Reviewed by: Details of Consequence: Ornament, Music, and Art in Paris by Gurminder Kaur Bhogal Keith E. Clifton Details of Consequence: Ornament, Music, and Art in Paris. By Gurminder Kaur Bhogal. (AMS Studies in Music.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2013 [x, 357 p. ISBN 978-0-19-979505-5. $65.00] In a famous 1878 letter to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky referenced the “capricious arabesques” inhabiting the third movement of his recently-composed Fourth Symphony, “fugitive images which pass through one’s mind when one has had a little wine to drink and is feeling the first effects of intoxication” (cited in Music in the Western World, 2d ed., ed. Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin [New York: Schirmer Books, 2007], 339.) Nearly three decades later, a performance of Maurice Ravel’s “Noctuelles” led critic Auguste Mangeot to evoke the sensation of “taking opium or hashish” (p. 3). In attempting to understand how these very different works could evoke parallel reactions of disorientation and fantasy, Gurminder Kaur Bhogal argues for each composer’s use of musical adornment. Often dismissed as mere decoration, ornament enjoys a long history in musical and philosophical writing extending from Plato through Immanuel Kant, Eduard Hanslick, Edgar Allen Poe, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jacques Derrida, and Vladimir Jankélévitch, before reaching an apex in France at the turn of the twentieth century. Following an introductory chapter laying out the basic premise of the book as a corrective to previous neglect of the topic, the remaining chapters are devoted to case studies demonstrating [End Page 306] the breadth of ornament during the fin-de-siècle period. Bhogal foregrounds the arabesque, a twisting decorative pattern originating in Europe during the Moorish conquest of Spain and used in reference to painting and architecture as well as music (see, for example, Maurice J.E. Brown and Kenneth L. Hamilton, “Arabesque”, in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2d ed., ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrell [London: Macmillan, 2001], 1:794–797; for a discussion of the term as related to the visual arts, see Hans Ottomeyer, “Arabesque”, in The Dictionary of Art, Vol. 2, ed. Jane Turner [New York and London: Macmillan, 1996]). Although the most famous nineteenth-century example is Robert Schumann’s piano character piece Arabeske, Op. 18 (1838), the book centers almost exclusively on music composed and performed in Paris. While the author is not the only musicologist to recognise the importance of the arabesque, she is the first to study it in depth (for other examples of scholarship on the topic, see Ralph P. Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections [Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009], 217–222; and Jann Pasler, Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009], 533–537.) A difficult term to define with precision, Bhogal notes that even works with arabesque in the title—for example, De bussy’s Deux Arabesques for piano (1888–1891)—may not conform to her interpretation of this ornament, a point I shall return to below. The first two chapters, devoted to establishing an historical and aesthetic foundation, reveal why profuse ornamentation found a home in the French beaux arts around 1900. Paintings, tapestries, furniture, and designs from artists including Auguste Racinet and Eugène Grasset provide representative examples. Grasset receives special attention for his work as an illustrator, decorator, and author, evoking comparisons to England’s William Morris and Russia’s Nicholas Roerich. Arguing for ornament as a “French national icon” (p. 48), Bhogal shows how the adept use of decoration allowed for the fusion of fantasy and reality, while retaining an aura of mystery and associations with femininity. On the specific topic of the arabesque, Bhogal writes: “Depending on its context and the theoretical standpoint from which it was viewed, the arabesque could be perceived as charming or unsettling; it could mean something or nothing; it could absorb the viewer’s attention and be seen; or it could remain peripheral on account of its status as ‘mere’ ornament” (p. 64). A discussion of Edouard Vuillard’s painting Le Piano (1896) highlights the “sheer variety of pattern and...