10 - Jankélévitch, Fauré, and the Thirteenth Nocturne

Summary

Scholars of French music have long known the name Vladimir Jankélévitch, but it is only in recent years that he has captured the attention of musicologists more generally. This is due almost entirely to the efforts of Carolyn Abbate, whose much-debated 2004 essay “Music – Drastic or Gnostic?” gives Jankélévitch pride of place.¹ A year before that essay, Abbate had published a translation of Jankélévitch’s 1961 book Music and the Ineffable, which was the focus of a special session at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Musicological Society and a subsequent colloquy in the Journal of the American Musicological Society.