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Debussy's Speculative Idea: Orchestration and the Substance of Jeux
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Abstract
This article seeks to determine the extent to which timbral and textural concerns inform the musical substance of Debussy's Jeux. Of particular interest are passages in which foreground detail effaces itself in the interests of orchestral qualities, those where an overabundance of surface detail is preconfigured so as to maximize orchestral efficacy, and sections where a more traditional distinction between compositional content and orchestrational attributes seems to obtain. It is Hegelian substance ultimately that I have in mind, however, on which basis I seek to distinguish between unification and synthesis – I argue that Jeux's immediacy is overcome through negating (orchestrational) activity, arriving thus at the objectively real (realized and posited) product. On this basis, Jeux's substance, including its orchestral aspects, is best understood speculatively.
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- Copyright © 2018 The Royal Musical Association
References
1 ‘Seuls, les musiciens ont le privilège de capter toute la poésie de la nuit et du jour, de la terre et du ciel, d'en reconstituer l'atmosphère et d'en rythmer l'immense palpitation.’ Debussy, ‘Concerts Colonne – Société des Nouveaux Concerts’, La revue musicale S. I. M., 9/11 (1 November 1913), 45–8 (p. 45), repr. in Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche et autres écrits, ed. François Lesure (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 239–43 (p. 240). Debussy goes on to deride ‘symphonic painters’ (‘peintres symphonistes’) whose studies of nature are ‘disagreeably artificial’ (‘désagréablement artificiel’), while painters and sculptors can represent the universe only in their own ‘somewhat free and ever fragmentary interpretation’ (‘interprétation assez libre et toujours fragmentaire’). Ibid. (ed. Lesure, 239–40). All translations are my own unless otherwise specified.
2 Peter Kivy, ‘Orchestrating Platonism’, The Fine Art of Repetition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 75–94 (p. 78). For a conflicting account of timbre's status here, see Jerrold Levinson, Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
3 Cited by Manuel Rosenthal in conversation with Roger Nichols, quoted in Nichols, Ravel Remembered (London: Faber & Faber, 1987), 67–8.
4 Frederick Corder, ‘Instrumentation’, Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, ed. John Alexander Fuller-Maitland, 5 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1906), ii, 473–84 (p. 480).
5 Emily Dolan, The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 256–7 (see Chapter 6, ‘Abuses of the Orchestra’, pp. 211–57, for reflection on these orchestral polemics in depth).
6 I will distinguish on occasion between ‘timbre’ or ‘instrumentation’ and ‘texture’, although more usually I will simply refer to ‘orchestration’ and variants thereof to encompass both. The contrast should generally be understood as being between sounding materials, or embodied sounding qualities, and more abstract structural categories (e.g. polyphony, heterophony, etc. – thus, a texture may remain the same, which is to say conceptually consistent, despite differing instrumentation). This is by no means without ambiguity, however, especially given that the problematic relation of materiality to abstraction is precisely what is at issue below, although in given contexts the apparent distinction should be borne in mind. Interestingly, Jonathan de Souza refers in his article ‘Texture’ for The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory, ed. Alexander Rehding and Steven Rings, Oxford Handbooks Online, August 2015 (<http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190454746.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190454746-e-10?rskey=UxtQ9m&result=1192>, accessed 20 November 2017) to the former as ‘textural materials’ and to the latter as ‘textural structures’; for the problematic early history of ‘timbre’ as both concept and parameter, see Dolan, The Orchestral Revolution.
7 The Greek here is ousia, which derives from ousa, the nominative feminine singular present participle of einai (to be). Though problematic, this is roughly equivalent not only to the Latinate ‘substance’ but also to ‘essence’ – it is thus the nature of being (or something's being) that is at stake.
8 For example, Socrates as a particular man, and not ‘man’ in general, be he young or old, etc.
9 As rehearsed in Book Zeta of Aristotle's Metaphysics. Aristotle appears to be arguing in this latter context, at times at least, that since substantial forms are species of a genus they are universals, something that seems directly to contradict his position in the Categories.
10 Michael Spitzer's Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven's Late Style (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006) and Janet Schmalfeldt's In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) are notable recent studies of this legacy.
11 Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner (1952), trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1991), 71.
12 Ibid. Adorno here quotes Wagner himself. See Richard Wagner, ‘Zukunftsmusik’ (1861), in Richard Wagner's Prose Works, 8 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Trübner, 1892–9), iii: The Theatre, trans. William Ashton Ellis (1894), 293–346 (p. 330). Adorno seems indifferent to the fact that Wagner is referring to aspects of Der fliegende Holländer's plot and not its orchestration.
13 Richard Wagner, Lohengrin (1852), WWV 75, Sämtliche Werke, 7, ed. John Deathridge and Klaus Döge (Mainz: Schott, 1996). See Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Livingstone, 71–84.
14 Ibid., 75.
15 Since the Idea must necessarily externalize itself, it must also in a certain sense be prior to external reality and its development. Strictly speaking, volumes 2 and 3 of Hegel's Encyclopaedia – the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit respectively – are the counterparts to the (lesser) Logic in this sense.
16 Despite the general historicity of Adorno's readings, Beethoven's early and middle periods are pivotal and thus Spitzer, in Music as Philosophy, focuses his attentions on Adorno's aspirations towards ‘translating Beethoven's style specifically into the terms of Hegelian logic’ (p. 48). On this basis, for example, the ‘working out’ of tonality, with reference to the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata, is conceived as the negation of immediate Being by Nothing (from which it cannot be distinguished given the absence of determinate content), passing over into Becoming. Beethoven, for Adorno, nevertheless casts off Hegel by ultimately rejecting volume 1 of the Logic (books 1 and 2 – ‘Being’ and ‘Essence’ respectively) in favour of volume 2 (‘Concept’), paradoxically ‘giving up on Hegel altogether’ (p. 53). My analysis of Debussy's Jeux, however, is not to be understood in terms of Adornian mimesis (for Spitzer, ‘Adorno's most dialectical tool’ (p. 53)), although I will refer to Hegel's Logic as an analogue of rationality. Nonetheless, this is neither an intraformal process nor a historical cipher in any consistent sense.
17 Both Lacan and Bataille (unlike Sartre) actually attended Kojève's seminars, although the Marxian-cum-existential thrust of Kojève's readings of Hegel was undoubtedly pivotal in Sartre's own thinking. As examples of this influence in each case, see Jacques Lacan, ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Subconscious’, in Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (London: Routledge, 1989), 323–60; Georges Bataille and Jonathan Strauss, ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice’, Yale French Studies, 78 (1990), 9–28; and Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 2 vols. (London: Verso, 2004–6).
18 See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947), ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980).
19 Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 249.
20 The distinction Alain Badiou makes between being qua being (ontology) and logics of appearing (onto-logy) is instructive here. See in particular Badiou, Logics of Worlds (2006), trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 141–52. It should be said, however, that Badiou finds ‘substance’ in general to be highly problematic (as indicative of ‘the One’ and not the multiple); Badiou's own dialectical emphases vacillate somewhat from Theory of the Subject (1982) to Being and Event (1988) and, seemingly, back again in Logics of Worlds.
21 Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 11–12.
22 Mark DeVoto, ‘The Debussy Sound: Colour, Texture, Gesture’, The Cambridge Companion to Debussy, ed. Simon Trezise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 179–96 (p. 193; emphasis added).
23 ‘Konsequent aus der Seele der Orchesterinstrumente heraus seine Werke konzipiert’. Richard Strauss, in Hector Berlioz, Instrumentationslehre, expanded and rev. Strauss, 2 vols. (Leipzig: C. F. Peters, 1905), i, p. III.
24 ‘J'ai terminé la composition de Jeux […]. Il faudrait trouver un orchestre “sans pied” pour cette musique. Ne croyez pas que je pense à un orchestre exclusivement composé de culs-de-jatte! Non! Je pense à cette couleur orchestrale qui semble éclairée par derrière et dont il y a de si merveilleux effets dans Parsifal !’ Debussy, in a letter to André Caplet of 25 August 1912, repr. in Debussy: Lettres, 1884–1918, ed. François Lesure (Paris: Hermann, 1980), 229.
25 Robert Orledge, ‘The Genesis of Debussy's “Jeux”’, Musical Times, 128/1728 (February 1987), 68–73 (p. 71).
26 Robert Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 172.
27 Myriam Chimènes, ‘Timbre in the Process of Composition of Jeux’, Debussy Studies, ed. Richard Langham Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1–25 (p. 8).
28 Ibid., 6.
29 Ibid., 15.
30 Herbert Eimert, ‘Debussy's “Jeux”’, Die Reihe 5, trans. Leo Black (Bryn Mawr, PA: Theodore Presser, 1961), 3–20 (p. 20).
31 DeVoto, ‘The Debussy Sound’, 193.
32 Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre, 170.
33 Jean Barraqué, Debussy (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 193. Barraqué in context is actually discussing La mer.
34 Jann Pasler, ‘Debussy, “Jeux”: Playing with Time and Form’, Nineteenth-Century Music, 6 (1982–3), 60–75 (p. 70).
35 Claude Debussy, Jeux (1914), Oeuvres complètes de Claude Debussy, V/3, ed. Pierre Boulez and Myriam Chimènes (Paris: Durand, 1988). I refer to rehearsal marks as R1, R2, etc. Superscript numbers to the left of the mark indicate bars before, to the right, bars after.
36 Pasler, ‘Debussy, “Jeux”’, 61.
37 Pasler notes that ‘In visual art, this term [arabesque] is associated with the idea of play, and is used to describe the lines in decorative rather than abstract or representative painting’ (ibid., 64), although the concept remains fascinatingly enigmatic – see Gurminder Kaur Bhogal's Details of Consequence: Ornament, Music and Art in Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) for a comprehensive study of both its visual and its musical implications. Bhogal argues here (p. 106) that ‘Debussy's perception of the arabesque seems to have been shaped by the ornate brilliance of medieval decoration’. Debussy himself, in ‘Vendredi Saint – Le neuvième symphonie’, La revue blanche, 1 May 1901, refers to ‘“musical arabesque” or rather the principle of “the ornament” which is the foundation of all kinds of art’ (‘“arabesque musicale” ou plutôt ce principe de “l'ornement” qui est la base de tous les modes d'art’); repr. in Debussy, Monsieur Croche, ed. Lesure, 33–7 (p. 34).
38 The synopsis as relayed via the original programme, from 15 May 1913, is as follows: ‘In a park at dusk, a tennis ball has been lost; a young man then two young girls are searching for it. The artificial light of large electric lamps, glimmering fantastically around them, suggests to them childish games: they play hide and seek, they chase one another, they quarrel, they sulk wilfully; the night is warm, the sky is bathed in pale light, they embrace. But the spell is broken by a further tennis ball thrown mischievously by an unknown hand. Surprised and alarmed, the boy and girls vanish into the depths of the park's night’ (‘Dans un parc au crépuscule, une balle de tennis s'est égarée; un jeune homme, puis deux jeunes filles s'empressent à la rechercher. La lumière artificielle des grands lampadaires électriques qui répand autour d'eux une lueur fantastique leur donne l'idée de jeux enfantins; on se cherche, on se perd, on se poursuit, on se querelle, on se boude sans raison; la nuit est tiède, le ciel baigné de douces clartés, on s'embrasse. Mais le charme est rompu par une autre balle de tennis jetée par on ne sait quelle main malicieuse. Surpris et effrayés, le jeune homme et les deux jeunes filles disparaissent dans les profondeurs du parc nocturne’).
39 Rebecca Leydon, ‘Debussy's Late Style and the Devices of the Early Silent Cinema’, Music Theory Spectrum, 23/2 (autumn 2001), 217–41 (pp. 217, 232). See also Mark McFarland, ‘Debussy: The Origins of a Method’, Journal of Music Theory, 48/2 (autumn 2004), 295–324 (p. 304).
40 Pasler, ‘Debussy, “Jeux”’, 61.
41 Claude Debussy, Jeux, for piano solo (Paris: Durand, 1912). References to the piano score are given as page number/system number/bar number within that system.
42 Laurence D. Berman, ‘“Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” and “Jeux”: Debussy's Summer Rites’, Nineteenth-Century Music, 3 (1979–80), 225–38 (p. 235).
43 DeVoto, ‘The Debussy Sound’, 194. I might also add in passing that this irrepressibly decorative instinct becomes hardly less visual than aural in that it leads to commensurately fastidious notation. Certainly, the likes of Berlioz (Grande messe des morts) and Rimsky-Korsakov (Russian Easter Festival Overture) upped the historical ante here, and Wagner's Magic-Fire Music is a clear antecedent of so-called Impressionist textures. Indeed, by Strauss and Mahler's time the proliferation of notational detail amounts perhaps to a defining characteristic. Yet Debussy (and Ravel) marked an even further advance, and this is in no small part owing to the niceties (and in their cases densities) of heterophonic scoring: the simultaneous presentation of multiple and varied versions of the same idea. This encompasses, among other things, timbral subdivision (the use of mutes, varying bow positions, pizzicato, harmonics), multiple articulations (trills, tonguings, tenuto, spiccato, staccato, tremolo bowing), fragmentation/variation of the basic line (through intermittent doubling, embellishment, colouristic flourishes such as harp/string glissandos), semi-independent emphases/reductions within lines (by the harp or within the percussion section), intersecting dynamic arcs (where aspects of the texture overlap with or oppose one another) and sonorous gestures in the interests of solidity (tremolos, sustained chords/pulses; such gestures are not themselves necessarily heterophonic but they are frequently desirable where more tenuous textures are concerned). As a consequence, these scores can seem overburdened with intricacy, giving rise to the (frequently deceptive) appearance (not least visually) of inordinate complexity. In addition to Example 5 above, Examples 13, 14 and 18 are all striking in this regard.
44 Pasler, ‘Debussy, “Jeux”’, 69.
45 Berman, ‘“Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” and “Jeux”’, 235–6.
46 E. Robert Schmitz, ‘A Plea for the Real Debussy’, The Etude, 55 (December 1937), 781–2, reproduced in Roger Nichols, Debussy Remembered (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), 167–71 (p. 171).
47 DeVoto, ‘The Debussy Sound’, 191.
48 ‘Qu'elles regardent autour d'elles: la beauté de la nuit, la joie de la lumière, tout leur conseille de se laisser aller à leur fantaisie.’
49 Pasler, ‘Debussy, “Jeux”’, 72–3.
50 Berman, ‘“Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” and “Jeux”’, 234.
51 Given the orientation of what follows, and given that ‘synthesis’ is not in fact a Hegelian term, readers may prefer Aufhebung as ‘sublation’ and Versöhnung as ‘reconciliation’. Einheit as ‘unity’ may be understood as the result of a dialectical process, a given contradiction (Gegensatz as ‘contradictory unity’) thus being both transcended and preserved; the (higher) unity that then obtains, however, is categorically not that of a simple merging into one (unification). Neither ‘synthesis’ nor ‘sublation’ is fully adequate here either, of course, but their Hegelian implications are at least clear.
52 Some measure of genuine unification between the processes can perhaps be envisaged at R27, however, given the identification of the protagonists with distinct timbral and textural (and metric) features. Here, the order in which various constitutive decisions were made and the relative implications of one process in respect of another are of little consequence; the timbral and textural (and metric) content is conventionally substantive and thus both compositional and orchestrational (i.e. ‘this particular’). Undoubtedly, this content's semiotic import is such that, were it to change, it would become quite literally significantly other.
53 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze (1830), trans. Théodore F. Geraets, Wallis Arthur Suchting and Henry Silton Harris (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991), 225–7.
54 Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 236.
55 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic (1833), trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 509.
56 This is thus to be distinguished from Spinoza's monistic ontology (‘in which all determinate content is swallowed up’). Definition 3 of Part I of Spinoza's Ethics is explicit in this regard: ‘By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, that is, that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed.’ This may be supplemented with Proposition 10's Scholium from Part II, which tells us that ‘Substance is, by its nature, infinite, immutable, indivisible, and so forth, as anyone can easily see’ (Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics (1677), ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin, 1996), 1 and 37 respectively). Spinoza thus refuses modal categories any objectivity, reducing nature to the nothingness of mere surface events.
57 Note that these arguments are specific to Jeux. I have for the most part resisted the temptation to generalize as to the implications of Hegelian substance for other (or all) repertoire (including Debussy), though music of a more traditional tonal orientation would be an unlikely candidate, given the above. Assuming the given piece does not cede the foreground to timbre and texture, these arguments are unlikely to apply (though others might). As for twentieth-century possibilities (for example, Schoenberg's op. 16, no. 3 (Farben), Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments, Carter's Eight Etudes and a Fantasy for Woodwind Quartet, Messiaen's Chronochromie, Ligeti's Lontano, Reich's Eight Lines, among many others), the point remains that a similarly detailed dialectical argument would need to obtain from the ‘inner nature’ and in accordance with the concept of each (and any) piece in particular and in isolation (and this would hold even were the above not so extraordinarily divergent as regards their respective aesthetics).