Transcript
w e i v e R c i s u M h s i t t o c S
Parting the Veils of Debussy’s Voiles
David Code Lecturer in Music, University o Glasgow
Abstract
Restricted to whole-tone and pentatonic scales, Debussy’s Debussy’s second piano prelude, Voiles, oten serves merely to exempliy both his early modernist musical language and his musical ‘Impressionism’. ‘Impressionism’. Rejecting both arid theoretical schemes and vag vague ue painterly visions, this this article reconsiders the piece p iece as an outgrowth o the particular Mallarméan lessons rst instantiated years earlier in the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un aune. In developing a conjecture by Renato di Benedetto, and taking Mallarmé’s dance criticism as stimulus to interpretation, the analysis makes distinctive use o video-recorded perormance to trace the piece’s choreography choreography o hands and ngers on the keyboard’s music-historical stage. A contribution by example to recent debates about the promises and pitalls o perormative or ‘drastic’ analysis analysis (to use the term Carolyn Abbate adopted rom Vladimir Jankélévitch), the article ultimately adumbrates, against the background o writings by Dukas and Laloy, a new sense o Debussy’s pianistic engagement with the pressing questions o his moment in the history o modernism. I will try to glimpse, gli mpse, through musical works, the multiple movements movemen ts that gave birth to them, as well as all that they contain o the inner lie: is that not rather more interesting than the game that consists o taking them apart like curious watches? -Claude Debussy1 Clichés and Questions A avourite avourite o the anthologies anthol ogies and survey texts, texts , Debussy’s Debussy’s second piano prelude, Voiles (‘sails’ or ‘veils’), ‘veils’), has attained near-iconic near-iconic status as the most characteristic c haracteristic single exemplar o his style. In a narrow, technical view, this prelude’s restriction to two non-diatonic scales (whole-tone and pentatonic) has made it a highly convenient encapsulation o his contributions to postRomantic musical language. In a somewhat wider, aesthetic perspective, its near-unbroken
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Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
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dynamic delicacy, along with its loosely-phrased textural drit and pedal-washed sonorous blur, have acilitated the most simple and immediate armations o his supposed ‘Impressionist’ aliation. No doubt, as Richard Langham Smith once suggested, the act that the well-worn association between Debussy and painterly Impressionism has survived all attempts to discredit it speaks to its intuitive rightness at some immediate level o reception (Smith, 1973, p. 61). But i this stylistic cliché remains a source o impatience or many Debussy scholars (including Smith himsel), this is because it tends to draw a misty screen o generality over the exquisitely rened detail deta il o Debussy’s crat. Because o its syntactical syntac tical uniormity uniormi ty,, Voiles has been particularly susceptible to such generalized description. On the other hand, it is not necessary to occupy the extreme wing o anti-theoretic anti-theoretical al curmudgeonliness to wonder whether the aspects usually singled out as signicant by those accounts that do engage with compositional detail—the relatively obvious interrelationships o motives and gestures that secure the prelude’s ‘unity’; the ‘reerentiall pitch-class genera’ that locate its scalar ormations within the taxonomic catalogue ‘reerentia catalogue o Debussyan syntax—are those most illuminating o its place in the development o this distinctive, poetic and imagistic compositional imagination (see or example Böckl, 1972; Charru, 1988; Harris, 1980; Parks, 1989). This is not to say there is nothing o value in previous commentaries. Indeed, the balance o insight and limitation in one o the ew previous discussions that can be considered at all ‘critical’, ‘critic al’, which appears appear s within Arnold Whittall’s Whittall’s 1975 article ar ticle ‘Aspects o the Whole-Tone Whole-Tone Scale in Debussy’, can useully set the stage or a new approach. Whittall, or one thing, gives pride o place to the ‘dramatic’ aspects o Debussy’s composition: Debussy, at his best, was always a dramatic composer. What is dramatized, what brings tension and dynamism to the music, is the skilully balanced relationship between chromaticism and diatonicism, both o which may show modal characteristics but which never lose sight o the triadic constructions and progressions o earlier tonal music. Debussy’s harmony unctions precisely in the sense se nse that it gives meaning, and movement, to this relationship. relatio nship. As a language it can best be descri described bed as “expanded “expande d tonality, tonality,” a language in which tonality still acts as a basic term, giving perspective to all other harmonic activity. (Whittall, 1975, p. 271) Here, the ne metaphors o ‘sight’ into and ‘perspective’ upon the ‘triadic constructions and progressions’ o earlier tonality could valuably serve to open the historical investments behind Debussy’s compositional choices. But while Whittall is indeed able, in this light, to oer appreciative analyses o L’Isle joyeuse, Des pas sur la neige , and Jeux —all o which are, o course, much more variegated in pitch language—he can only dismiss Voiles or its threeold dramatic ‘weaknesses’: In the irst place, it attempts to oppose static and dynamic harmonic entities, relying primarily on rhythm to propel the whole-tone sections. Secondly, it ignores the most
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important, i not the only, property o the whole-tone scale itsel—the act that it can be transposed once, by a semitone, to provide the other six notes o the chromatic scale. Finally, although in Voiles the contrast and similarity between the two modes—both with Bb and two other notes in common, but one without the crucial E b —are exploited and even dramatized, there is little evidence o any attempt to integrate the two elements in such a way as to produce a new kind o chromaticism controlled by the intersection o diatonic and whole-tone elements. (pp. 261-2) It is hard to think o a clearer example o the tendency or normative music-theoretical presuppositions to thwart sympathetic critical engagement. Why, we might ask (with countless works rom Stravinsky to Reich in mind), is it ‘weak’ to rely on rhythm to propel a static harmonic language? Is the whole-tone scale’s only signicant property really its potential— as Messiaen might put it—or ‘limited transposition’? Is it appropriate to demand some predetermined degree o pitch-syntactical ‘integration’, let alone some ‘new kind o chromaticism’, rom this—or any—composition? In this early article, Whittall eectively condemns Voiles or not being (as he elsewhere describes L’Isle joyeuse) ‘a satisying subject or detailed harmonic analysis’ (p. 267). But rather than taking such (wholly understandable) dissatisaction as grounds or dismissal, it is more ruitul to consider whether the analytical categories themselves might be inappropriate to the particular case. In other words, Voiles, by its very syntactical poverty, might challenge us to recognize, and interpret, a dramatization o historical perspective that unolds in other dimensions than pitch-patterns alone. In this article, I take Voiles as a case study to explore, in a rankly experimental spirit, the critical potential in an analysis that ocuses not only on pitch patterns and rhythmic processes in the abstract, but also on the way they are deployed to underpin—and, in some degree, to determine—an unolding choreography o touch and gesture on the mediating substance o the piano keyboard itsel. This redirection o attention onto the ‘multiple [physical] movements that gave birth to the piece’, to paraphrase a line rom Debussy’s rst published paragraph o music criticism (Debussy, 1988, p. 23, as quoted in my epigraph), is obviously in tune with the many exhortations in recent musicology or a new critical attention to music’s ephemeral, physical, perormative aspects alongside either traditional ormalist analyses o musical unity or hermeneutic readings o musical signication (see or example Berry, 1989; Briscoe, 1999; Cook, 1999; Dunsby, 1995). My sense, indeed, is that an attempt to analyse the ‘multiple movements’ o the pianist’s hands as they realize the pitch-patterns o Voiles, i pursued with an ear to what those patterns might suggest about ‘inner lie’ (as in the urther words o my Debussyan epigraph), can useully contribute to the recent debate about the relationship between these various, notionally distinct modes o understanding. To reer only to the most polemical instance: it could well be said that Carolyn Abbate, who has recently enthusiastically endorsed Vladimir Jankélévitch’s insistence on the essentially perormative or ‘drastic’ nature o musical experience (as opposed to the ‘gnostic’ or signiying aspects elevated by any hermeneutics), ultimately exposes the potential limitations o such an approach rather more clearly than she adumbrates its revisionary promise (see Abbate, 2004).
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As examples o the level o ‘drastic’ understanding she nds possible during her own perormance, Abbate gives only feeting reports—‘doing this really ast is un’; ‘here comes a big jump’ (p. 510)—whose vacuity ully justies both her own somewhat melancholy peroration and the querulous response o Karol Berger: ‘i you have something worthwhile to say about them, do write about actual perormances; but do not cloak your choice o the object in the spurious mantle o revolutionary heroics’. (Berger, 2005, p. 499) Berger, in this response, rightly suggests that Abbate overdraws the distinction between drastic (perormative) and gnostic (hermeneutic) experience. As he puts it, ‘there is no such thing as pure experience, uncontaminated by interpretation’ (p. 497). But this rebuttal swings so ar in the other direction that it makes it hard to pursue critically the degree to which any musical composition might itsel hold the possibility o ‘pure experience’ up to question— and, in so doing, enact an unolding negotiation between the immediate, drastic pleasures o perormance and all the imaginative possibilities such experience might inspire, simultaneously, in the parallel (or parasitical) realm o gnosis. Debussy’s piano music oers a ertile eld or an investigation o such sel-conscious interplay between the material bases o aesthetic experience and their seductive summons to imaginative extrapolation, or exactly this kind o interplay was a central, conscious and intense concern o the poetic environment rom which this music sprang. In short, I take as a basic interpretive orientation the act that Voiles, like a good many o its twenty-three companions in the two books o Préludes, is deeply rooted in the variegated nexus o aesthetic motivations nurtured by Debussy’s ormative immersion in the poetry o Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Indeed, though the nod to this lineage in the one-word title o this second prelude is ar less explicit than in that o the ourth (whose title Les sons et les parums tournent dans l’air du soir borrows a line rom Baudelaire’s ‘Harmonie du Soir’). I ollow Renato di Benedetto’s suggestion, in the most substantial single article on the piece, that the word ‘voiles’, in its two possible meanings and in its very ambiguity, is insistently evocative o the Mallarméan strand o Debussy’s compositional sensibility (di Benedetto, 1978). 2 The problem remains, however, that invocations o Debussy’s Mallarméan sensibility, too, dissipate all too easily into paeans to Symbolist ‘mystery’ that are no more illuminating about musical detail than clichés about Impressionist ‘mist’. Given that di Benedetto does not entirely avoid this related cliché himsel, it will be useul to begin by revisiting his article briefy, to rene his conjecture about the Mallarméan pedigree o Voiles. Then, ater sketching some essential points o historical background, it will be possible to turn to analysis in hopes that the Abbatean level o reportage (‘here comes a really big jump’) might be ruitully supplemented both by Whittall’s historical perspective (‘this triad
2 As di Benedetto notes, there is no more crucial Mallarméan image than the ‘veil’; the nautical implication o ‘sails’ is almost as central to the oeuvre, in poems rom ‘Brise Marine’ through ‘Salut’ to the shipwreck in ‘Un coup de dés’.
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doesn’t eel as it should’) and by some sense o the poetic penumbra that still, in Debussy’s time, surrounded some o the most mundane scalar and physical materials.
A Mallarméan Conjecture, and Another Di Benedetto’s 1978 article ‘Congetture su Voiles’ is largely taken up with an analysis that nicely balances close attention to momentary textural deployment with broad considerations o background scalar logic. The analysis can be read on its own merits; I will highlight only one or two points o emphasis that help to understand the Mallarméan ‘conjecture’ di Benedetto oers in his conclusion. In short, he nds that Voiles, in spite o its ‘static’ scalar language, creates a sense o progress through an evolving density o ‘contrapuntal artice’ (p. 318). But he also discerns a ‘closed’, almost crystalline underlying unity in its ‘quadrilateral’ deployment o whole-tone scale segments in prime, inverted, retrograde, and retrograde-inverted orms (see pp. 315-19). This biurcation between his own diachronic and synchronic apperceptions leads him to question the work’s ormal stability: This net o correspondences, allusions, reciprocal reminders, itsel set in contrast to the apparent succession o events, annuls the traditional tripartite orm, or rather absorbs it and encloses it in a circular orm, even—it might be said—a rotating one, generated rom the oscillatory movement that, in so many ways, is the true, primary ramework o the prelude. (p. 333) Daring to characterize Voiles, in this light, as an ‘allegory o the ambiguous relation between essence and appearance, ction and reality’, di Benedetto asserts that ‘all o this recalls to me … one name: that o Mallarmé.’ Ater spinning a virtuoso gloss on veil imagery in Mallarmé’s poems, he urther suggests, most intriguingly, that Voiles might also be ruitully juxtaposed to Mallarmé’s amous essay about dance, ‘Ballets’ (p. 335). 3 Di Benedetto’s Mallarméan conjecture is exactly the kind o inspired interpretive leap that can reviviy our understanding o Debussy’s richly evocative piano preludes. 4 Still, the unapologetically ‘linguistic and ormal’ nature o his analysis orestalls any development o his striking intuition about the potential interpretive relevance o Mallarmé’s musings on dance. His conclusions, indeed, all prey to the common one-sided view:
3 In partial support o the link to dance criticism, di Benedetto makes the simple but apposite observation that Voiles ollows immediately in the rst volume o preludes rom a piece whose evocation o dance is explicit: Danseuses de Delphes (p. 339n25). 4 See also the contextual support provided by the piece’s other close companions in the rst volume—or example, the third prelude Le vent dans la plaine , whose title is taken rom a poem by Favart; and the ourth, Les sons et les parums tournent dans l’air du soir , a clear evocation—i not a direct gloss—o the Baudelaire poem rom which its title is taken. The ‘poetic’ orientation o these works is patent, why not try and imagine, and consider critically, related avenues o inspiration in less explicit cases?
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Heedless o analytical invasions, impenetrable and distant, the enigmatic “musical object” that is Voiles continues to oscillate beore our eyes as i suspended “ dans le doute du Jeu suprème” [within the doubt o the supreme game]; and, like the intangible mallarméan “eternal Azure,” lets its own serene, indolent irony pour over anyone who lingers, spellbound, to contemplate it: here, alas, is no poet, but only, and much less heroic, a ‘eeble musicologist who curses his genius’. (p. 339) The image o the ‘spellbound’ analyst is inspired; the humility is touching; but di Benedetto’s identication with the poet’s ‘haunted’ idealism (as in the early poem ‘L’Azur’) overinvests in the trope o ‘symbolist mystery’ that has long orestalled precise insight into Mallarmé’s infuence on Debussy. A more multidimensional sense o the dramatic experience traced through this ‘rotating’ nexus o pitches becomes possible i we consider, at the same time, the material and physical substrates o its temporal realization. It thus becomes possible to experience it as one more Debussyan exploration o the dialectical interplay central to all o Mallarmé’s literary art, between the brute reality o artistic materials and the expressive ideals such materials are manipulated to serve. I have tried to expose this dialectic, in a previous article, by tracking in detail the close and sophisticated musical reading o Mallarmé’s ‘L’après-midi d’un aune’ in Debussy’s amous orchestral Prélude (Code, 2001). The primary goal o that exercise, let me now insist, was never simply to try and attach this or that chain o specic images (nymphs and ountains, reeds and roses) to this or that chain o musical ideas. In itsel, that crudely mimetic level o reading could only ever attain what we might call the ‘cryptographic mundane’ in contradistinction to Abbate’s slightly mocking notion o the ‘cryptographic sublime’—by which she means the ‘deep’ social meanings desired and assumed by all ideological hermeneuts rom Adorno through McClary, Kramer and Taruskin (see Abbate, 2004, p. 524 and ater). The point is, rather, that by tracing the way the poet structures such imagery to serve an allegorical conrontation with broader, more basic oppositions and concepts—matter and idea; sound and sense; speech and writing—it becomes possible to unearth Debussy’s articulation o musical orm around a similar, broad-brushed allegory o the relation between the same (or closely equivalent) categories o experience, as sensed at that moment in the history o orchestral composition. Di Benedetto’s conjectural link, via the image o ‘veils’, between the maddening elusiveness o Voiles and Mallarmé’s dance criticism can be enriched by adopting the same kind o sel-conscious, allegorical sensibility in the ace o the physical realisation o the prelude’s ‘crystalline’ pitch structures. But a critical pursuit o a similar material-ideal dialectic through perormative analysis is not best served by the particular example di Benedetto has selected rom Mallarmé’s dance writings. The ‘veil’ in the essay ‘Ballets’ promises only ‘conceptual’ revelation: ‘through a communion whose secret her smile seems to pour orth, without delay [the dancer] yields to you through the last veil which always remains, the nakedness o your concepts’ (Mallarmé, 1945, p. 307). In another essay on dance, by contrast, we nd the poet responding to the cascade o veils in a more modern production with praise more palpably oriented around the tension between the physical and the ideal.
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The ‘Autre Étude de Danse: Les Fonds dans le Ballet d’après une Indication récente’ celebrates the American dancer Loïe Fuller, whose manipulations o gauzy veils and brilliant lighting entranced many n-de-siècle artists. Any attempt to gloss such a characteristically extravagant piece o criticism—a truly ‘drastic’ use o language, we might say, which tries to re-enact the vibrancy o the viewed event in its own fexibly coiling prose—must o necessity sell it somewhat short. But it is worth underlining, in the rst place, how passionately the poet responded to the intimate, symbolic or symbiotic relationship between the swirl o veils and the sound o music: The décor lies latent in the orchestra, treasure o imaginations, to emerge, lashing, according to the vision that the representative o idea dispenses to the stage-ront here and there. Well, that transition o sonorities to tissues (is there anything more similar to gauze than Music!) is, uniquely, the magic that Loïe Fuller operates, instinctively, with the exaggeration, the retreats, o skirt or wing, instituting a place. The enchantress makes the ambience, draws it rom hersel and puts it back in there, through a palpitating silence o crêpes de Chine ... Here is given back to Ballet the atmosphere or nothing, visions immediately scattered as soon as known, their limpid evocation. The ull scene, at the service o ictions exhaled rom the play o a veil with attitudes and gestures, becomes the very pure result. (Mallarmé, 1945, pp. 308-09) Here, it is as i the elusive, concealing-revealing substance o the veils attains to the same semiotic promiscuity beloved by the musical hermeneuts. But at the same time, recalling the line previously quoted rom the essay ‘Ballets’, much more than a purely metaphorical revelation o the ‘nudity o concepts’ is at issue in this ‘transition o sonorities to tissues’. Through a passing glimpse o diastolic rhythm—Fuller extrudes the ambience, and withdraws it back— Mallarmé hints at his sense o the physical presence at the core o the whole representational extravagance. As the essay continues, this palpable, electrical, hypnotising sense o the (unseen) dancing body becomes ever clearer: All emotion issues orth rom you, and releases a milieu; or dissolves onto you and incorporates the space back into you. Thus this multiple discharge around a nudity, great with contradictory lights wherever the body commands, tempestuous, soaring, magniies it to the point o dissipating it: [it remains] central, or all reacts to each leeting impulse in swirling eddies, she gathers it all in, by a mad will projected to the extremities o each wing, and darts all in around her severe, standing statuette—struck dead rom the eort o condensing out o a near-total sel-liberation these lingering side-springing ornaments o skies, o sea, o perume, o oam. (p. 309) For Mallarmé, in other words, or all the dazzling, evanescent beauty o the visual-sonorous display, the experience hinges most prooundly on an ineluctable, essential sense o the ‘mad will’ o the perormer . And or this reason it is important to recognize that however hyperbolic
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Mallarmé’s enthusiasm or Fuller’s dance might seem, it also carries a aint undercurrent o disquiet—or, to be more precise, o envy. In a valuable recent reappraisal o symbolism, Richard Cándida Smith speaks directly to this point when he suggests that ‘Mallarmé … embraced Fuller as the realization o the power modernity brings to art, although he himsel was not sure how he as a poet could take advantage o the technical attributes that Fuller exploited so well.’ (Smith, 1999, p. 71) I would put it more strongly: in celebrating Fuller, Mallarmé is well aware that he is conronting an art that is available to the poet only as a distanced observer—that is, a mere reader o ‘bodily writing’. And the dance critic, as reader, cannot even claim the partial perormative satisaction o the dramatic reciter—as oered, or example, in the lyric-dramatic hybrid o the ‘aun’ poem, with its ormed pursuit o materialized voice, or indeed in the ar grander perormative project Mallarmé let incomplete under the title o Le Livre (see Code, 2004). In this sense, however passionately the critic might try to write the dynamism and extravagance o Fuller’s art into his own prose, he inevitably nds himsel at a remove rom the participatory, physical immediacy o the art itsel—much in the way (ironically enough) that Debussy, in translating the aun poem’s allegory o speech and writing to the orchestra, could only enact a parallel at one remove, so to speak, where the sensations o listening imperectly substitute or the embodied acts o perormance. It is in this light that we might now consider the potential signicance or a rehearing— and re-experiencing—o Debussy’s mature piano music o the occasional explicit exhortations, in Mallarmé’s criticism, to read poetry like pieces at the piano (see e.g. Mallarmé, 1981, p. 26; Mallarmé, 1945, pp. 362, 380, 491). Pianism becomes an ideal act o reading because the pianist, simultaneously reader , hearer and (in some small way) dancer , is able, in deciphering the musical score whose arcane mysteries Mallarmé so envied, to project evocative sonorous ‘gauzes’ rom the keyboard ‘stage’ through the choreography o hands and ngers. But in entering the choreography o Voiles as dancer-reader, we must not orget the historical selconsciousness with which the poet conronted the illusory promises o a complete, materialideal synthesis in the ‘symbol’—even as he tried, again and again, to enact through poetic orm the idealized moment o physical plenitude. In other words, as we trace the enchainement o gesture along this eld o black and white keys ( touches), the challenge is to try and sense the interplay, at every step, between brute, sensate presence and the feeting illusions o expressive promise.
Historical frames The historical sel-consciousness about lost or ading ‘expressive promise’ Mallarmé exemplied in his aun poem arguably became one o his most valuable and lasting legacies to Debussy. The aun Prélude, I have argued, articulated its elegiac pastoral poetics through a studied revoicing o Berliozian orchestral rhetoric and an ironic redeployment o Wagnerian harmony (Code, 2001). As a nal ingredient or this Mallarméan interpretation o Voiles, we need at least
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a rough sense o the somewhat dierent historical perspective that might be said to inorm the piano music o more than a decade later. For a start, it is possible to suggest (perhaps counterintuitively) that the sense o the historically mediated nature o musical materials could have become, i anything, even more intimate and insistent once Debussy turned his attention rom the orchestra to the keyboard. Now the very ‘stage’ o encounter—the characteristic array o black and white keys—conronts the composer with a reied, material and technological trace o the history o equal-tempered diatonicism. At least one o Debussy’s contemporaries argued that that this material eld had itsel become the primary locus o an ongoing interplay between the material and the conceptual in the evolution o musical language. The 1900 article ‘À propos le monument de Chopin’ by Paul Dukás, which begins by suggesting that the distinctive ‘harmonic mobility’ o contemporary music ‘is inherent to the style o keyboard instruments’, proceeds to suggest that the infuence o Chopin’s distinctive manner o compositional-pianistic ‘utterance’ prooundly inormed musical language in all media: It is in the orchestral works o Liszt, particularly the earliest, that the handling [ maniement] o harmony, as Chopin conceived o it, appeared, or the irst time, not just as a servile copy, but as the principle o an even reer mode o expression and o a progressive emancipation rom the habits and customs o the tradition o the schools [...] The inluence o Chopin was extended by Liszt as ar as Wagner himsel. Certain pages o the second act o Tristan und Isolde seem to have sprung directly rom the Nocturnes or the Preludes o Chopin. Similarly, [...] the musicians most closely connected to Liszt—or example, the majority o composers o the new Russian school—are also those whose turn o thought and eel or harmony recall Chopin all the more. (Dukas, 1900, p. 516) No doubt Dukas underplays the ability o composers to conceive and hear independently o instrumental idiom. But the importance he grants to the circulation between the ‘eel or harmony’ and the compositional ‘turn o thought’, in the creative lineage extending rom Chopin through all o the most signicant infuences on Debussy, can serve as a preliminary stimulus to reconceive the historical ‘perspective’ encapsulated in his piano music more richly than in purely abstract, syntactical terms. In the attempt to trace such perspective with maximal historical sensitivity, I have ound it useul to borrow, and rene, a more recent raming o the central terms at issue. In a 1989 article on Debussy’s prelude La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune scholar-pianist Michelle Biget sums up her own attempt at a gesturally based analysis with the help o the post-Derridean musings on ‘technics’ by the literary theorist Bernard Stiegler. In a lapidary ormulation, Biget suggests that in Debussy’s pianism ‘there is no confict between logos and techne ’ (Biget, 1989, p. 91; see also Stiegler, 1998, p. 193). But while this assertion seems a reasonably appropriate distillation o Dukas’s point about Chopin and his most immediate heirs, its accuracy or Debussy’s later engagement with pianistic history depends, I think, on a signicant qualication. However unpredictable Chopin’s techne and harmonic idiom may have been, both
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ultimately remained bounded by the same logos (the ‘language’ o transposable diatonicism) that the keyboard itsel arose—by means o signicant modications over time—to serve. But when Debussy composes or piano in the whole-tone scale (or example), he is, in eect, deploying an alien conceptual scheme against a technology designed or other purposes. The countless examples o ‘black-key’ orientation in Chopin (to take a dierent, equally relevant instance) are all enolded within a diatonic envelope o coherence; Debussy’s bald presentation o black-key pentatonic in such works as Voiles, by contrast, releases an incidental property o the diatonic keyboard into material and conceptual sel-suciency. For Debussy, in short, we might better ask o each o his compositions how it negotiates the various degrees o confict or collusion between logos and techne that become possible as the circulation between abstract ideals o musical coherence and physical results o instrumental ‘handling’ drit ree rom the sustaining logic o common-practice harmony. The most immediate historical context that must inorm the pursuit o such a question through any particular one o his works, nally, is the developing Debussyan pianistic oeuvre itsel. Although some celebrate the last work o the ’90s, Pour le piano (published 1901), I am inclined to accept Ravel’s polite insistence (in a 1906 letter to the critic Pierre Lalo) that Debussy’s ull attainment o a mature pianistic voice only took place in the 1903 Estampes, ater the appearance o his own Jeux d’eau (Ravel, 1989, p. 83). 5 Quibbles over the precise debt to Ravel aside, it is enough or now to note Debussy’s telling shit rom more abstract ‘genre’ designations (in the Suite Bergamasque and Pour le piano) to an explicitly evocative stance, or a triptych marked geographically as two ‘exotic’ pieces ( Pagodes, Soirée dans Grenade ) ollowed by one ‘domestic’ ( Jardins sous la pluie ). There can be no doubt that the poetic titles relate directly to the compositional language: Pagodes, or one, has long been recognized as Debussy’s most blatant evocation o the gamelan (see Example 1(a), the opening pentatonic tune o Pagodes, and (b), its luxurious climactic swirls on the black keys). 6 In his book on Debussy’s piano music, Paul Roberts notes that while Debussy would never repeat such ‘pastiche orientalism’, the ‘memory o the gamelan’ would nonetheless ‘remain with him at the prooundest level’ (Roberts, 1996). It will be worth bearing this simple proposal in mind when we turn to Voiles. As concerns the syntax—the logos —that sustains such pianistic indulgence, Pagodes is exemplary o the rst stage o a trend that would continue through the next two or three piano collections. To put it simply, the piece’s syntax hovers between two modal/tonal environments,
5 Ravel claimed to admire Pour le piano ‘passionately’—and indeed orchestrated the Sarabande —but insisted the suite contained nothing very new ‘rom a purely pianistic point o view’ (‘au point de vue purement pianistique’, emphasis original). 6 The ‘exoticism’ was recognized as both a material and a conceptual dimension o the piece: as Louis Laloy put it, ‘the glissandi on black keys refect the liquid sonority o a Far-Eastern orchestra’ (trans. in Priest, 1999, p. 227). (There are actually no ‘glissandi’ in Pagodes, but the basic point is apt).
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B major and g # minor, each o which contains all o the black keys. We might say in a preliminary sense that the modal environments with this basic physical property appealed to Debussy as contexts in which logos and techne can operate, on the whole, in a comortable marriage or interlock. Ater the Estampes, the central pianistic oeuvre appeared between about 1905 and 1915; a rough sense o the shit between the two books o preludes, 1910 and 1913, will suce. In the rst book, which includes Voiles, the many tactilely conceived passages remain grounded in relatively clear (i generally two-sided) modal or tonal elds. The most obvious instance, La flle aux cheveux de lin (see Example 2(a)) has been much celebrated both as a ‘black-key’ piece and an evocation o idealized innocence; a passage rom La sérénade interrompue (Example 2(b)) can exempliy a somewhat more choreographic approach to the keyboard, in its ‘black-white’ mimesis o guitar strumming; Les collines d’Anacapri , or one urther example, revisits both the g#-minor/ B major ambivalence o Pagodes and its general exoticist—in this case sunny and Neapolitan—idealism (Example 2(c)). All three preludes can be taken as exemplary o the interplay o syntax and technique in the rst book as a whole: their various idyllic shades o exoticism and olkloricism are presented in the grammatical context o ambiguous modal regimes oriented around the black keys: E b minor/Gb major; F Phrygian/ Bb Aeolian; B major/ g# minor. In the second book o preludes, by contrast, what Jankélévitch aptly termed an ‘irrational’ dissonant regime oten results rom a seemingly more arbitrary choreography o let hand on white keys against right on black (Jankélévitch, 1949, p. 156). Even a cursory encounter with the three most obvious examples— Brouillards, Les ées sont d’exquises danseuses , and Feux d’artifce (Examples 3(a), (b) and (c))—clearly shows the irrationality that results rom the shit towards a more purely physical conception. 7 Perhaps due to the challenge such passages pose to ‘sae and conventional’ notions o musical coherence (Roberts, 1996, p. 184), the reception o the second book o preludes has been more ambivalent than the rst. For one early example, the eminent Italian musicologist Guido Gatti stated his discomture plainly in a signicant 1921 article: When he reached his thirteenth Prélude, Debussy’s soul appears to have turned away—more or less—rom any human subject: as though his soul no longer vibrated save in response to the reinements and delicacies o artiice ... We have the impression o something aded, spoiled by caresses, even conused. Hence the character o his emotion, which, i it be not supericial, is at any rate peripheral, and in a measure no more than epidermic, skin-deep. (Gatti, 1921, pp. 444-45)
7 To be sure, a ‘rational’ explanation can occasionally be developed, with reerence (or example) to the octatonic scale. But my sense is that octatonicism can oten ser ve as a post hoc justication or conceptions more undamentally pianistic in origin. The question as to the precise balance between these two possible bases is precisely the one on which the nest historical understanding can be said to hinge.
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We might ollow Gatti just so ar as to entertain the possibility that Debussy, having achieved an exemplary interdependence o logos and techne in several piano sets, ultimately courted a collapse o expression into purely solipsistic, ‘epidermic’ sensation. But Gatti’s negative assessment demands qualication. He comes closer to the appropriate, ambivalent tone himsel when he suggests later that Debussy’s ‘savorous, regenerated pianistic technic’ eventually, in the second book o preludes, came to strain its own idiomatic security to the extent that the perormer eels Debussy is ‘groping or what he is in search o [rather] than nding it’. (p. 445) From a more sympathetic view, the sense o groping ‘search’ can be understood, or some works at least, as programmatic—that is, as exemplary o a composed conrontation with the questions thrown up by this new stage in the historical circulation between musical ‘thought’ and instrumental ‘handling’. It is in this light that we can best appreciate the close echo, in Gatti’s accusation, o the words with which Debussy himsel fippantly ended the preace he included in his last major pianistic collection, the 1915 Etudes: Our old Masters—I mean to say ‘our’ admirable clavecinistes—never indicated ingerings, relying, no doubt, on the ingenuity o their contemporaries. To doubt that o the modern virtuosos would be unseemly. The absence o ingering is an excellent exercise, suppresses the spirit o contradiction that pushes us to preer not to use the author’s indicated ingering, and veriies those eternal words: ‘One is never better served than by onesel.’ Let us search or our ingerings! (Debussy, 1991a, p. 2, emphasis added).
This last exhortation—‘ Cherchons nos doigtés! ’—can be read as an ironic trace o the history o pianistic touch that underlies much o the composer’s output or piano. Attempting such a ‘search’ through Voiles, now, we can try to gain a precise sense o its place in this history o touch, language, and evocation.
Analysis Although some o the points in the analysis o Voiles that ollows can be understood with reerence to the score given complete as Example 4, I also include a set o lm clips o perorming hands, as a an illustrative guide to my tactile and gestural observations. Though obviously an imperect—because purely visual—simulacrum o embodied experience, the lm might at least serve to direct the attention o other perormer-interpreters to their own ‘drastic’ experiences [OPEN VIDEO]. The quasi-improvisatory arabesque in thirds that launches this prelude links it to a larger set o ‘wind arabesque’ works including the aun Prélude; The Little Shepherd ; the Verlaine song ‘Le Faune’; the Louÿs song ‘La fûte de Pan’; and the rst orchestral Nocturne, ‘Nuages’, with its
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haunting cor anglais solo. This whole amily is arguably shaded with the ‘pastoral’ topicality most undamentally characterized by a search or lost purity or immediacy. In the case o Voiles, the sense o lack, or search, is compounded by the doubling o the line. For Debussy in 1910, a major third is not an (0,4) pitch set, but rather the most charged vestigial shard o the whole tradition o tertial harmony. Indeed, the triadic orientation o much o the material in Voiles only emphasizes the loss o the syntactical security once provided by triadic tonality. ‘Taking the stage’ to realize the opening arabesque physically, we immediately encounter an alternative, material and tactile grounds o coherence (see the rst clip). In a wide view (at the middle-ground, so to speak) the vestigial reminiscence o antecedent-consequent logic in the rst two phraselets is articulated by a contrast in sensation: the rst gesture moves to the black-note third F #-Bb, the second drits down to the white C and E. But this is only the most obvious hinge o a more thoroughgoing tactile orientation. The arabesque is, in act, deployed on a materially symmetrical whole-tone octave, two black keys on either side (A b and Bb below; F# and G# above) o three white (C-D-E). Topography here substitutes or tonal logic. No doubt there are a ew possible results o a ‘search or ngerings’ to realize the arabesque as written. I have ound one in particular, [5/4-5/3-4/2-3/1-2/1], most intriguing as a point o departure or the choreography, or in bringing the seven-note whole-tone octave under the hand as symmetrically as the ve ngers will allow, it gives palpable ocus to the awkward relationship between the dancing hand and this new material-historical stage. Here, o course, we immediately conront the threat o solipsism: given that Debussy’s Etudes preace implicitly acknowledges the open-endedness o any ‘search or ngerings’, it is hard to assess the relevance o any individual realization to historical understanding more generally construed. It is impossible to address this problem decisively here, beyond noting that every analytical method, including the most ‘scientic’, proceeds by selection. The important question, it seems to me (i we are even to entertain the possibility o a ‘drastic’ mode o interpretation alongside more traditional scholarly approaches) is whether or not the quasi-‘seven nger’ reading o the opening arabesque can serve an account o the piece along the lines o Biget’s resonant suggestion: The deployment [aménagement ] within the pianistic given counts at least as much as the identiication o the ‘harmonic’ phenomenon. Beyond just assigning a label to the elements o the discourse, it is crucial to seize upon their situation relative to the instrumental journey. (Biget, 1989, p. 86) Though other pianists’ ‘instrumental journeys’, based on dierent choices o ngerings, will undoubtedly open dierent avenues o understanding, no doubt the reasonably limited range o options or physical realization o the notated sounds guarantee some possibility o ruitul interpretive dialogue.
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Beneath the white third, a bass B b enters (bar 5), ollowed by an octave-doubled tune (bar 6). The theoretical circumlocutions occasionally oered to explain the B b syntactically as a true ‘root’ (see or example Whittall, 1975, p. 161) remain, I think, unconvincing. Better, at least at rst, to think o it spatially, as a ground or gravitational point de répère or the choreography. Whether or not such a pitch-ground can remain syntactically neutral, or how it might take on ‘logical’ infection as a true ‘undamental bass’, are questions to carry through the piece. Here, the Bb states the rst rhythmic stage o an ostinato that will, in the principal mechanism o large-scale coherence, rise and accelerate incrementally through the piece’s sub-sections (see the second clip). The ‘arc tune’, the second main thematic idea, whose drit through the span rom A b to E is not as palpably keyboard-derived as the opening arabesque, might oer a reminder that any particular analytical ocus has its limits. Some musical ideas may indeed be more undamentally conceptual than tactile. But this is not to say that the tune alls away as a pure sonorous object or pitch-cipher. Some slight interest can be gleaned rom the seemingly arbitrary handsharing Debussy notates or its incipit and rst statement: dierent choreographic oddities, we will nd, also infect the tune’s two subsequent recurrences. But it is perhaps more ruitul to consider the shape o this tune through the historical sel-consciousness previously imputed to the opening arabesque. I the improvisatory chain o thirds evoked pastoral winds, this octave-doubled line, we might say, traces an abstraction o a deeper musical archetype. To the aint topicality o the opening, the tune adds a highly attenuated version o the classic arc o lyricism, temporally adrit against the ostinato ‘foor’ and the regulating meter. In this sense, it stands or a larger perspective on lost expressive ctions, extending back through the various sel-consciously belated treatments o melodic lyricism in such works as Nuages, the aun Prélude, and the Quatuor à cordes (see Code, 2007). The remainder o the opening paragraph, with its re-tracing o the opening arabesque, has little to add to the tactile observations o the rst appearance—though it is worth noting one physical detail about the return o the incipit o the arc tune as slightly denatured (i.e. augmented) triads beneath the arabesque (bar 15). While the two musical shapes occupy relatively distinct registers, their contrary ‘instrumental journeys’ result in a couple o brie overlaps (bars 15 and 17; 1’03” and 1’08”). The notional (and notational) separation o layers is belied by collisions on two shared pitches. The sensation o such ctive part-writing can oer something to interpretation. At the very least, the disconnect between touch and sound-idea thematizes the illusory, deceptive relationship between the dance o ngers and the layers o sonorous ‘gauze’ it throws orth. Such a moment could well serve to remind us o the tangled interrelationship, over the development o Debussy’s pianistic oeuvre, between the idiomatic possibilities o the instrument itsel, and its potential to operate suggestively as an imaginative transcription o the orchestral soundworld in which he rst established his mature compositional voice. Extravagant or not, the image o Loïe Fuller, capturing and transmitting orchestral sounds in her swirling veils, might well stand as a ertile gure or the relation brought aintly into ocus by these tiny tactile collisions—
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the relation, that is, between the material-technical idiom o pure pianistic activity and the memory-saturated sounds this activity throws orth. In the second large paragraph (starting bar 22) tactile orientation signicantly strengthens. As the Bb expands to become a rhythmic pedal, and the ostinato element accelerates and rises one increment (rom crotchets and quavers to dotted quavers and semiquavers; rom bass to middle voice), a turn on the three black keys common to the whole-tone and pentatonic elds palpably anticipates the central section (bars 22-23; see the third clip, rom 1’33”). Less obviously, the turn sets up a deepening o historical perspective. Di Benedetto is not the only analyst to reject hasty generalizations about Debussy’s ‘anti-contrapuntal’ inclinations. But all too oten, critics oer in place only ill-dened notions o textural and registral ‘counterpoint’— that is, juxtapositions o layers; ‘articulation o [distinct] musical lines’; ‘independently evolved and developed horizontal levels’ (see or example DeLone, 1997, p. 53; Pasler, 1999, p. 228; Schmitz, 1950, p. 18). This loose, textural sense o ‘counterpoint’, undoubtedly central to Debussy’s style, should not be allowed to obscure the precise, historically sel-conscious role he occasionally gives to more traditional contrapuntal aspects o local voice-leading. Here, the black-key turn introduces an instance o—or a reerence to—the strongest convention o traditional part-writing: two-voice contrary motion (bar 23; 1’38”). In the whole-tone context, such a texture seems a particularly reighted attempt to assert a syntactical security that is, in the absence o semitones, impossible. Even more clearly than the opening arabesque, this denatured counterpoint seems to seek material compensation or logical railty: the new registration o the ostinato requires that the our ngers o the right hand split, to move rom white-key sixth to black third, as i gripping a material substitute or the absent security o diatonic contrapuntal syntax. Even when the hand dances ree rom such material counterpoint, it resumes exploring symmetrical triadic shapes (the original G #-C-E-G#, along with another, Bb-D-F#) beore alling away, through the black-key third, onto another inconclusive ‘cadence’ (bar 27). In the next passage, a larger-scale choreography comes into play. Ater a new continuation rom the turn (b. 29), the two hands cross, briefy, giving precise tactile ocus, again, to the distinctive material aspects o this whole-tone eld. As can be seen in the lm (2’07”2’08”), the let hand, above, feetingly touches the three white keys as the right, below, turns on the three black. The turn, as has been noted, clearly anticipates the central section; it is a ‘motive’ in the traditional sense as well as a recurring tactile unit. At a purely gestural level, the hand-crossing, too, anticipates the piece’s climax, which will eature a ar more emphatic and abandoned dance o hand over hand. In its immediate context, this initial hand-crossing shits the tactile encounter to a treble intensication o the prior contrapuntal ‘sight into’ tonal history (bar 31; 2’11”-2’14”.) In this variant o the earlier contrary motion, the only intrusion o chromaticism in the piece hints, through its quick passing notes (G § below, Db above), at the strongest o all moves in two-part counterpoint, diminished th to major third—again splitting the hand as i in physical intensication o the attempt to secure the third by breaking ree o syntactical ambiguity.
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Perhaps the emergence o the third rom this spasmodic ficker o chromatic voice-leading (bar 32) represents a triumph; the cessation o the B b pedal or two measures might reinorce such a reading. But the A b-C third is never allowed to ring ree. It immediately becomes entangled in the highest version o the ostinato (bar 33). Here, the coiling white-key semiquavers call up a literal sense o white ‘veils’. However crude such a material-metaphorical equivalence might seem, it has strong precedent in Debussy’s ‘pianistic imagination’. An obvious point o reerence is the notion o white-key / black-key (C major / F # major) ‘tonalities o darkness and light’ in Pelléas (see Smith, 1989); or another purely instrumental example, recall the pervasive ‘white-note’ harmonies in the outer sections o Nuages. 8 At any rate, when the arc tune returns (clip 5), as a single line within the right hand doubled by let-hand chords (again, a textural conguration that anticipates one element o the climax), this naïve notion o white-note ‘veiling’ is deepened by another instance o the more subtle sense o a technicalsubstantive barrier. Again, feeting collisions occur in the part-writing (bars 34-35; 2’28” and 2’30”), hinting once more that the distantiation o transcription intervenes between notated technical activity and the sound-world it purports to create. With a brie inusion o dynamics, momentum, and textural cohesion, the pedal B b now nally attains clearer syntactical implication, becoming the ‘root’ o a ‘whole-tone dominant seventh’ (Bb-D-F#-Ab) to set up the move to the pentatonic section, whose clearest tonal infection is eb minor (bars 38-41; clip 6, rom 2’40”). Starting rom the black-key turn, the pivot between the two elds, a pair o harp-like sweeps choreographed or switly overleaping hands sets up the chordal surge to the climax, marked ‘Emporté’, swept away. The brie, ringing high point is no sooner attained than relinquished. The hands retreat reluctantly to a muted, repetitive aterglow (bars 44-47), in which black-key contrary-motion counterpoint, th to minor third, is topped by a pair o octave-doubled melodic phrases that utter the piece’s most plangent trace o Romantic vocal infection. The simplest interpretation o this crux might note that as ‘musical thought’ the harp sweeps are utterly vacuous: naked armation o gesture on the keyboard, techne reed rom logos. The ve-note scale, unlike the whole-tone scale, alls easily beneath the hands; the 1+3+1 black-key symmetry o each seventh-span comes as close as is possible, on this technology, to a material correlate o the hands’ own ngers. In this armation o a simpler scale, the material and the physical conjoin in a blithe ten-ngered dance that rebuts the tactile complexity o the only prior hand-crossing.
8 As possible ‘material-poetic’ substrates or the claim in the original program note (oten attributed to Debussy) that Nuages ‘renders the immutable aspect o the sky and the slow, solemn motion o the clouds, ading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white’ (see Vallas, 1973, p. 112) note, or example the hovering G dominant-major-ninth ‘chord-cloud’, bars 21-28; and the ‘ade to white’ over a B-A-G-F bass just prior to the end o the rst section, bars 51-6. Clearly, the studied contrast between this white-note syntax and the black-key pentatony o the middle section is one main determinant o this piece’s pitch structure.
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The chordal rise is obviously more complicated. With its textural and rhythmic interlock o hands, semiquavers within and beneath demisemiquavers, it recalls the similar interlock, one increment slower in rhythm, in the last statement o the arc tune (compare bars 43-44, 3’06”-3’07” with bars 33-35, rom 2’24”). But now, the mesh o collisions that ‘veiled’ that tune receives an answer in ecstatic, shared, purely pianistic transport. Arriving on a ringing quartal chord, ree o triadic traces, and ree o the pedal B b, we might now sense a triumphantly distilled, gesturally liberated, octave-doubled and sonorously radiant armation o the ‘Chinese scale’ that had so clearly oered an exotic vision in Pagodes. This climax, in other words, seems, to realize again the promise such exotic materials held or the n de siècle, o renewed expressive immediacy in the ace o exhausted Western cliché. We might say that through our own dance o hands and ngers, we have sailed, imaginatively, to dreamed-o lands—or, more pruriently, we have parted the veils to reveal, and touch, the desired substance beneath. The diminuendo that ollows, with its answering stasis, and minor-mode infections, might be simply explained as the usual melancholy atermath to intense pleasure. Given the extreme brevity o this gestural irruption into this historically sel-conscious choreography, however, such a crude narrative reading seems inadequate. As concerns black-key pleasures, the counter-example o Pagodes —itsel, now, a ‘proound memory’ (recalling Roberts’s words)—demands more careul consideration. In 1903, it seems, black-key guration, partly released rom harmonic logic, was newly available or recursive tactile indulgence. (Even urther back, in 1899, black-key pentatony was available or expansive reverie, deepened by the delicate fute and harp timbre at the heart o Nuages). In 1910, the player o Voiles cannot languish in the dream o exotic escape with the same naiveté. Here, by regressing to a hollow pentatonic reminder o lost contrapuntal security, and breathing a nostalgic vocal infection, the piece invites a tinge o doubt about what such naked union o techne and technology has accomplished. Might the brie attainment o reedom rom syntactical constraint promise only private, ‘epidermic’ pleasures (to recall Gatti’s response to the second book o preludes), empty o expressive potential? For a helpul comparison, consider a more distant precursor than Pagodes or Nuages. Chopin’s iconic Nocturne op. 27 no. 2 in D b major—the central reerence, arguably, or the nostalgic lyricism at the heart o Debussy’s aun Prélude —also, in its last rhetorical fourish (see Example 5, bar 60), gives the perormer an indulgent maniement o the same black-key seventh interval, simpler in its symmetrical array (perect ourths above and below A b). Here too, as Biget might say, the hand nds a gratiying aménagement in the ‘pianistic given’. But this earlier unmeasured fourish o pianistic techne, unlike Debussy’s, remains gloriously armative o the tonal logos: the rhetorical orce o the 4-3 suspension, syntactical substrate and rational guarantor o the material symmetry, is heightened by the nal, strong infection towards the ‘dominant 13 th’ F natural (bar 61). 9 It is this strength o syntactical and expressive context whose very absence
9 O course, the suspended Db does not actually resolve immediately in the right hand, but a more complete analysis o Chopin’s middleground voice-leading is not germane to the current argument.
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rom Debussy’s later sweeps that is, arguably, acknowledged by the subsequent muted shadow o lost contrapuntal conventions, where the contrary motion rom hollow ths (A b-Db) to bare minor thirds (E b-Gb ) eels—considering middle register alone—like a studied incompletion, precisely at the only point in the piece where the hand could have been given a ull ‘tonal’ triad. For E. Robert Schmitz, the ‘ornamental glissando’ gures that ‘re-establish the whole-tone scale’ in bars 48-49 (Schmitz, 1950, p. 135) operate as a transition rom the pentatonic section, precisely because they each use only ve notes o the six-note scale (clip 7, rom 3”41”). But these ‘5 nger + 5 nger’ selections o the whole-tone eld can also be elt as something o a rebuttal to, or erasure o, the simpler sensations o the untransposable and symmetrical ‘5+5’ choreography on the black keys. The pianistic equivalent o ‘harp sweep’, so compelling in the climax, here is blocked, unsettled, by the more complicated tactile array, whose transposition and transormation (three black keys plus two white becomes two black plus three white) palpably thematizes the arbitrary relation between syntax and material within the whole-tone environment. In the last statement o the arc tune (bars 50-54), this abstracted vestige o lyricism might seem, rom the score alone, to attain an apotheosis, stated with its greatest clarity atop the texture. But a physical realization proves more complicated. I am not sure there is a single, Werktreue realization o the notated texture: to play the middle-register ripples as written, with the let hand alone, is to leave unexplained the three upward curving slurs extending through the measures 50, 51 and 52. It is possible to treat these slurs as choreographic notations, showing the silent path o the let hand as it rises to ll in alternate notes o the melody, and breaking this last melodic arc with a recurrence o an important ‘gestural motive’, the crossing o hands (see clip rom 3”49”). Such a reading may seem absurdly contorted—but I think it is worth experimenting with the ways such strain in perormative interpretation can literally work hand in hand with critical interpretation. However it is played, when compared to the co-operative dance o hands at the climax, any realization o this more complex textural array arguably carries an air o reutation similar to that borne by the ve-ngered whole-tone ‘glissandi’ with respect to their pentatonic precursors.10 Along the same lines, the ensuing, registrally vagrant enchainement o chords in sixths, seconds, ourths and sevenths (bars 44 and 46; rom 4’03”) places the hands at an unprecedented tactile remove rom the vestigial triadic shapes that have predominated—and that carried particular nostalgic weight in the aterglow to the climax. Cast adrit rom any trace o contrapuntal cohesion, this thickened harmonic veil eects a urther retreat rom history. When
10 I think Debussy ‘sets up’ this choreographic realization through his initial presentation o the ‘glissandi’ in bars 48-49. However one reads the implied hand distribution here, it seems perverse to play the glissandi, in isolation, with a single hand. A ‘hand-alternation’ is established beore the tune enters; we are, in eect, invited to continue this choreography through the presentation o the tune.
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the arabesque returns amidst this denser gauze, to grasp again the uncomortable seven-note black-and-white scale, and then to glide through expanded ‘glissandi’ onto the white third or the last time, we are inevitably reminded, by negation, o the opposite sensations we held briefy at the piece’s crux.
Laloy’s History, Mallarmé’s Suspense, Debussy’s Modernism The same year Debussy completed his rst book o Préludes, his riend and biographer Louis Laloy published an article on ‘Claude Debussy and Debussysme’ (see Priest, 1999, pp. 89-91). Proposing that the whole history o Western musical language is driven by a ‘ear o anything that escapes reason’, Laloy proceeded to trace a capsule history o musical language in terms o the deence against this ear. In a rst displacement o individuated ‘sensation’ by classicatory ‘notion’, as he puts it, the unique, untransposable modes o the Greeks were simplied in Gregorian chant to several ‘cuts’ o a single intervallic sequence. The process o abstraction continued with the reduction o Medieval modality to the major/ minor system—in which the minor, or Laloy, is really only ‘an accidental alteration o the major’ (pp. 89-90). But salvation rom the descent into arid rationalism was in store: Debussy appears, at the last stage o this account, as the composer who achieves ‘deliverance’ or music rom all rational constraint and writes ‘music which obeys no precept, only the laws o sensation’ (pp. 90-91). It is tempting to suggest that the ‘sensation’ at the climactic point in Voiles perectly ts this idealized account o Debussy-as-saviour. The pentatonic revelation emerges, we might say, as a brie, triumphant recovery o the modal particularity Laloy mourns as lost, over intervening centuries, to accreted deences o reason against its opposite. But what is missing rom Laloy’s partisan perspective is any sense o the agonistic sel-consciousness with which such a gesture now takes its place, ramed within a whole-tone eld rom which all modal specicity has been even more decisively lost than it was rom generalized diatonicism. In act, Laloy’s review, around the same time, o Debussy’s orchestral Images, eectively contradicts his article’s one-sided armation o ‘sensation’: The two works, with dierent characters and proportions, achieve the union o sentiment and sensation which Claude Debussy has always sought, which he alone can give us, and which he has succeeded today in putting in more clear-cut orm than ever. (Priest, 1999, p. 221) Here, Laloy comes closer to recognizing what was compositionally at stake in this moment. Indeed he goes on to assert piously that ‘music which is all about sentiment is abstract; music which is all about sensation has no continuation’ (p. 221). With less refexive condence in Debussy’s unqualied ‘victory’, we can see this unresolved double threat—o excessive conceptual abstraction on the one hand, and o purely sensuous (and thus historically inert) conrontation with musical materials on the other—as encapsulated in the juxtaposition o pianistic gestures and nostalgic counterpoint across the heart o Voiles.
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It is on this point that reerence to Debussy’s ‘Mallarméan sensibility’ can useully supplement any purely style-historical interpretation o his pianistic oeuvre. One particularly acute raming o the agonistic infection I have sensed in the course o the material-conceptual ‘dance’ through Voiles can be ound in the postlude Mallarmé later added to his essay on Loïe Fuller. He quoted, with emphasis, a ‘luminous’ passage in another critic’s response to a nude statue o a danseuse, which captured, he ound, ‘the proper concern o ballerinas or all time’. According to Georges Rodenbach, this was: ‘to complicate with all sorts o vaporous attire the sorcery o dances, in which their bodies appear only as the rhythm on which all depends but which all conspires to hide’ (Mallarmé, 1945, pp. 311-12). 11 In response to Rodenbach, Mallarmé was inspired to give his own most ecient statement about the near-invisible ‘nudity’ at the physical core o Loïe Fuller’s dance: An armature, which is not o any particular woman, o unstable locale, through the veil o generality, attracts onto some revealed ragment o the orm and there drinks the lash o light that deiies it; or, exhales, in return, this ecstasy, through the undulation o the loating, palpitating, dishevelled tissues. Yes, this is the endless suspense o Dance: the contradictory dread, or desire, to see too much or not enough, which demands a transparent continuation . (p. 311, my emphasis) This twisting prose comes close to the perect description, rom this pianist’s perspective at least, o the interrogatory poise o the climactic crux in Voiles. ‘Endless suspense ’; ‘contradictory dread or desire to see too much or not enough ’: or the ‘reader’ o the dancing body, lack o erotic specication might disappoint the searching gaze—but excessive clarity, total revelation, would be a ailure o the idealistic-materialistic ‘suspense’ that remained so central to Mallarmé’s poetic vision. For the dancer-perormer o Voiles, the searching ngers may indeed attain a marriage o sensation and substance that pierces the ‘veil o generality’ to recover a lost, untransposable modal specicity (and suggest at the same time—in a classic nde-siècle equivalence—a ullment o exotic antasy). 12 But in alling away to a muted, eviscerated evocation o history—a moment o ‘groping or syntax and not nding it’, we might say with Gatti—the piece turns back on the feeting marriage o ve (plus ve) ngers with ve (plus ve) black keys, as i with the question: ‘too much, or not enough?’
11 The postlude is separated rom the Fuller essay by another essay, ‘Mimiques’, in the Oeuvres complètes, but it ollowed directly in the 1897 Fasquelle edition o Divagations. 12 In ‘Claude Debussy et Debussysme’, Laloy exemplies the commonplace slippage between exoticist dreams o renewal and antiquarian dreams o recovery. His capsule history o postlapsarian music in the ‘rational’ West ollows this Romanticized claim: ‘A Chinese who is transported simply by the sound o singing stones or bells, a Hindu plucking the strings o his bamboo lute deliberately one ater the other, a Senegalese who spends hours at a time caressing a little harp which is so sot that only he can hear it, all are Impressionists and even Symbolists without knowing it: they hear, they are moved, they dream.’ (Priest, 1999, p. 89)
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To discern such a question at the crux o this iconic little piece can help to draw it into line with the best recent interpretations o literary Symbolism. As Richard Cándida Smith puts it in the course o a book that champions a more socially grounded understanding o Mallarmé, ‘the embedding o content, that is, o idea, into the physical experience o the medium was central to what made symbolist activity “experimental”’ (Smith, 1999, p. 22). In a much wider sense, it could be that the (inevitably uneasy) attempt to draw the sensations o perormative techne into analysis alongside the ratiocinations o theoretical logos is the best way to reviviy our sense o Debussy’s engagement with the most proound concerns o contemporaneous modernism. By this I mean such concerns as those Jim Samson indicates telegraphically near the end o a recent essay on music analysis, when he describes the ‘crisis in bourgeois culture at the turn o the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ as one ‘variously characterized as an epochal change o discourse (Reiss), a broken contract between word and world (Steiner), and a deconstruction o the boundary between sensus and ratio (Derrida)’ (Samson, 1999, p. 51). It is this last reerence that is most resonant here, in light o Biget’s dierent wording or the same sort o dialectic. And o course, in the attempt to diagnose modernism in such terms—matter and idea, sensus and ratio, techne and logos —many more names could be added to Samson’s ew. 13 But in the ace o all temptation to literary-theoretical generality, I would insist that the only way the historical operation o such ancient metaphysical oppositions can be brought to lie through criticism is through continuing attempts to illuminate precisely how this dialectic is conronted through the ormal processes o particular works. Framed within a choreographed search or lost syntactical security and expressive rhetoric, the black-key quartal chord at the peak o Voiles hovers briefy on a pivotal moment: between the pianistic indulgences o the 1903 Estampes and the epidermic oddities o the 1915 Etudes; even, at a stretch, between what Biget characterizes as the more ‘enunciatory’ pianism o Chopin or Liszt and the more irreducibly physical pianistic choreographies o Kagel or Ligeti. This is not to claim that everything beore Voiles diers rom everything ater: Debussy’s oeuvre traces widening circles, rather than any straightorward teleology, in its explorations o syntax and material.14 He himsel, nally, may have given us some hints as to how best to interpret the issues underlying this circulation. In a 1901 review o Dukas’s piano sonata, he wrote: True music lovers rarely visit airground booths; they have their simple piano, and passionately return to certain pages; this is just as sure to intoxicate as the ‘true, powerul and subtle opium’; and creates pleasurable moments in a way that is much less debilitating.
13 Thus, or another raming o the same dialectic, cultural historian Peter Por argues that the ‘general constellation o European thinking’ at the n de siècle evinced a ‘recognition o the impossibility o any unity between poiesis and techne, idea and matter.’ (Por, 1989, p. 101) 14 In spite o his own ambivalent gestures towards periodization, Gatti makes this point well when he suggests that ‘the personality o Debussy is one o those which unolded in concentric circles, and indeed, one may say that nothing vitally necessary had been orgotten on the road o its unolding.’ (Gatti, 1920, p. 422)
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Paul Dukas seems to have thought o this sort o person when he wrote his sonata: the hermetic quality o the emotion to which it gives expression and the rigorous connection in the progression o its ideas strongly demand an intimate, proound communion with the work. (Debussy, 1988, p. 30) For a start, this paragraph can useully serve to qualiy the scepticism Abbate turns on the idea that complex acts o ‘gnosis’ might take place in the feeting and ‘drastic’ experience o real-time perormance. For many o us, ‘perormance’ is, in point o act, private practice or a good deal o the time (whether or not we eventually take the stage). Such practice, less timebound than any recital, makes possible countless ‘passionate’ repetitions, as Debussy suggests, o those ‘pages’ and ‘pleasurable moments’ that, in oering distinct physical sensations, also prove most inexhaustibly ertile with interpretive questions. It might also be said that this review o Dukas obliquely anticipates the incremental broadening o Debussy’s own pianistic writing, rom its origins in music whose ‘airground’ appeal, in marrying logos and techne, gloriously realizes collective antasies, to those later explorations perhaps ully understandable only through the intimate epidermic experience o ‘true music lovers’. One ramication o such an account o Debussy’s development is that the risk o solipsism inevitable to any choreographic reading becomes essential to an account o this music’s historical stance. Solipsism—like historical sel-consciousness itsel, and the antasy o expressive plenitude—is, in this view, one o the central terms at issue in Voiles. None o these terms will ever be ully accessible to systematic analysis. But while it is thus too much to hope that this interpretive experiment will lead others to experience, across the climax o Voiles, exactly the same exquisitely Mallarméan suspension between ecstasy and mourning, it might at least inspire some to try and sense aresh how the various possible choreographies summoned by these pitch patterns can oer richer pathways or the imagination than are distilled by any arid analytical theorem, or captured by any hazy Impressionist scene.
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List of References Abbate, 2004: Carolyn Abbate, ‘Music: Drastic or Gnostic?’, Critical Inquiry vol. 30, no. 3 (Spring 2004), pp. 505-36. Berger, 2005: Karol Berger, ‘Musicology According to Don Giovanni, or, Should we get Drastic?’, The Journal of Mu- sicology vol. 22, no. 3 (Summer 2005), pp. 490-501. Berry, 1989: Wallace Berry, Musical Structure and Performance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Biget, 1989: Michelle Biget, ‘La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune ou le primat du geste instrumental’, Analyse musicale 16 (1989), pp. 85-91. Böckl, 1972: Rudol Böckl, ‘Claude Debussys Prélude II (... Voiles): Über Material und Form. Ein Versuch’, Die Musik- forschung vol. 25, no. 3 (July-Sept 1972), pp. 321-23. Briscoe, 1999: James Briscoe, ed., Debussy in Performance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Charru, 1988: Philippe Charru, ‘Une analyse des 24 Preludes pour le piano de Claude Debussy: Le mouvement musical au rythme de la orme’, Analyse musicale no. 12 (July 1988), pp. 63-86. Code, 2001: David J. Code, ‘Hearing Debussy Reading Mallarmé: Music après Wagner in the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune ’, Journal of the American Musicological Society vol. 54, no. 3 (Fall 2001), pp. 493-554. Code, 2004: David J. Code, ‘The Formal Rhythms o Mallarmé’s Faun’, Representations no. 86 (Spring 2004), pp. 73-119. Code, 2007: David J. Code, ‘Debussy’s String Quartet in the Brussels Salon o La Libre Esthétique ’, Nineteenth- Century Music vol. 30, no. 3 (Spring 2007), pp. 257-87. Cook and Everist, 1999: Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, eds., Rethinking Music (Oxord: Oxord University Press, 1999). Cook, 1999a: Nicholas Cook, ‘Analysing Perormance and Perorming Analysis’, in Cook and Everist, 1999, pp. 239-61. Debussy, 1985: Claude Debussy, Préludes books 1 and 2, ed. Roy Howat and Claude Heler. Oeuvres complètes de Claude Debussy , ser. 1, vol. 5 (Paris: Durand-Costallat, 1985). Debussy, 1988: Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche et autres écrits , ed. François Lesure, 2 nd rev. ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1988).
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Debussy, 1991: Claude Debussy, Estampes, D’un cahier d’esquisses [etc.] , ed. Roy Howat and Claude Heler. Oeuvres complètes de Claude Debussy , ser. 1, vol. 3 (Paris: Durand-Costallat, 1991). Debussy, 1991a: Claude Debussy, Etudes books 1 and 2, ed. Claude Heler. Oeuvres complètes de Claude Debussy , ser. 1, vol. 6 (Paris: Durand-Costallat, 1991). DeLone, 1997: Peter DeLone, ‘Claude Debussy, Contrapuntiste malgré lui ’, College Music Symposium vol. 17, no. 2 (Fall 1997), pp. 48-61. Di Benedetto, 1978: Renato di Benedetto, ‘Congetture su Voiles ’, Rivista italiana di musicologia vol. 13, no. 2 (1978), pp. 312-44. Dukas, 1900: Paul Dukas, ‘A Propos du Monument Chopin’, in Les Écrits de Paul Dukas sur la Musique , ed. G. Samazeuilh (Paris: SEFI, 1948), pp. 512-19. Dunsby, 1995: Jonathan Dunsby, Performing Music: Shared Concerns (Oxord: Oxord University Press, 1995). Gatti, 1921: Guido Gatti, ‘The Piano Works o Claude Debussy’, Musical Quarterly vol. 7, no. 3 (1921), pp. 418-60. Harris, 1980: Simon Harris, ‘Chord-Forms based on the Whole-tone Scale in Early Twentieth-Century Music’, Music Review vol. 41, no. 1 (February 1980), pp. 36-51. Jankélévitch, 1949: Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le Mystère (Neuchâtel : Baconnière, 1949). Mallarmé, 1945: Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes , ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). Mallarmé, 1981: Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance , vol. vi (January 1893-July 1894), ed. Henri Mondor and Lloyd James Austin (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). Parks, 1989: Richard Parks, The Music of Debussy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989). Pasler, 1999: Jann Pasler, ‘Timbre, voice-leading and the musical arabesque in Debussy’s piano music’, in Briscoe, 1999, pp. 225-55. Por, 1989: Peter Por, ‘Fin de Siècle, End o the “Globe Style”? The Concept o Object in Contemporary Art’, Diogenes no. 147 (Fall 1989), pp. 92-110. Priest, 1999: Deborah Priest, ed. and trans., Louis Laloy (1874-1944) on Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). Ravel, 1989: Maurice Ravel, Lettres, Écrits, Entretiens , ed. Arbie Orenstein (Paris: Flammarion, 1989).
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Rink, 2002: John Rink, Musical Performance: A Guide to Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Roberts, 1996: Paul Roberts, Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1996). Samson, 1999: Jim Samson, ‘Analysis in Context’, in Cook and Everist, 1999, pp. 35-54. Schmitz, 1950: E. Robert Schmitz, The Piano Works of Claude Debussy (Duell, Sloan & Pierce: 1950). Smith, 1973: Richard Langham Smith, ‘Debussy and the Art o the Cinema’, Music and Letters vol. 54, no. 1 (January 1973), pp. 61-70. Smith, 1989: Richard Langham Smith, ‘Tonalities o Darkness and Light’ in Roger Nichols and Richard Langham Smith, eds., Claude Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 107-39. Smith, 1999: Richard Cándida Smith, Mallarmé’s Children: Symbolism and the Renewal of Experience (Berkeley: University o Caliornia Press, 1999). Stiegler, 1998: Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus , trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanord: Stanord University Press, 1998). Vallas, 1973: Léon Vallas, Claude Debussy: His Life and Works , trans. Maire and Grace O’Brien (New York: Dover, 1973). Whittall, 1975: Arnold Whittall, ‘Tonality and the Whole-Tone Scale in the Music o Debussy’, The Music Review vol. 36, no. 4 (Nov. 1975), pp. 261-71.
David J. Code is Lecturer in Music at the University o Glasgow. Previously, he taught at Stanord University on a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, and at Bishop’s University in Québec. He has published on Debussy, Mallarmé and Stravinsky, and, alongside his ongoing Debussy projects, has recently begun writing on music in the flms o Stanley Kubrick.
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