle eveillera tout le monde’) – a noise like the scream that signals a breaking through between two worlds (like that of Kundry, in Wagner’s Parsifal). The pain of crossing the threshold, of coming to see things properly, is key to the drama. But the castle gate opens to the brightness of the world outside, as the sun rises over the infinite expanse of the sea and this, too, is part of the drama. Before Golaud encounters Mélisande at the water’s edge, water is already everywhere: ‘Pour all the water of the flood; you will never accomplish it’, says the porter (Versez toute l’eau du deluge; vous n’en viendrez jamais à bout). The threshold is a key idea throughout Maeterlinck’s play. In another scene (Act 2.iv) not set by Debussy, Arkel explains why Pelléas should not leave – not just because of his father’s ill health or the unrest in the kingdom. Why go, he asks, since Marcellus is already dead? One’s duty is rarely found in the rush of travel and activity. It is better to wait for others on the threshold, he counsels, and let them enter as they pass, which they do all the time (‘Il vaut mieux les attendre sur le seuil et les faire entrer au moment ou ils passent; et ils passent tous les jours’).

Romanticism and Modernism not only share a fascination with the threshold, but cultivate the space either side of it. The idea of a transcendent art, a transformative and transportative art, necessarily has to do with this movement between and across different states, conditions, and ways of being. But whereas, in Romanticism, the narrative of the musical work often has to do with the drawn-out struggle to approach and effect such a transformation, in a metaphysical modernism the entire focus of the work is often the threshold of transformation. The difference is neatly heard in the contrast between Mahler and Webern; where Mahler symphonies stage a quest narrative towards the place where transformation may finally take place, Webern’s miniatures focus themselves exclusively on this axial moment (consider, for example, the difference between Mahler’s First Symphony and Webern’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 10). The musical miniature often locates itself in this liminal space; Webern’s Lieder, no less than Schumann’s, tend to cultivate this place of exchange. The early mélodies of Fauré and Debussy similarly draw on a romantic poetry whose central topic is the mingling of soul and nature. The recurrent imagery of ‘Seule’, Op. 3, no. 1, a setting of Théophile Gautier, is that that of movement across the edges between things: everything in nature shares a chiasmic boundary with the rest of the world (except the languishing poet) – the sea with the shore, the flower with the dawn, the wind with the trees, the still water with the moonlight, the dome of the church and the blue sky. Following romantic poetry’s fascination with liminal space – one that continues through literary modernism – songs are frequently located at the edge of water, the edge of night or sleep, or straining towards a horizon.

But the same fascination is at the centre of the work of spectral composers in the latter part of the twentieth century; indeed, the very notion of spectralism hinges on crossing, to-and-fro, the perceptual thresholds of sonic material – between acoustic and electronic sounds, timbre and harmony, fundamental and overtone.²¹ Writing about his work L’Esprit des dunes (1994) Tristan Murail comments that here ‘the same melodic, harmonic and electronic elements are apprehended under continually renewed angles’ such that the piece opens up ‘sonic landscapes at the border between reality and irreality’.²² The same sense of moving between the two is at the heart of two ‘water pieces’ from the same period, Le partage des eaux (1995–96) and Bois flotté (1996), both of which elaborate the exchange between acoustic instruments and the computer analysis of natural sounds – with one shaping the other just as a piece of driftwood (bois flotté) is shaped by the sea in which it floats. But this is a longstanding concern; the title of two pieces for piano from 1971–72, Estuaire, similarly draws attention to the idea of margins and interchange between sonic materials. Murail’s note for this work talks about a memory of his birthplace in Le Havre, situated on the estuary of the river Seine, ‘where the fresh waters of the river mix with the salt waters of the sea’.²³ The second movement is titled ‘Au mélange des eaux’.

The recurrent terms of discourse about this repertoire have to do with the play of ambiguity produced by the fluidity of sounds in process rather than as fixed objects. It is not the opposition of acoustic and synthetic sounds that shapes this music, but an exploration of their relation, the hinge between them and their constant mixture (mélange) and intermingling. In the case of Gondwana (1980), for example, Murail underlines that his interest was in ‘the harnessing of transitional phrases and the thresholds between two states, that’s to say in a liminal writing (écriture liminale)’.²⁴ An early work for ondes martenot and piano, Les miroirs étendus (1971), signals that the fascination with a kind of border-crossing between sound sources is conceived in terms of the transformative potential of the mirror reflection. The piano is not an ondes martenot, but the relation of one to the other sets up rich possibilities of materials that are alike but different. The piano offers a familiar mooring to the space and soundworld of the concert hall and a tradition of tempered musical discourse, while the untempered fluidity of the ondes martenot, like open water, tempts it out to wider spaces. Nearly forty years later, Murail’s fascination with the same idea is embodied in his three Reflections/Reflets (2013 and 2017) for orchestra – the double title is itself a play on this idea of sameness and difference. Murail has compared these pieces to the model of Debussy’s Nocturnes, each exploring a highly particular soundworld. The first, Spleen, is relatively dark and might be compared with the single-minded concern with Debussy’s Nuages. The second, High Voltage/Haute Tension, by contrast, is concerned with an explosive energy; Murail has related it to the idea of a genre of ‘firework’ music, and thus might perhaps find its double not only in Debussy’s Fêtes, but also the piano prelude ‘Feux d’artifice’. The third, published in 2017 and titled Vents et marées/Tidal winds, rounds out the parallel with a nod to Debussy’s Sirènes.

The mirror is a kind of threshold; on the other side, so to speak, there appears another space, one which inverts the ‘reality’ of the onlooker (the mirror was Foucault’s prime example of a heterotopic space). But by the same token, the threshold is a kind of mirror. If it marks a boundary, it also suggests a crossing and thus entry into a new space. Music has often lent itself to this sense, since the ‘real’ concrete presence of an acoustic sound is always edged by the threshold of silence. Murail’s Au-delà du mur du son (1972) for orchestra, like several works by Jonathan Harvey – From Silence (1988), Birdconcerto with Pianosong (2001), Death of Light, Light of Death (1998) – plays with this idea of edge and beyond. Such an idea has first to do with the phenomenology of listening but frequently takes on a metaphysical overtone in Harvey, as for Messiaen – in works like Éclairs sur l’au-delà (1991) – or indeed for Webern (witness his use of mirror forms in his settings of the poetry of Hildegard Jone).²⁵ Murail’s sense of mirror-double is similarly found in several works by Kaija Saariaho, not just in the reworked and expanded pieces, such as Nymphéa (1987) and Nymphéa Reflection (2001) but in the pairing of two works in Du cristal . . . à la fumée (1990), two pieces presented as an orchestral diptych, bridged by a solo cello. The ellipsis in the title points to the gap between the two which is also their hinge, a bridge between something solid and something aerial (the second piece uses an electronically-modified alto flute and solo cello). Risto Nieminen describes it thus: ‘The bridge is a looking-glass in which the two aspects of the overall work are reflected. Not symmetrically, but as two separate worlds, one in front of the mirror and the other behind it – through the looking glass. The laws that order the two universes are different, governed by a different logic.’²⁶

As Jean-Luc Hervé noted, in his discussion of Gérard Grisey’s Vortex temporum (1996), the idea of the threshold was proposed by Grisey in the 1980s as a kind of definition of ‘the concept of a liminal music – that is to say placed on a threshold’.²⁷ Grisey’s final work before his untimely death was Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (1996–98) (Four songs for crossing the threshold) – note the active verb underlining that this denotes not some static, metaphysical other but rather a kind of doing, a working at and on the threshold. Formed from a series of meditations on the threshold between life and death, these pieces distance themselves from the ‘events’ usually articulated by structural divisions. The opening prelude begins with white noise and the sound of breathing; only gradually does a voice coalesce and augment to a huge intensity before its collapse and fall back to silence (like a massively expanded version of Mallarmé’s/Debussy’s ‘Soupir’). Across the piece as a whole the voice moves constantly between loss and recovery, appearing from and disappearing back to a noise of non-being, outside of human life and language. The strange scratching sounds of the instrumental interludes suggest the noise of insects in the accrued dust of time, as if to mark the erasure of the voice. Time and again, lines fall and bright energy collapses downwards –in the prelude but also too in the fourth movement, La mort de la voix. D’après Erinna, and through to the final berceuse.²⁸

This fascination with the threshold between states, and the mirror as a transformative threshold, thus defines a central focus of art and music ‘after Debussy’. It takes us back to Mallarmé’s faun, himself half-man and half-beast, caught – like the poet – between music and language as ways of taking hold of the world. The famous opening of Debussy’s musical response to Mallarmé’s poem, is generally discussed as embodying the sensuality of a sultry afternoon. But, more precisely, what it does is to state, in unambiguous form, the gentle oscillation between two spaces of being, its gentle rocking motion between C♯ and G♮ connecting, through chromatic slippage, two harmonic worlds (see Example 5.1).

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

This is a kind of musical archetype of liminal movement; it anticipates the gentle oscillations of the sea at the start of Sirènes, or the threshold moment in the first movement of La mer, where the cor anglais and two solo cellos rock equally gently across the tritone, poised between two harmonic worlds.²⁹ The opening bars of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune set out a musical equivalent not just to Mallarmé’s play between music and language, but also to the space demarcated by the two hands of Rodin’s La cathédrale. The flute proposes one sensuous form, the other instruments, led by the horn, another. Between them is the famous bar of silence, an empty space holding the two ‘hands’ together by the tension of their separation. The flute solo rocks between two pitches (C♯ to G♮) but also between the whole-tone space and the ‘arrival’ at an E major space (b. 3). The flute alternates with the horn, and the horn itself rocks between two spaces – the C♯ chord in b. 4 and the B♭ chord. The bar of silence is followed by a kind of mirror inversion: the horn theme is extended, but leads back to the opening flute (now over a D major chord). The oscillation between two worlds could not be clearer.

As a summons for the appearing of desired presence, the flute here anticipates a more direct enactment in Ravel’s ‘La Flûte enchantée’, the second song of Shéhérazade (1903).³⁰ From the absence of night and sleep, Ravel’s flute summons the appearance of the full orchestra, overflowing in its sensual rush of colour. An undetermined desire without object, it breaks off rather than ends in this understated, reticent and momentary piece. If, in the third song of Ravel’s triptych, ‘L’indifferent’, the sonorous richness of the orchestral music is the desired body, it nevertheless remains as ungraspable and impermanent as the young stranger who passes by: ‘On my doorstep your lips sing in a remote and mysterious dialect like music out of tune.’ (Ta lèvre chante sur le pas de ma porte / une langue inconnue et charmante / comme une musique fausse . . .). Once again, the music positions us on a threshold (here, a doorstep) between two worlds – between the interiority of the subject and the rich, remote and mysterious world that passes by on the other side. And just as the nymphs evade the grasp of the faun, so the indifferent stranger is not to be possessed – ‘from my threshold I see you moving away’ (de mon seuil je te vois t’éloigner). The voice of the stranger strikes the ear just as Pelléas hears the voice of Mélisande, like a bird from a far-off place. Such is the threshold between music and language, between the understanding of the linguistic mind and the sonorous sense of the musical body.

For a certain kind of philosophy, the edges of language are the edges of the world – the edges of what can be said and thus what can be known and thought. For the medieval cartographer, the edges of the known world were declared finis terrae – the precipitous ends of the flat earth to which no one could journey beyond and return. The two ideas come together wonderfully in Umberto Eco’s fictional medieval library in The Name of the Rose.³¹ For such a worldview, the edge of language is not so much a threshold – a border or margin implying another space that comes to meet it – but a dead-end, a barrier beyond which there is nothing. The medieval map thus draws the ends of the earth and of language alike as a place of monsters, of madness and death. Which brings us back to the myth of the sirens. The ancient fear of the sirens is that they lure the listener off the linguistic map altogether, and into the dark abyss of the wordless. But all the music to which we have been listening says otherwise. It says that, with music, we move across thresholds and between worlds. In the face of the repressive anxiety of that which is other to language, music offers a sonorous release into other ways of being.

Echo

In 1911, a year before the premiere of the ballets of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé and Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, the Ballets Russes staged Alexander Tcherepnin’s Narcisse et Echo, in an adaptation of Ovid’s story by Léon Bakst with choreography by Michel Fokine. Tcherepnin’s score is full of echoes and pre-echoes of other composer’s scores, in what Paulo de Castro calls a ‘rich intertextual web of allusions’.³² Among those references was the use of a wordless chorus as the voice of nature, recalling the female voices of Debussy’s Sirènes and anticipating the mixed chorus of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé. The myth of Narcissus is readily evoked in relation to the self-absorption of art at the fin de siècle, most obviously in the case of Aestheticism and art’s preference for its own self-contained beauty to an exploration of a world beyond itself. John William Waterhouse’s iconic Echo and Narcissus (1903) provides a knowing visual allegory of such an idea. But the larger idea, of a transformation of perceived reality through the reflective transformation of the artwork, is more radical.

The echo supplies a sonic equivalent to the idea, though it is one less readily amenable to musical treatment than is the mirror reflection in painting. Echo ‘effects’ aside, music’s auditory parallel to the altered reflection is the altered reprise (making a spatial relation temporal); the ornamented double in baroque keyboard music, or the da capo aria in vocal music, both offer historical examples. The increasing avoidance of repetition in nineteenth-century modernism, however, tended to displace this idea from new musical practice. By 1900, Schoenberg’s idea of developing variation encapsulates the central technique of a musical prose that elaborates itself entirely from within the creative subject, in a constantly dynamic trajectory, rather than being made in the encounter with pre-given material. Painting with a broad brush, here then is a striking distinction between the ‘French’ turn around 1900 and the tradition of Austro-German musical form-building. In the music of Debussy and his contemporaries, not only is the (vertical) exploration of mirror-like symmetry increasingly important, but so too the idea of (horizontal) return.³³ It is, once again, in later electro-acoustic music that this idea comes into its own, as the transformed return of musical material arrives from a quite different sound source, moreover, from an acousmatic source that seems to stand outside the acoustic space of the ‘real’ performers.

In Boulez’s Dialogue de l’ombre double (1985), a solo clarinet occupies the centre of the performance space. From here it generates a dialogue with its own shadow (a pre-recorded clarinet), spatialised across six speakers placed around the edges of the hall, with the audience located in the space between the two. The form of the piece is an alternation between six ‘strophes’ played by the acoustic clarinet and the pre-recorded clarinet heard over the speakers. But it is of course in the dialogue between the two, in the proliferating multiple voices, that the music emerges as a constant flickering between real and irreal, presence and echo, such that the borders between them are criss-crossed continuously in both directions. This is a music that not only makes palpable the crossing of thresholds, but – to borrow a resonant phrase of Jean-Luc Nancy – of ‘being singular plural’.³⁴

The idea had earlier been explored in Répons (1981–84) – an extensive work for ensemble and electronics and a key work in the development of real-time computer transformation of acoustic instruments. Here, an acoustic ensemble of twenty-four musicians is located in the centre of the space, with six soloists placed in a ring around the outer edges of the space (cimbalom, piano 1, xylophone/glockenspiel, harp, vibraphone, piano 2/synthesizer). Beyond them is a further ring of speakers which feed in the electro-acoustic transformation of the soloists. The piece is an elaborate and extended exploration of moving between different sound worlds and the dialogue between them, of blurring the distinctions between acoustic ‘origin’ and electronically transformed ‘echo’. In the haunting closing section, the rolling arpeggio figures of the soloists echo out into the otherwise empty space like waves of reflected images – a sonic parallel to the proliferating mirrors of sky and water in Monet’s largest Nymphéas canvasses.

Although a tape-piece rather than a live interaction of acoustic and electronic sounds, Jonathan Harvey’s Mortuos plango, vivos voco (1980) remains a kind of touchstone of this musical exchange between different soundworlds – the apparently ‘real’ and substantive tone of the boy’s voice on the one hand, and that of the bell on the other, but with both intermingled by means of electronic transformation so that voice and bell sounds become part of a larger whole. In doing so, what is past (as echo) is recalled into the present through a kind of reversal of sonic decay, blurring the sense of past and present, sound and silence, attack and resonance. The title of the piece is taken from the Latin inscription on the great bell of Winchester cathedral, a recording of which provided part of the sonic material for the work: ‘I lament the dead, I call the living’. It is fitting that perhaps Harvey’s best known work should underline this idea, of sound as an interchange across the threshold of life and death itself, an idée fixe that shapes his music as a whole – not simply as a matter of personal belief, but as something inscribed into the very fabric of his musical materials. Bell sounds are perhaps the archetypal musical sound-image of resonance, echo, and decay – a marker of both spatial distance and the sonic fullness that distance transforms. They echo through a century of music ‘after Debussy’,³⁵ from Debussy’s ‘Cloches à travers les feuilles’ and Ravel’s ‘La vallée des cloches’ to Messiaen’s Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum and Boulez’s Répons, from Varèse’s Déserts to Risset’s Sud, Harvey’s Mortuous plango to Grisey’s Vortex temporum.

For Adriana Cavarero, the nymph Echo introduces into speech a moment of distance that creates the resonance of music. As she put it: ‘Echo makes the musicality of language sing.’³⁶ But this loosening up of language through resonance also loosens its semantic precision: ‘the revocalization is thus a desemanticization’.³⁷ It is thus in this distancing or gapping of language in which music comes into its own. As Jessica Wiskus has shown, Merleau-Ponty found something similar in Cézanne’s fascination with the principle of ‘non-coincidence’. Whereas, in the Cartesian worldview the visual intelligence surveys the world with pan-optic vision, without any dislocation between seeing and the viewed object, Cézanne and the art that comes after him opens up a gap of non-coincidence. The wider significance of all those Monet water paintings is similarly found in how their foregrounding of reflection breaks up the fixed solidity of things. Or again, as Bachelard underlines in relation to writers like Poe and Rodenbach, the reflective properties of still water come to define the oeuvres of writers fascinated by the unsettling and unstable phenomenon of imprecise doubling.³⁸ It would be nearly a century later before philosophy was able to open up, within language, such a play of différance. In music, of course, the threshold of transformation takes place within the temporal unfolding of the piece. In Mahler, the Adornian suspension holds up the linear progress of the piece in order to deliver an outcome that, until that point, was not forthcoming. In his unlikely twin, Anton Webern, what was temporal becomes definitively spatial, as the threshold becomes an axis of reflective symmetry – vertically, in terms of the intervallic and registral spacing of pitches, and horizontally, in terms of palindromic structures on every level from row forms to the structure of complete movements.³⁹

But in this, the transformed image of reflection is also a metaphor for the alchemy of art itself. Spampinato quotes Pierre Bonnard on this process of transfiguration: ‘I have all my subjects to hand. I go to see them, I take notes. And then I return home. And before painting, I reflect, I dream.’⁴⁰ Debussy made a similar comment in an interview in Rome in 1914 that in the presence of the sea, his creativity was paralysed; in order to write, one needs distance.⁴¹ La mer is related to the sea not because such music imitates directly what is visible in nature, but because it transposes what is invisible in nature – that is to say, movement, tone, the constellation that arises between things. The ellipses at the end of the titles to the Piano Preludes are there to remind us of this – that without the distance, the absence, the fold of return, art does not take place. Bernard quotes a description from 1875 of the gap between the orchestral pit and the stage in the Wagnerian opera house as ‘a mystical abyss which separates the ideal world from the real world’.⁴² The transformation enacted on stage is thus inscribed into the spatial division between the stage and the orchestral pit, and thus the space between words (and the Apolline world of forms they construct) and music (understood famously by Nietzsche in terms of its Dionysian and wordless flux).

For Mallarmé, the task of poetry was precisely to undo the fixity of a world defined through language and to effect a ‘dispersion volatile’. Poetry should dissolve the fixity of a linguistic world and take flight from it. This fundamentally deconstructive urge lies at the heart of Mallarmé’s work, albeit to replace the ‘thing’ with a dematerialised ‘idea’. Music is different in this respect; music does not negate the object in order to replace it with the idea (a muteness which Mallarmé, the poet, sees as a lack). But, contra Mallarmé, this is precisely music’s value – it loosens the materiality of the world not in order to negate it, but to reconfigure our relationship to it. Music is of course the art of evanescence, the very model of the dispersion volatile of Mallarmé’s poetry; just like the latter, its goal is also ‘to transpose a fact of nature into a vibratory near-disappearance’.⁴³

For Proust, and therefore for Merleau-Ponty who comes to music through Proust, music nevertheless embodies a ‘sensible idea’. In the last few pages of ‘The intertwining – The chiasm’, in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty discusses Proust’s notion of the musical idea. As Jessica Wiskus underlines, Merleau-Ponty finds there ‘a model for the ontological shift that [he] seeks to articulate through the philosophy of the flesh’.⁴⁴ The sensible idea, like the musical idea, is not waiting for some linguistic clarification or explication. As Wiskus comments: ‘Their shadow – their depth – is constitutive.’⁴⁵ She continues: ‘the musical idea is a “negativity that is not nothing” for, through this divergence or negativity, the fact that there is an unpresentable comes to presence’.⁴⁶ The musical or sensible idea is ‘not the positing of a content, but the opening of a dimension that can never again be closed [not a] “positive thought” [but] “negativity or absence circumscribed” ’.⁴⁷ What might a philosophy be like, Merleau-Ponty asks himself, that might do something similar, ‘in the same sense of music, that, speaking not at all, says everything’?⁴⁸

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