Debussy's Resonance ed. by François de Médicis and Steven Huebner

Reviewed by: Debussy's Resonance ed. by François de Médicis and Steven Huebner Peter Shirts Debussy's Resonance. Edited by François de Médicis and Steven Huebner. (Eastman Studies in Music, vol. 150.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2018. [xiv, 625 p. ISBN 9781580465250 (hardback), $125; also available as e-book (ISBN and price varies).] Music examples, illustrations, contributor biographies, index. This hefty collection of twenty articles grew out of a bilingual conference in 2012 at the University of Montreal. The conference celebrated 150 years since Debussy's birth and this compilation was published in 2018, the onehundredth anniversary of Debussy's death. The book joins a host of recent scholarship on Debussy, including Stephen Walsh's Debussy: A Painter in Sound (London: Faber and Faber, 2018), Catherine Kautsky's Debussy's Paris: Piano Portraits of the Belle Époque (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), and Marianne Wheeldon's Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation (New York: Oxford, 2017), to name just a few. The past several years also brought translations from French and German of other important scholarly books on Debussy. A further (and still incomplete) list of modern Debussy scholarship is the work of this volume's introduction and chapter 1, Richard Langham Smith's "Debussy Fifty Years Later: Has the Barrel Run Dry?" This scholarship, and the contents of this collection, provide a definite "no" to Smith's perhaps superfluous question. Veteran Debussy scholars and a few relatively new scholars contributed the widely ranging chapters. A few themes emerge, however: studies of early songs (many based on recent manuscripts that have come to light), the influence of other music cultures on Debussy's music, Debussy's novel harmonic and melodic language, comparisons of Debussy to contemporary artists, and competing conceptions of Debussy. I present the following chapter review in these categories, as opposed to chapter order. Four chapters examine early Debussy songs, attempting to track his artistic evolution. Dennis Herlin's chapter on the Kunkelmann manuscripts is a classic source study with a wealth of facsimiles and transcribed music examples, plus appendices and detailed footnotes. David Grayson looks at the other main source of manuscripts for Debussy's early songs, the Recueil Vasnier; instead of a bird's-eye view, however, Grayson employs solid traditional scholarly sleuthing to unlock meaning and show how the revisions Debussy made in several versions of "Paysage sentimental" over twenty years mirror his stylistic development. Grayson also includes [End Page 126] helpful chronologies and graphs of gatherings in his chapter's appendix. Julian Johnson's chapter compares Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1913), especially "Soupir," with the only early setting of Mallarmé, "Apparition" from the Recueil Vasnier. Johnson struggles, however, in arguing that Debussy portrays nothing and emptiness with his music; he does better at documenting musical irony, where Debussy conveys a different meaning with the music than the text seems to indicate. One more chapter examines early songs, but with a lens on extra-French musical influences: Marie Rolf examines two recently unearthed songs written at the Conservatoire that borrowed from Spanish music or from Western music's imitation of Chinese music. Rolf's analysis is illuminating but stops short of solidly connecting these early works to later exotic-style Debussy. In addition to Rolf's analysis, two other chapters explore outside influence, specifically Japanese. David J. Code argues for a "song triptych" model, based on a format of Japanese prints popular with contemporary French artists. While Code tries very hard to disprove scholars' consensus of little musical unity in Debussy's triptychs, his arguments are for the most part unconvincing; I also question the usefulness of Code's "painterly formal structure" (p. 139) designation, which he fails to define succinctly. In the end, however, Code succeeds in demonstrating Debussy's masterful text setting. Michel Duchesneau looks exhaustively at Debussy and his social circle's interest in Asian art and attempts some general descriptions of Debussy's music with Japanese art—acknowledging that such connections, though interesting, are not provable. In addition to these two somewhat subjective studies, five chapters tackle more objective theoretical analyses of Debussy's novel harmonic and melodic language...

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