Review of Elliott Antokoletz and Marianne Wheeldon eds.,Rethinking Debussy(Oxford University Press, 2011)

Abstract

[1] Rethinking Debussy participates in an uptick in Debussy publications over the past two decades, a trend likely to continue given the sesquicentennial celebration of Debussy's birth last year. The title calls to mind Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist's 1999 survey Rethinking Music, to cite only one among many titles.(1) Given the contents of that foundational collection, which challenged longstanding assumptions of scholarship--not least the category of itself(2)--one might wonder what the titular in the present volume signifies. Does it similarly interrogate received wisdom? The editors Marianne Wheeldon and Elliott Antokoletz, for their part, encourage such an expectation when they express the desire to offer new perspectives with which to consider and reconsider Debussy's music (xiii).[2] But something is amiss. A perspective is not something one considers with, rather, it is something from within which one acts. It is not so much a gadget in the musicological toolkit as a set of assumptions--ideological, methodological, ethical, and so on--from which one begins. Telling, then, is the assertion that essay endeavors to situate Debussy's in previously overlooked and ever more relevant contexts, and, moreover, that each seeks to fill certain (xiii). Filling lacunae is not rethinking. It suggests instead an effort to complete and refine a familiar image of Debussy--one that the authors know and love. Indeed, some do just that. For example, Marie Rolf's deep admiration for Debussy's shines through her insightful analyses of three early compositions based on the topic of Spring. It also shapes the trajectory of Rolf's essay, which traces Debussy's compositional techniques to their teleological culmination in the composer's widely accepted masterpiece, the Prelude a l'apres-midi d 'un faune (3), a work that in Rolf's terms, elevated the nineteenth-century concepts of cyclic composition and motivic transformation to a higher aesthetic plane altogether (25).[3] Such is the difficult work of rethinking in general, and a fortiori, of rethinking a figure like Debussy or any of his more familiar works: engaging, questioning, and maintaining an organizational locus without uncritically making that locus the repository of value created by scholarly labor. Part of the critical onus is of course on the reader, and thankfully, the editors' organization suggests ways to productively read the essays in Rethinking Debussy with and against one another.(3) The chapters are presented as a loose chronology, moving from Debussy's student compositions to his posthumous reception. Cutting across this arrangement are four subsections: Early Encounters, New Perspectives on Pelleas et Melisande, Career and Creativity, and Reception Histories. While similar volumes (e.g. Smith 1997) eschew topical categories without a problem, their use here has a consequential corollary. Comparison with organizational categories in other recent edited collections, however, reveals a pertinent side-effect. Instead of grouping chapters along disciplinary lines, leaving the to theorists and social and biographical context to historians--as does The Cambridge Companion to Debussy (Tresize 2003), for example-- Wheeldon and Antokoletz allow methodologies to sit side by side as they engage shared themes. Rethinking Debussy thus reflects a healthy pluralism and commitment to an organizing figure and a body of without settling into rigid prescriptions or uncritical conventions.(4) This in turn facilitates rethinking between and across the essays. To be sure, the persuasiveness of such an approach still depends on the merits of the individual essays, and it is these to which I now turn.[4] Among the ten chapters in Rethinking Debussy, Denis Herlin's An Artist High and Low, Or, Debussy and Money stands out in the first place for the sheer quantity of raw data it contains. …