Ontology of space in Claude Debussy's sheet music

Abstract

Background. Debussy's sheet music is a unique phenomenon showing the transformation of musical spatial characteristics into a graphic equivalent. This paper suggests a new elementalist approach to studying the spatial properties of musical sound. This approach enables musicologists and performers to create a new interpretation of sheet music and to discover a new musical content in a score. Aim: to show techniques which C. Debussy used to fix spatial characteristics in the printed music and to show how the physical properties of space - namely mass, volume and density of sound - become the carriers of the artistic sense in C. Debussy's notation. Objectives: to show the technique of marking the sound mass; ways of decreasing the weight of sound; transformation of the mass of sound into the volume of sound and the different density of sound. Methods of study. We used a musicological analysis to reveal the techniques of sound articulation typical of C. Debussy. The new approach of musicological elementalism was used to study musical sound in terms of its spatial features, namely its mass, volume and density. Musicology adopted the elementalist approach from personal psychology. Scientists used it to study personal nature in terms of every individual component of a person's behaviour, from simple to composite. We continue this tendency and use this approach in this item. A comparative method was used to find out the distinctions between mass, volume and density of sound. The axiological approach and semantic approach were used to study the expressive properties of mass, volume and density in the artistic content.