Semiotic Analysis of Debussy's Prelude N.10, Book ll "Canope"

Rivista di Analisi e Teoria Musicale, 2022

This paper intends to demonstrate how the tritone in the Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp becomes a tool of the memory, capable of revealing an underlying cyclical unity. The analysis consolidates Jean-Louis Leleu's insights (Leleu 2017), reinterpreting the function of some recurring intervals in the construction of the Sonata. What emerges is a path of progressive revelation of a few supporting elements, in particular the α interval [6-0], which gradually shed their themes to reveal a distinctive identity. So far the cyclical nature of the work has been evaluated only with regard to the resumption of the theme of the Pastorale in the epilogue. But the analysis of this paper highlights a much denser network of links, which tends to go beyond the thematic dimension, to favor a substantially athematic connection. Musicological studies tried to find a kinship with French research on cyclicity at the end of the XIXth century (DeVoto 2004; Wheeldon 2009). But Debussy eclipses every model, experimenting with various solutions. There is a transformation process, which leads the composer to rework some cyclical procedures that were historicized by tradition: specially the rewriting of the péroraison, which loses its melodic traceability while remaining the athematic climax of the entire work. Above all, there is a strong drive towards a form of subconscious cyclicality, which offers the listener continuous points of contact with that déjà entendu by working on connoted and perceptible cues.

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Musicological Annual

In the dialogue What Is Music? between Carl Dahlhaus and Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, music is defined as a “mathematized emotion” or an “emotionalized ‘mathesis’”. As emphasized by Marija Bergamo, this is the way of underlining its equal and unavoidable constitution, based on emotion and rational organization in the time dimension. So, Marija Bergamo is continuously searching for those music determinants in a musical work as an “autonomous aesthetic fact”, whose base and real essence lie “within the nature and essence of music itself”. In other words, the starting point of the author’s concern with (art) music is her reflection on that which is “purely musical”, that is, on “the very nature of the musical”.The attempts to determine what the purely musical is and to understand the nature of the sense and inevitability of man’s musical dimension have been made since the beginnings of music and musical thinking. In that context, more recent knowledge and thinking about the phenomenon of ...

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2016

The present paper forms part of a complex research project and is designed to be a chapter in the book based on a closed-reading approach I am conducting in opera semiotics and literary and philosophical anthropology with the aim to provide a series of interpretations of drama and opera of selected operas of Mozart and plays of Shakespeare, inviting Nietzsche and Kierkegaard as our guides. The thorough study of the subject invites comparisons which should lead to new insights into the musical drama, i.e. the way drama is conveyed by the musical form. To quote Osip Mandelstam, "Music is no guest here called in from outside, but an active participant in the debate, or to put it more precisely, the one who promotes discourse”. The term I have coined as the "phenomenology of music” refers to the methodology of outward or perceptible indications depicted (or the depictability of such indications) in form(ation)s and configurations related to and conditioned by the musical expression. The findings presented in this paper are intended to serve as a stepstone for close-reading based analyses of other operas. In the first part of this paper I offer a close-reading analysis of a scene from a Musorgsky opera leading us to identify a "musical trope” – the musical metaphor – which I term as the "musical synecdoche.” Musical tropology, likewise metaphor in language, becomes a key tool in approaching the musical work. One of the characteristic elements in the poetic arsenal of Gogol, a technique termed by Boris Eikhenbaum as the "Gogolian mask,” reappears in Musorgsky's last opera, Khovanshchina, having a musical genre adapt a literary legacy. The second part of the paper approaches the subject in a more pragmatical way, insofar it examines an opera staging set, the Figure of the Child from Andrei Tarkovsky's production of Musorgsky's Boris Godunov, intending to draw attention to the importance of selecting the right tools in designing the visuality of an opera performance.

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Music Analysis, 2002

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Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

Claude Debussy’s personal style is typically characterised as a departure from earlier diatonic tonality, including a greater variety of pitch-class materials organised in fragmented yet coherent compositions. Exploiting the music-theoretical interpretability of Discrete Fourier Transforms over pitch-class distributions, we performed a corpus study over Debussy’s solo-piano works in order to investigate the diachronic development of such stylistic features across the composer’s lifespan. We propose quantitative heuristics for the prevalence of different pitch-class prototypes, the fragmentation of a piece across different prototypes, as well as some aspect of the overall coherence of a piece. We found strong evidence for a decrease of diatonicity in favour of octatonicity, as well as for an increase of fragmentation accompanied by non-decreasing coherence. These results contribute to the understanding of the historical development of extended-tonal harmony, while representing a fert...

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An analysis of Le Jet d’Eau from Claude Debussy’s Cinq poéms de Charles Baudelaire, reveals the composer’s modernist approach in setting text in musical symbolism. Unlike the German lieder of Mahler or Schubert, this song evidently deviates from the Wagnerian chromaticism. Since his encounter of exoticism in the 1889 World Exposition in Paris, Le Jet d’Eau essentially illuminates Debussy’s shift in compositional aesthetics. Hinged within the symbolist perspective of “hearing as pleasure,” Debussy’s aesthetic transformation becomes evident. Traits, such as the absence of using leitmotiv, the use of non-resolving harmonic sonorities, and his use of musical symbolism to capture his own synaesthesia are among the few indications to his deviation from Gesamtkunstwerk. He separated himself aesthetically through his use of musical symbolism. Consequently, his unique modernist approach—composition through the “hearing as pleasure” —affected later composers pertaining to the relationship between symbolism and music.

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2008

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Musicological Annual, 2005

According to Gerard Genette, paratextual elements can be defined as that what comes against, beside, and in addition to the text (a score for example) 'itself'. In that sense, they are always subordinate to 'their' text. The paratext is all material other than, though very closely connected to, the 'actual' text: the cover, the author's name, the title, preface, illustrations, notes, etc. It is therefore located in the space between inside and outside, the space between still belonging and not yet belonging to the text. This essay first of all investigates how paratextual elements (especially breath marks) are necessary to provide a musical text (in this case Debussy's Syrinx for solo flute) with a (temporary) meaning and how they direct possible interpretations. Secondly, this essay also suggests that within the musical text 'itself', paratext is always already present (for example in ornamentation). However, in Syrinx, the borders between te...

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