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Timbral Aesthetics in Debussy's Writings for Flute Jasmine Yiqi

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Timbral Aesthetics in Debussy's Writings for Flute Jasmine Yiqi 1 Sonic Ephemerality and Expression: Timbral Aesthetics in Debussy’s Writings for Flute Jasmine Yiqi Yuan Advisor: Gurminder Kaur Bhogal, Music Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite for Honors in Music 2021 © 2021 Jasmine Yuan 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 3 Introduction 5 Chapter One: Debussy at the fin-de-siècle and the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune 11 Chapter Two: Unaccompanied Flute Timbres in Syrinx for solo flute 21 Chapter Three: Looking Backward and Looking Forward in the Sonate pour flûte, 34 alto, et harpe Conclusion 55 Bibliography 58 3 Acknowledgements I would like to begin by thanking my incredible thesis advisor, Professor Gurminder Bhogal, for her dedication, patience, and guidance. This thesis would not exist without her continual support and wonderful feedback throughout this whole process. Her expertise and invaluable insights into this field have given me new perspectives on this topic and I am grateful to have had this opportunity to work with such a remarkable music scholar and person. Thank you also to my major advisor, Professor Claire Fontijn, for her kind advice through my journey in becoming a music major. I would also like to thank the members of my thesis committee: Professors Jenny Johnson, Claire Fontijn, and Sharon Elkins. Special thanks to Carol Lubkowski for her kindness in helping me with research and finding resources. This endeavor would not have been possible without the support from the Wellesley College Music Department and my music instructors over the years. I would like to thank Kathy Boyd, as her teaching has created spaces of such kindness and positivity in this difficult year. I would also like to thank Suzanne Stumpf for teaching and supporting me. Through her guidance I have grown so much as a flutist, musician, and person. I am grateful to Ai Tashiro for teaching me so much and for our tea chats during my semester abroad. Thank you also to Jenny Tang for her insightful performance coachings and critique every week. All of them have shaped me to be the musician I am today. I owe gratitude to Jenny Tang and Eliko Akahori, who have been immeasurably dedicated to supporting my performance endeavors through all the challenges of this academic year. Thank you also to Gabriela Diaz for her wonderful chamber music coaching. It has been a joy and a privilege to learn from her and to work with my collaborators, Paige Jones and Erin Kim, on the Debussy Sonate every week. Thank you to the Jerome A. Schiff Committee and the Office of the Provost for allowing me the opportunity to study timbres in performance with Alison Fierst, Associate Principal Flutist of the New York Philharmonic. Alison has inspired me immensely through our virtual Debussy coachings. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends. I am grateful to my parents for their unwavering love and support for me over all these years. I am thankful to Lucille Tsao, Marie Tan, Marinn Cedillo, Sandra Xu, and Silvia Yu for being the best friends and support system I could have at Wellesley. I dedicate this thesis to the late Dekui Zhu, who has shown me what it means to truly persevere and to share joy with others as an artist and musician. 4 Sylvain d'haleine première Si ta flûte a réussi Ouïs toute la lumière Qu'y soufflera Debussy (If the flute has played well, the primal woodland breath hears all the light that Debussy has inspired in it.)1 - Stéphane Mallarmé 1 From a copy of the first edition of L'Après-midi d'un faune sent to Debussy by Stéphane Mallarmé in 1897. Translated in Paul Holmes, The Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers: Debussy (London: Omnibus Press, 2015), 48. 5 Introduction Claude Debussy’s symphonic poem Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894) is often considered by scholars to signal a turning point in the history of music. This orchestral piece was composed as an introduction to a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, L’après-midi d’un faune (1876), which is about a dream/vision imagined by the mythical figure of a faun. Marked by a mysterious piano solo flute entrance, the flute emerges from silence, entering into a languorously winding arabesque melody that evokes the drowsiness of the faun’s awakening. As the hushed tone colors of the flute’s lower registers are joined by the harp, the listener is immediately transported into the magical dreamscape of the faun’s imagination. We might wonder why Debussy chose an unaccompanied flute to open this orchestral work in this subdued manner, and what it is about this combination of flute and harp that makes the piece so alluring. How is the timbral blend of these sonorities able to successfully immerse the listener in the time and space of the composition? My thesis explores these, and other related questions, by examining the topic of timbre in Debussy’s works for flute. Timbre is one of the most captivatingly immersive properties of music. This aspect of sound and auditory sensation is difficult to define, and it is often referenced using the mixed sonic-visual metaphor of tone color. In recent decades, scholars have tended to describe timbre as a sounding object whose unique qualities allow listeners to differentiate between musical instruments, and identify the unique sounds of one instrument in contrast to another. Recently scholars such as Isabella van Elferen have highlighted the concept of timbre as a paradox, that is, an ineffable aesthetic experience that embodies both physical and immaterial components. Timbre has a tangible, physical presence that is difficult to capture in words, which bears a 6 tendency to erase its own meaning in creating an ephemeral “present absence.”2 Certain physical aspects of timbre extend to a consideration of material sound sources such as instrument design, body physiology of the performer, and frequency spectrum (overtones of pitch and the wide range of frequencies that we can interpret), in addition to the spectral envelope of the sound (attack, decay, sustain, and release). The material properties of timbre function to shape an aesthetics of tone color. Timbre is also characterized by immaterial components such as its ability to emotionally affect listeners and its proximity to the quality of the sublime, a transcendental experience created by a paradoxical absence of presence.3 The expressive capabilities of timbre extend beyond its physical presence to facilitate stimulating experiences that invite thoughtful contemplation. Timbre has the ability to engender an alluring auditory experience by conveying the indescribable and the ineffable, qualities that are inherent to French aesthetics of the early twentieth century with which Debussy identified. The aesthetic moment of timbre is immediate and unpredictable because it is contingent on factors in performance such as the interplay of articulation, vibrato, and dynamics used to shape the mingling of sounds in space. Timbre is a critical determinant of our musical experience, and its immediacy invokes emotional responses in listeners. When we hear and perceive timbre, we participate in configuring a timbral aesthetics, which is centered around the paradox of materiality and immateriality. Timbre’s aesthetic allure is based on these kinds of intersections and those that are juxtaposed between the physical and the sublime. 2 Isabella van Elferen, Timbre: Paradox, Materialism, Vibrational Aesthetics (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020): 76-89. 3 See Elferen’s discussion of timbre’s “aesthetic reaching” from the physical to the transcendental in Timbre: Paradox, Materialism, Vibrational Aesthetics, 97. 7 My interest in timbral aesthetics as explored in relation to Debussy’s music can be traced back to my experience of listening to and being fascinated by the enchanting flute arabesques and tone colors of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Debussy was one of the most influential composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and his music flourished within the rich cultural milieu of fin-de-siècle/début-de-siècle Paris. Over the course of his lifetime, Debussy wrote multiple works involving the flute, giving the instrument a significant role in his body of work. His music was often concerned with topics that were of interest to contemporaneous literary and artistic movements in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century: the world of dreams, idealized visions of nature, and escapist fantasies. His development of flute timbres was firmly aligned with ideas inherent to fin-de-siècle aesthetics. As I analyze his flute compositions, I also offer a glimpse into the cultural contexts that shaped Debussy’s cultivation of flute timbres. Debussy’s treatment of timbres was an important precursor to timbral innovation that took place later in the twentieth century. Pierre Boulez explained that the development of timbral blending in orchestration during the nineteenth century allowed timbre to be liberated from the constraints of fixed instrument identities.4 As sonorities of instruments merged together to create new orchestral sounds, individual timbres became less identifiable and took on a multitude of characteristics. On the one hand, an orchestral instrument might be identified with a specific musical topic when used in a soloistic capacity. On the other hand, its timbres could become unrecognizable when combined in ensembles with other instruments due to the complex nature of these timbral blends. Debussy’s music broke away from traditions of nineteenth-century 4 Pierre Boulez, “Timbre and composition—timbre and language,” Contemporary Music Review 2/1 (1987), 164. 8 orchestration since he viewed each instrumental timbre to be a source of “potential sonorous beauty, a much less defined agent of musical colour, light, mood and effects.”5 He believed that music, through attention to timbral development, was most capable of attaining the “inexpressible.” As I will explore, Debussy often elicited specific sonorities from the flute through emphasis on soft dynamics, gently articulated phrases, winding arabesque figurations, and shimmering accompaniment in projecting an effect of the ephemeral.
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