Review of Matthew Brown,Debussy Redux: The Impact of his Music on Popular Culture(Indiana University Press, 2012)

Abstract

[1] The gap between high-brow and popular culture, and how, where, and when that gap narrows and closes, has been a subject of keen scholarly interest. Bernard Gendron's (2002) study is perhaps most ambitious one to date: Gendron explores collisions of art and pop spheres, especially within avant-garde scenes, over a period spanning from 1880s through 1970s. Among other questions, Gendron asks how it was that pop audiences came to accept and embrace features originating in rarefied sphere of art music. Other recent works--Ken McLeod's study of operatic influences in pop and recent texts on prog rock by Kevin Holm-Hudson and others, for example--similarly focus on peculiar convergences and alignments of pop and art.[2] Matthew Brown's Redux serves as a key contribution to this ongoing discourse. Brown investigates reappearances and adaptations of Claude Debussy's music within a wide variety of popular cultural phenomena, ranging from classic Hollywood film scores of Dmitri Tiomkin, to Isao Tomita's cosmic Moog synthesizer stylings, to Rosemary Brown's necromantic transcriptions of piano music from beyond grave. Readers interested in genealogy of high-low interactions and cultural impact of Debussy's music in particular will enjoy this book.[3] The book's subtitle is deceptively modest. There is an equally strong emphasis throughout book on broader meta-critical questions, and book turns out to be as much a meditation on issues of aesthetic value, authenticity, autonomy, authorship, and influence, as on repurposing of Debussy's works. This sometimes results in a rather diffuse text, as author repeatedly moves away from specific examples to wide-ranging discussion of concepts such as the creative act and organic unity. Each chapter highlights a particular aesthetic question by presenting an account of a compelling popular-cultural appropriation as a jumping off point for exploration of a broader aesthetic theme. For example, From Parisian Salon to Billboard Phenom, tackles high-brow/low-brow divide, showing (contra Adorno) how pop tunes and art music are not so very far apart, at least from a nut-and-bolts musical materials perspective. Schenkerian analysis reveals underlying similarities between ostensibly trivial and eminent works, namely (1890) and C'est l'extase from Ariettes oubliees, (1885-1887). These works share surprisingly similar harmonic features and modes of thematic development. Another supposed pop trifle, American bandleader Larry Clinton's swing adaptation of Reverie, My Reverie (1938), is also compared with source and defended against charge that it is purely generic pop.[4] Chapter 4, In Moog, tackles matter of authorship in situations where works have multiple authors, or multiple versions of a work by same author coexist. Here Brown considers substantial contributions of Andre Caplet, whose orchestrations of Children's Corner and Pagodes were enthusiastically endorsed by composer. Caplet's original orchestrations and his direct intervention in scoring of L'enfant prodigue and other works, as well as Debussy's endless tinkering with orchestration of his own music well after its publication illustrate how Debussy took it for granted that structure could be manifest in several different scorings (73). These examples undermine notion of an Urtext for many of Debussy's works. Brown draws an analogy with photography, suggesting that treated his works in much same ways that photographers treat their pictures; just as latter are able to develop a particular negative in black and white, in sepia, or in color, so he was able to realize his scores in terms of different instrumental palettes (ibid.). At same time, case of a misguided orchestration of La plus que lente by Henri Mouton illustrates how decidedly rejected particular timbral realizations (in this case, one needlessly decorated with trombones). …