Epilogue

Grappling with music in language (music-ology) offers a critical reflection on both. It is here that a hundred years of the philosophical critique of language (from Mauthner, Wittgenstein, and Bergson through to Serres, Nancy, Derrida, and Wellmer) overlaps with a tradition of music after Debussy that, through a logic of the senses, resists the grammars of language. A key source here is Lyotard’s Discours/Figure. A recent convergence of work on the relation between music and language, across diverse scientific disciplines, suggests productive links with the kinds of ideas that emerge from the study of music ‘after Debussy’. The chapter concludes by considering how, at its boundaries, the range of practices we might call musical (playing, listening, composing) blur into something more broadly ecological and ethical.

The art of touch

This chapter explores the way Debussy’s piano music ‘writes’ the body of the pianist, particularly in the late Études, by rewriting the historical body enshrined in pianistic technique and repertoire. Michel Serres’ discussion of Bonnard and Merleau-Ponty on Cézanne are used to explore the idea of art’s presentation of immersive aesthetic experience and of a music that has to do less with representation than a logic of touch and bodily movement. Susan Sontag’s call for an erotics of art (1964) is the starting point for exploring this music as fundamentally erotic (shaped by the body and by desire). The topic of the ‘chevelure’ from Baudelaire to the music of Dutilleux provides a focus for exploring how this repertoire foregrounds itself as an erotic body.

Taking place

Music ‘after Debussy’ does not present musical arguments or narratives, but rather ‘takes place’ and is thus experienced more like landscape, or the painting of landscape, than literature. It is concerned neither with representation nor communication. A central concern with the sea, from Debussy’s La mer (1905) through to Murail’s Le partage des eaux (1996) and Saariaho’s L’amour de loin (2001) denotes a concern with allowing music to be endlessly mobile in its play of forms and colours, but non-discursive. This requires a different kind of listening which relates to a different kind of consciousness of the sonic environment. The closed space of the garden is explored in Fauré’s song cycle Le jardin clos (1914). Debussy’s La mer forms a principal focus for exploring an immersive play of forms that work outside the linearity of tonal practice.

Sirènes

Debussy’s Sirènes is the starting point for a discussion of the wordless voice in music from Debussy through to Saariaho. How should we interpret the idea of the siren voice? As a misogynistic voice (Cavarero), or a dangerously seductive voice (Adorno and Horkeimer) that foregrounds the sonic aspect of language over its signifying aspect? Mallarmé’s Un coup de dès is used to explore the idea of the siren’s voice leading to the shipwreck of language and the breaking up of grammatical order. This is taken as a parallel to Debussy’s call to dissolve tonal grammar towards a more fluid kind of musical logic. Both enable the appearing of a ‘constellation’ of new relations, a key idea for Boulez in the 1950s, from Pli selon pli to the Third Piano Sonata.

Writing the body

This chapter distinguishes between recent disciplinary swings to foreground the body, in a phenomenology of experience, and the more specific focus on how musical works write the body. Just as Mallarmé sees the dancer as an écriture corporelle, so music ‘after Debussy’ can be understood in a similar way. Debussy’s piano Préludes (Book 1) are examined in detail for their re-writing of the body. The work of Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Nancy, Michel Serres, and Jean-Luc Marion are explored in terms of a phenomenology that places the perceiving body centre stage but read as a development in philosophical thought that was already being explored through art and music.

Prologue: Music and language

The Prologue explores the tension between language and music and the place that musicology might occupy as a way of thinking through that tension. Rather than collapsing this difference into the assumption that language deals adequately with music or that, conversely, music remains ineffable to language, the relationship is explored as one of non-identity that is mutually constitutive – in other words, that we understand both music and language better through an exploration of their non-identical proximity. Music is taken here to mount a challenge to philosophy – specifically, that music embodies a kind of thinking through particularity rather than thinking through the abstraction of the concept. It sets out the rationale for a musical focus on Debussy and later French composers, and a parallel exploration of French writers from Mallarmé and Bergson to Derrida and Nancy.

Coming to presence

Debussy’s early setting of Mallarmé’s ‘Apparition’ provides the focus for an exploration of the way music stages the process of appearing and coming to presence. The foregrounding of this, over any idea of narrative or drama, is traced in La damoiselle élue, the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Pelléas et Mélisande, La mer, Jeux – works whose central concern is the play of appearing and disappearing. This category is explored theoretically through the work of Jankélévitch, Martin Seel, and Derrida. Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence is central here, as is a consideration of Mallarmé’s discussion of the dancer Loïe Fuller. The idea of an evanescent music is thematised in the ‘fairy’ creatures of Debussy’s piano preludes, a kind of fictional embodiment of Mallarmé’s idea of poetry as a ‘dispersion volatile’.

Mélisande and the silence of music

Through detailed discussion of specific moments in the opera, this chapter explores how Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande exemplifies the central aesthetic idea of ‘saying nothing’. The muteness of Mélisande is an idea that joins the work of Maeterlinck and Debussy to a wider aesthetic movement. It is key to the aesthetics that Mallarmé sets out in relation to the figure of the ballet dancer, whose ‘veils’ make visible a kind of nothing that appears only in her speechless movements. This muteness of art offers a critical and embodied reflection on a key category of wordlessness and the unsayable that preoccupies philosophy from Bergson, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger through to Jankélévitch, Derrida, and Nancy.

Thinking in sound

Debussy’s music is discussed in terms of its logic of sensation (Deleuze) and the ways of being it affords, rather than for any discursive logic of propositions. Composers think in and through sounds; they do not transpose other things into sound. Saariaho’s ‘grammar of dreams’ signals a concern with a different kind of musical logic – what Adorno called a ‘musique informelle’. ‘Jeux de vagues’, the central movement of Debussy’s La mer, provides a key focus, though music by Dutilleux and Saariaho is also explored to demonstrate the allusive logic of this musical repertoire. The chapter examines how this music constitutes ‘a new epistemology’ (Dufourt), an embodied knowing of the world inscribed in the details of musical works.

Mirrors

The trope of reflection foregrounds the idea that art is not a representation of reality but its remaking as a heterotopic space (Foucault). Two river paintings of Monet and Matisse’s The Open Window (1905) are explored as studies in the nature of vision and looking, anticipating Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of visuality and our perception of the world. Music since Debussy does something similar, as is shown in Saariaho’s two ‘Nymphéas’ pieces and in Boulez’s Constellation-Miroir from the Third Piano Sonata. The idea of a threshold is explored musically in relation to works from Fauré’s song cycle Mirages (1919) through to Grisey’s last work, Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (1998). The idea of mirror reflection finds a musical parallel in the idea of sound and echo, central to the development of electro-acoustic music.