Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 75-09(E), Section: A.

Adviser: Brian Kane.

This dissertation considers music of Debussy and early Ravel c. 1895-1910 in the context of emerging constructions of listening and auditory sensation around the turn of the twentieth century, particularly as they were expressed in the music-critical discourses of Debussyism. It argues that seemingly disjunct aspects of Debussyism can be contextualized as part of a shared set of commitments to, as well as anxieties towards, the perceived realite of sound---a phenomenon that can be described as "sonic realism" and that had tangible connections to late nineteenth-century epistemologies of sensory experience in the sciences. Analogously to (but also, in crucial ways, distinct from) developments in Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting and their relationship to a newly problematized visuality, the writings of key figures in early twentieth-century Debussyism subjected auditory experience, and the relationship between music and the protean, non-musical "outside" of sound, to new scrutiny.

The dissertation falls into two main parts. Following the Introduction, which lays out the goals of the project and the musicological conversations with which it is engaged, and Chapter 1, which details recent work outside of musicology on vision and hearing in the nineteenth century, Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the related constructs of sensation and representation in Debussyist discourse. Through close reading of key music-critical texts of the period by Pierre Lalo, Louis Laloy, Paul Dukas, and Debussy himself, I argue that these critics and composers advocated a special, heightened receptivity to auditory sensation as a means of circumventing musical artifice and convention. That is, they constructed an opposition between the attentiveness to sensation evident in Debussy's music, which was a conduit to the reality of nature, and a derivative and false representation premised on habit. Yet, at the same time, these writers also recognized sensation as deeply problematic and mediated through a malleable listening apparatus. Using the opacity of the symbol as a figure for the opacity of sensation, they interposed layers of deferred signification between the sensation captured in Debussy's music and the reality to which it ostensibly pointed. These intertwined constructions of sensation and representation among Debussyist critics, I argue, reproduced the same problems of sensory knowledge articulated in late nineteenth-century sensory physiology, particularly that of Hermann von Helmholtz. With these theoretical issues as a backdrop, in Chapter 4 I examine a specific class of pieces by Debussy and Ravel with special relevance to the issue of auditory attentiveness: piano compositions that represent bell peals.

Chapters 5 and 6 turn towards a broader question of the relationship between music and its sonic material in Debussyism. I argue in this final section that sonic representations of bells or water sounds merely make conspicuous a more generalized Debussyist preoccupation with listening and its relationship to natural truth. Adding another, equally influential, group of critical voices to the conversation, these chapters focus on Jean Marnold, Lionel de la Laurencie, and Henry Gauthier-Villars in addition to Laloy, Lalo, and other critics addressed earlier in the dissertation. In particular, Marnold's account of Debussy's harmony---first propounded in a series of articles on the Nocturnes in May 1902, just as the premiere of Pelleas et Melisande vaulted Debussy into instant notoriety---imagined a novel relationship between music and sound in which music, in essence, acts as a representation of and a means of knowledge into the material of which it is constituted, even as Marnold maintained that knowledge of this material would always be provisional and subject to historical change. Tracing the far-reaching influence of Marnold's ideas through music discourses of the time, the dissertation concludes that these ideas implicate Debussyism in widespread anxieties about the accessibility of nature and a perceived need to reclaim meaningful contact with a world that was forever receding from human knowledge.

Finally, the Conclusion of the dissertation situates these arguments about Debussyism in relation to narratives of music and noise in the twentieth century---a narrative that typically begins with Italian Futurism in the 1910s and 1920s and includes such figures as Edgar Varese and John Cage. The preoccupation with the boundary between noise and musical sound in the music-critical discourses of Debussyism spurs a reconsideration of this narrative and the historical forces that underpin it, even as Debussyism's unique historical position gave rise to a problem of representation that distinguishes it from later avant-garde aesthetics.