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Blending history and musical analysis, Davidian reveals the genius of Debussy’s major works. As Davidian looks beneath the surface of the music to explain its power, she contextualizes them within Debussy’s life and nineteenth-century Paris.
'That great blue Sphinx', Debussy called the sea. Debussy himself was something of a Sphinx: in the early 1890s he was thinking of 'founding a society for musical esotericism', and although, on the surface, most of his music is instantly engaging and accessible, at a deeper level run currents that are dangerous, unpredictable, destructive. In this new biography, Roger Nichols considers the life and music of this seminal figure charting the currents and the whirlpools in which other humans were sometimes unlucky enough to get caught. Debussy's status is such that no modern composer has been able to ignore him, asking, as he does, any number of riddles to which late twentieth-century music is still searching answers.
Debussy's life is of extraordinary interest because, like Wagner and Stravinsky, he crossed artistic boundaries, associating as much with poets and artists as with musicians. His father was active in the 1871 Paris Commune and the composer's childhood was thus unsettled, his musical preparation erratic, and his subsequent lifestyle somewhat bohemian by the bourgeois norms of the French musical establishment. He never went to a proper school, but was enough of a pianist to enter the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 10. Whilst still a student he rebelled against the academy-taught "rules of composition" and constructed a language of his own, in constant rebellion against the heavy Wagnerian influence prevalent at that time.In the early 1900s he worked in Paris as a music critic. His own music during these years includes some of the greatest and most influential works of the early twentieth century: the opera Pelléas et Mélisande, his orchestral masterpieces La Mer and Images, a series of profoundly original piano works (including two books of Préludes), and the ballet Jeux, premiered in Diaghilev's 1913 season just before Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (which Debussy attended). His later years were plagued by the rectal cancer that eventually killed him in 1918. But he continued to compose until 1917This was a period of political and cultural turmoil in French life, the Franco-Prussian war and its aftermath, the Dreyfus affair with its religious and military undercurrents, the general instability of the Third Republic, and the First World War. Stephen Walsh's study combines chronological biography with a contextualised picture placing Debussy in the broad artistic and social environment of turn-of-the-century France, making this a significant contribution to the cultural history of the time.
Emma Bardac and her relationship with Claude Debussy take centre stage in this insightful exploration of their lives together. The singer Emma Bardac (1862-1934) has often been presented as a woman who ensnared Claude Debussy (1862-1918) because she wanted to be associated with his fame and to live a life of luxury. Indeed, in many biographies and composer-related studies of Debussy, the only mentions that she receives are brief and derogatory. Here Emma Bardac and her relationship with the composer take centre stage. The book traces Emma's Jewish ancestry and her background, the significant role of her wealthy uncle Osiris, her marriage at seventeen to the wealthy Jewish banker Sigismond Bardac, her affair with Gabriel Fauré and her liaison with and subsequent marriage to Debussy. As Gillian Opstad shows, the pressure and stifling effects of domestic life on Debussy's attitude to his composing were considerable. The financial consequences of their partnership were disastrous, and their circle of close friends was small. Emma suffered physically and mentally from the tensions of the marriage, particularly money worries, and the possibility that Debussy was attracted to her older daughter. She considered divorce but supported him through his deepest depression and during the First World War until he succumbed to cancer in 1918. After Debussy's death, Emma felt driven both on his behalf and for financial reasons to further performances of the composer's works and provoked the annoyance of other musicians by having early compositions resurrected, completed and performed. In this engagingly written biography, Gillian Opstad brings to light little-known facts about Emma's background and family, advances new insights into her relationship with Debussy, and provides a glimpse of an early twentieth-century Parisian milieu that experienced wide-spread antisemitism.
Debussy's Resonance by François De Médicis,Steven Huebner Pdf
Some of Debussy's most beloved pieces, as well as lesser-known ones from his early years, set in a rich cultural context by leading experts from the English- and French-speaking worlds.
Debussy's Critics: Sound, Affect, and the Experience of Modernism explores the music of Claude Debussy and its early reception in light of the rise of the empirical human sciences in Western Europe around the turn of the twentieth century. In the midst of a sea change in conceptions of the human person, the critics who wrote about Debussy's music in the Parisian press-continually returning to this music's nebulous relationship to sensation and sensibilité-attempted to articulate a music aesthetic appropriate to the fully embodied, material self of psychological modernism. While scholarship on French music in this period has often emphasized its affinities with other art forms, such as Impressionist painting and Symbolist poetry, Debussy's Critics demonstrates that a preoccupation with the specifically sonic materiality of Debussy's music, informed by late nineteenth-century scientific discourses on affect, perception, and cognition, was central to this music's historical intervention. Foregrounding the dynamic exchange between sounds and ideas, this book reveals the disorienting and bewildering experience of listening to Debussy's music, which compelled its early audiences to reimagine the most fundamental premises of the European art-music tradition.
Debussy's Critics: Sound, Affect, and the Experience of Modernism explores the music of Claude Debussy and its early reception in light of the rise of the empirical human sciences in Western Europe around the turn of the twentieth century. In the midst of a sea change in conceptions of the human person, the critics who wrote about Debussy's music in the Parisian press-continually returning to this music's nebulous relationship to sensation and sensibilité-attempted to articulate a music aesthetic appropriate to the fully embodied, material self of psychological modernism. While scholarship on French music in this period has often emphasized its affinities with other art forms, such as Impressionist painting and Symbolist poetry, Debussy's Critics demonstrates that a preoccupation with the specifically sonic materiality of Debussy's music, informed by late nineteenth-century scientific discourses on affect, perception, and cognition, was central to this music's historical intervention. Foregrounding the dynamic exchange between sounds and ideas, this book reveals the disorienting and bewildering experience of listening to Debussy's music, which compelled its early audiences to reimagine the most fundamental premises of the European art-music tradition.
The Cambridge Companion to Debussy by Simon Trezise Pdf
Often considered the father of twentieth-century music, Debussy was a visionary whose influence is still felt. This book offers a wide-ranging series of essays on Debussy the man, the musician and composer. It contains insights into his character, his relationship to his Parisian environment and his musical works across all genres, with challenging views on the roles of nature and eroticism in his life and music. His music is considered through the characteristic themes of sonority, rhythm, tonality and form, with closing chapters considering the performance and reception of his music in the first years of the new century and our view of Debussy today as a major force in Western culture. This comprehensive view of Debussy is written by a team of specialists for students and informed music lovers.
Classical music shows a close relationship to language, and both musicology and philosophy have tended to approach music from that angle, exploring it in terms of expression, representation, and discourse. This book turns that idea on its head. Focusing on the music of Debussy and its legacy in the century since his death, After Debussy offers a groundbreaking new perspective on twentieth-century music that foregrounds a sensory logic of sound over quasi-linguistic ideas of structure or meaning. Author Julian Johnson argues that Debussy's music exemplifies this idea, influencing the music of successive composers who took up the mantle of emphasizing sound over syntax, sense over signification. In doing so, this music not only anticipates a central problem of contemporary thought--the gap between language and our embodied relation to the world--but also offers a solution. With a readable narrative structure grounded in an impressive body of literature, After Debussy ranges widely across French music, demonstrating the impact of Debussy's music on composers from Fauré and Ravel to Dutilleux, Boulez, Grisey, Murail and Saariaho. It ranges similarly through a set of French writers and philosophers, from Mallarmé and Proust to Merleau-Ponty, Jankélévitch, Derrida, Lyotard and Nancy, and even draws from the visual arts to help embody key ideas. In accessibly tackling substantial ideas of both musicology and philosophy, this book not only presents bold new ways of understanding each discipline but also lays the groundwork for exciting new discourse between them.
Claude Debussy's Paris was factionalised, politicised, and litigious. This text aims to capture the complexity of the composer's restless personal and artistic identity within the context of fin-de-siècle Paris.
The Ocean as a Creative Experience by Juergen Claus Pdf
This book by artist, diver, and editor-in-chief of an underwater magazine Jürgen Claus is a milestone among the books dedicated to the planet sea. It is a knowledge-rich overview, created from facts and experiences, of three main themes that have never been described in context. Marine architectures from both the Pacific and Atlantic regions have now moved from vision to reality. Whether it is a sail-shaped architecture in Nouméa or a whale-shaped one in the Arctic region. Special attention is paid by Prof. Claus to post-disaster architecture. The book will encourage young readers to design metabolic buildings themselves. That the seascape has also become a fluid studio for visual artists may come as a surprise. The works of art, some of which the author has experienced first-hand, have intertwined with an ecological, sustainable way of working. And this is also true to a special degree for the sound artists. They realize their sonic worlds with recordings from the sounding world underwater, a concert hall of hitherto unknown dimensions. The author’s experience as a professor of media art with students flows into the description of multimedia or media-related ocean installations. Here the book becomes a stimulus for realizing one’s own experiences.
Claude Debussy, who composed works of major significance in a wide range of musical and theatrical genres, has exerted a fundamental influence on musicians of the twentieth century. This book explores how Debussy's compositions are brought to life in performance, investigating the composer's own expectations, the traditions surrounding the performance of his music, and the internal and contextual evidence that can give insight to performers of his works. Leading international scholars and interpreters of Debussy's music draw on his letters and music criticism as well as on the memoirs of performers close to him to discuss issues of performance forces, tempo and its flexibility, performer license, and the interpretation of expressive indications in the scores. They urge performers to recognize the symbolism and the value of silence in Debussy's work. And they show that it is particularly important to focus on aspects of timbre, voice-leading, and the musical arabesque, together with meter and phrase ambiguities, when playing his music. The book also includes the translation of an article on the opera Pelleas et Melisande In performance by one of Debussy's original conductors, Desire-Emile Inghelbrecht, and an interview with the composer-conductor Pierre Boulez on approaches to Pelleas and the orchestral works.
Claude Debussy's Clair de Lune by Gurminder Kaur Bhogal Pdf
Debussy himself had little regard for Clair de Lune, and scholars have thus far followed suit--until now. Claude Debussy's Clair de Lune is the first book wholly dedicated to an historical, cultural, and analytical investigation of the French composer's famous composition for piano. Author Gurminder Kaur Bhogal explores why, over any other piece in Debussy's repertoire for piano, Clair de Lune achieved stardom in the decades following the composer's death, and how, as the third movement of the Suite Bergamasque, it managed to almost fully eclipse the other movements. Drawing on a broad range of excerpts from classical and popular music, commercials, film, and video games, Bhogal examines the various ways in which listeners have engaged with the piece. She also places it in its proper artistic context, through analysis alongside the poetry of Paul Verlaine and the paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau. A wide range of aural, visual, and video examples energize the narrative, and demonstrate how Clair de Lune has come to achieve an iconic status within and beyond Debussy's oeuvre.
Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation by Marianne Wheeldon Pdf
Today, Claude Debussy's position as a central figure in twentieth-century concert music is secure, and scholarship has long taken for granted the enduring musical and aesthetic contributions of his compositions. Yet this was not always the case. Unknown to many concert-goers and music scholars is the fact that for years after his death, Debussy's musical aesthetic was perceived as outmoded, decadent, and even harmful for French music. In Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation, Marianne Wheeldon examines the vicissitudes of the composer's posthumous reception in the 1920s and 30s, and analyzes the confluence of factors that helped to overturn the initial backlash against his music. Rather than viewing Debussy's artistic greatness as the cause of his enduring legacy, she considers it instead as an effect, tracing the manifold processes that shaped how his music was received and how its aesthetic worth was consolidated. Speaking to readers both within and beyond the domain of French music and culture, Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation enters into dialogue with research in the sociology of reputation and commemoration, examining the collective nature of the processes of artistic consecration. By analyzing the cultural forces that came to bear on the formation of Debussy's legacy, Wheeldon contributes to a greater understanding of the inter-war period--the cultural politics, debates, and issues that confronted musicians in 1920s and 30s Paris--and offers a musicological perspective on the subject of reputation building, to date underrepresented in recent writings on reputation and commemoration in the humanities. Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation is an important new study, groundbreaking in its methodology and in its approach to musical influence and cultural consecration.
The Classical Music Experience by Julius H. Jacobson Pdf
Covers sixty of the world's most celebrated composers, from Bach, Mozart and Beethoven to Tchaikovsky, Gershwin and Bernstein. It weaves five hundred years of history and music into a rich tapestry of sound and story.