Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

The Debussyist Ear: Listening, Representation, and French Musical Modernism

The Debussyist Ear: Listening, Representation, and French Musical Modernism Musicologists have long recognized that “sensation” played an important role in the musical culture of debussysme . Close readings of the writings of Debussy and his circle in the first decade of the twentieth century reveal that a key, though often overlooked, aspect of Debussyist sensation is a specifically auditory one—a special mode of attentive listening that claims a privileged knowledge of the natural phenomenon of sound. This account of sensation and listening, which both recapitulates and critiques central components of Helmholtzian sensory physiology, puts Debussy and Debussyism in dialogue with a network of late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century discourses on the limits of sensory knowledge and resultant problems of representation. Considering Debussyism in this light demonstrates the extent to which musical culture in this period negotiated a modernist crisis of representation salient across high-art culture around the turn of the twentieth century even as it inflected this problem specifically toward issues of sound and listening. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png 19th-Century Music University of California Press

The Debussyist Ear: Listening, Representation, and French Musical Modernism

19th-Century Music , Volume 39 (1): 24 – Jul 1, 2015

Loading next page...
 
/lp/university-of-california-press/the-debussyist-ear-listening-representation-and-french-musical-a0s7KkwFCz

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
University of California Press
Copyright
© 2015 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions Web site, www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp.
ISSN
0148-2076
eISSN
1533-8606
DOI
10.1525/ncm.2015.39.1.56
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Musicologists have long recognized that “sensation” played an important role in the musical culture of debussysme . Close readings of the writings of Debussy and his circle in the first decade of the twentieth century reveal that a key, though often overlooked, aspect of Debussyist sensation is a specifically auditory one—a special mode of attentive listening that claims a privileged knowledge of the natural phenomenon of sound. This account of sensation and listening, which both recapitulates and critiques central components of Helmholtzian sensory physiology, puts Debussy and Debussyism in dialogue with a network of late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century discourses on the limits of sensory knowledge and resultant problems of representation. Considering Debussyism in this light demonstrates the extent to which musical culture in this period negotiated a modernist crisis of representation salient across high-art culture around the turn of the twentieth century even as it inflected this problem specifically toward issues of sound and listening.

Journal

19th-Century MusicUniversity of California Press

Published: Jul 1, 2015

There are no references for this article.