19TH CENTURY MUSIC
Mystères limpides: Time and Transformation in Debussy’s Des pas sur la neige
Debussy est mystérieux, mais il est clair. —Vladimir Jankélévitch
STEVEN RINGS
Introduction: Secrets and Mysteries sive religious orders). Mysteries, by contrast, are fundamentally unknowable: they are mys- Vladimir Jankélévitch begins his 1949 mono- teries for all, and for all time. Death is the graph Debussy et le mystère by drawing a dis- ultimate mystery, its essence inaccessible to tinction between the secret and the mystery. the living. Jankélévitch proposes other myster- Secrets, per Jankélévitch, are knowable, but ies as well, some of them idiosyncratic: the they are known only to some. For those not “in mysteries of destiny, anguish, pleasure, God, on the secret,” the barrier to knowledge can love, space, innocence, and—in various forms— take many forms: a secret might be enclosed in time. (The latter will be of particular interest a riddle or a puzzle; it might be hidden by acts in this article.) Unlike the exclusionary secret, of dissembling; or it may be accessible only to the mystery, shared and experienced by all of privileged initiates (Jankélévitch cites exclu- humanity, is an agent of “sympathie fraternelle et . . . commune humilité.”1
An abbreviated version of this article was presented as part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison music collo- 1Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère (Neuchâtel: quium series in November 2007. I am grateful for the Baconnière, 1949), pp. 9–12 (quote, p. 10). See also his later comments I received on that occasion from students and revision and expansion of the book, Debussy et le mystère faculty. I am also indebted to Michael Puri, Alex Rehding, de l’instant (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1976), pp. 15–19. Re- Anne Robertson, and the reviewers for this journal for maining citations in the present article refer to the origi- their trenchant reactions to earlier written drafts of the nal 1949 edition, unless the later edition is explicitly speci- paper. fied. Translations from either edition are mine.
178 19th-Century Music, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 178–208. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2008 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/ reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2008.32.2.178. Debussy’s music, Jankélévitch famously pro- in all problems the secret of technical con- STEVEN RINGS nounced, is a music of the mystery, not of the struction,” considering the latent “scientism” Debussy’s secret. It does not hide its truths behind her- of this approach a “philosophical indiscretion, Des pas sur metic codes or arcane formalisms, but instead mistaking for a secret the constitutional and la neige lays bare essential mysteries of existence, mak- nuclear mystery of existence.”5 Jankélévitch’s ing them palpably present to experience: “no exclusive religious societies, quintessential cul- musician has gone as far as Claude-Achille in tures of the secret, are all too easily compared the suggestion and transcription of the myste- to communities of musical analysts trained in rious. The inexpressible that Debussy expresses highly specialized approaches—methods acces- resembles an enigma that, we might say, is sible only to the initiate. (It is hard to imagine meant to be loved, but not solved.”2 that he did not intend the comparison.) The “But not solved. . . . ” The implication is analyst not only does violence to music’s mys- clear: we are not to treat mysteries as secrets. tery, but exhibits something approaching a pa- That is, we are not to approach them as puzzles thology—a “maniac antihedonism,” manifested to be solved, ciphers to be cracked, doors to be in a desire to flee from music’s most potent unlocked. In short, we are not to analyze mys- effects: “Technical analysis is a means of refus- tery. Jankélévitch easily could have quoted ing to abandon oneself spontaneously to grace, Debussy himself on the matter: “Grownups which is the request the musical Charm is tend to forget that as children they were forbid- making.”6 Analysis, in short, is in league with den to open the insides of their dolls—a crime the ideology of the secret and is anathema to of high treason against the cause of mystery. mystery. And yet they still insist on poking their aes- The scholarly literature of course abounds thetic noses into things that don’t concern in analytical and theoretical studies of them! Without their dolls to break open, they Debussy’s music. Jankélévitch’s view, if ac- still try to explain things, dismantle them and cepted, would force us to regard all this work quite heartlessly kill all their mystery.”3 There as, at best, orthogonal to what is most impor- is much to relish here, most notably the mas- tant in the composer’s music, or, at worst, terful twist that allows Debussy to patronize deeply damaging to it. Some analysts may be adults by comparing them to children, who untroubled by this indictment, finding Jan- know better than to analyze their pleasures. kélévitch’s notion of mystery too woolly to Citations of these (or similar) words from the support rational academic discourse in the first composer have become a familiar ritual in place. Others may wish to dismiss Jankélévitch Debussy criticism, offered as an admonition by on more philosophical grounds, holding his those not inclined to analysis, and as an expres- sion of anxiety by those who are.4 With Jankélévitch, the admonition against analysis rises to the level of an ethical indict- 5Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère, p. 10. 6Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. ment. He condemns the tendency to “seek out Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 102. Charme is a special term of art for Jankélévitch, denoting a sort of unanalyzable poetic grace; Arnold I. Davidson discusses the concept in his introduc- 2Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère, p. 11. tion to Abbate’s translation (pp. vii–xii). Abbate has ex- 3Debussy on Music, ed. and trans. François Lesure and tended and elaborated on Jankélévitch’s arguments in her Richard Langham Smith (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 13. much-discussed article “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Criti- The quote comes from Debussy’s first published essay for cal Inquiry 30 (2004), 505–36, in which she stresses the La revue blanche, dated 1 April 1901. importance that Jankélévitch places on the antimeta- 4Roy Howat, for example, begins his monumental analyti- physical materiality of music as experienced in perfor- cal study of Debussyan form and proportion with this very mance. Echoing the passage quoted above, she states that citation. See his Debussy in Proportion: A Musical Analy- “dissecting the work’s technical features or saying what it sis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. ix. represents reflects the wish not to be transported by the Edward Lockspeiser offers a characteristic admonition state that the performance has engendered in us” (pp. 505– against analysis in Debussy: His Life and Mind, vol. II 06). These ideas of course have a history: most obviously, (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 234. Though Lockspeiser the notion that analysis is a form of “dissection,” which does not quote Debussy in this particular passage, he does turns a living body into a corpse, is a familiar trope in approvingly cite Jankélévitch. Romantic criticism.
179 19TH claims of musical ineffability suspect.7 Some range his presentation in a way that will stimu- CENTURY MUSIC readers, however, may find this division of la- late the musical imagination of his audience. bor more or less satisfactory, falling, as it does, . . . Analysis simply says: listen to this . . . now along familiar and well-fortified disciplinary remember how that sounded . . . hear the rela- battle lines. In this view we are left with two tion . . . etc.”9 From this perspective—analysis nonintersecting, irreconcilable discourses on as an invitation to listen, to experience in- Debussy’s music, one of them immersed in the tently—Jankélévitch’s charge of “maniac fascinations of form, the other immersed in the antihedonism” rings especially false. The charge fascinations of meaning (meanings worldly or will surely come as a surprise to those who find mysterious, legible or ineffable). This split, fa- analysis and all of its attendant activities— miliar and comfortable for some, will never- listening, playing, singing, reflecting, recom- theless feel intellectually crippling for others. posing—a means of experiencing music’s physi- Not only does it divide the scholarly commu- cality and immediacy, its presence effects and nity into two populations who do not commu- meaning effects, as acutely as possible.10 The nicate with one another, it also closes off a experiences so constructed are of course not wealth of insight into the ways in which the extra-discursive; they are constructed by the sounding details of Debussy’s music (variously analytical act itself. I do not mean to naturalize refracted or constructed through different ana- analysis; it is a very special kind of activity, lytical discourses) might give rise to meanings with an admittedly charged ideological and in- (variously refracted or constructed through dif- stitutional history. The analytical encounter ferent interpretive discourses). with music should not be facilely equated with Perhaps the most effective end run around our countless other encounters with music, all Jankélévitch’s binary is to demonstrate that richly interwoven in the fabric of our everyday analysis need not always work in the way he lives, and all saturated with meaning.11 I sim- says it does. Analysis, at its best, need not be a ply wish to stress that, rather than reflecting a means of “solving” a piece—of decoding it like desire to flee music’s effects, the act of analysis a secret—but instead a process of making us is often undertaken in an effort to intensify more alive to it as a material, sonic phenom- those very effects. If a charge is to be made enon. The endeavor, thus conceived, aims not against analysis so conceived, it would more at knowledge understood in some discursive properly be one of hedonism.12 sense, but at intensified experience, which If the mystery that Jankélévitch detects in yields a different sort of knowledge.8 The view Debussy is indeed experienced, can analysis— was articulated long ago by David Lewin, who understood as a process of constructing an in- suggested that the “goal [of analysis] is simply tensified experience—make us more attentive to hear the piece better, both in detail and in the large. The task of the analyst is ‘merely’ to point out things in the piece that strike him as 9David Lewin, “Behind the Beyond: A Response to Edward characteristic and important (where by ‘things’ T. Cone,” Perspectives of New Music 7 (1969), 63, main one includes complex relationships), and to ar- text and n. 5. 10On “presence effects” and “meaning effects,” see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Mean- ing Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 7See, for example, Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and 11See Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of Califor- Cambridge University Press, 2000). Nicholas Cook dis- nia Press, 1995), pp. 10–19; idem, Musical Meaning: To- cusses the differences between modes of listening informed ward a Critical History (Berkeley: University of California by musicological discourse and more everyday modes of Press, 2002), pp. 5–6, 145–72; and Susan McClary, Con- listening in Music, Imagination, and Culture (Oxford: Ox- ventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berke- ford University Press, 1992). ley: University of California Press, 2000), esp. pp. 1–31. 12That charge has of course been made. It is an implicit 8Jankélévitch calls such experiential knowledge drastic, as subtext, for example, in much of Gary Tomlinson’s “Mu- opposed to gnostic; Abbate’s article “Music—Drastic or sical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: A Response to Gnostic?” has given those terms new currency. One of the Lawrence Kramer,” Current Musicology 53 (1992), 18–24. claims of the present article is that music analysis can See especially his comments on close listening on pp. 21– lead to drastic knowledge. 22.
180 to that mystery, or is it simply the wrong mode vious experience may only have been vague or STEVEN RINGS of attending for the task? To work our way inchoate. When we do not want clarity, this Debussy’s into the question, we should first note that may be a problem; some scholars have indeed Des pas sur Jankélévitch understands the Debussyan mys- suggested that it is a problem in Debussy analy- la neige tery as a function not of obscurity, but of clar- sis. Richard Taruskin, for example, states that ity. To capture the idea, he adopts the para- analysis of Debussy’s music runs the risk of doxical locution of the mystère limpide, the “valu[ing] an ounce of light over a pound of lucid mystery: “What could be less labyrin- shadow,” a view that “does not accord very thine than the nude, arid simplicity of the Étude well with the Symbolist scale of values.”15 pour le cinq doigts, of Tierces alternées, or of Taruskin’s statement suggests that the best ap- Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum? Whereas all se- proach to Debussy’s music might be a sort of crets require complication and profundity, analytical soft focus—one in which we do not Debussy is intelligible [patent] because his mys- seek to listen to the music too closely. Jankélé- teries are clear! Debussy is mysterious, but he vitch’s comments should give us pause, how- is clear. The lucid mystery—epitomized by ever. If one of the vehicles of Debussy’s enig- death—is this not the mystery par excellence?”13 mas is indeed clarity, might not the “light” Jankélévitch’s notion of the lucid mystery is shed by analysis be used to bring that clarity part and parcel of his broader critical project, into yet sharper relief, making our experience which involves, among other things, a Gallic not one of less mystery, but of more? reaction against Teutonic profundity. The I will test that idea in the following pages. mystère limpide is as much a polemical con- But first, another question demands attention. struct as it is a positive assessment of Debussy’s If a mystery is clear, is it not clear immedi- style.14 I will not delve into these broad ideo- ately—that is, on first listening, without any logical issues here, but instead simply adopt discursive intervention (analytical or other- Jankélévitch’s idea heuristically, as a way to wise)? And would this not stop us in our tracks get at the problem of contemplating artworks at this point and oblige us to cease talking and that we value as mysterious. For the idea pro- simply listen to Debussy’s music in silence? vides an opening, suggesting that clarity need Jankélévitch, perhaps surprisingly, says no. not diminish a work’s mystery. While music is for him fundamentally a sound- Analysis is well suited to clarity. It can fo- ing surface—a sensuous, material phenom- cus one’s hearing of a piece or passage, making enon—it is nevertheless a surface that wills available a sharpness of perception where pre- our close attention and invites our contempla- tion. Through contemplation, the surface opens onto depths. These are not Teutonic, meta- physical depths, however; they are depths cre- 13Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère, p. 11. Jankélévitch ated by the work’s reticence to disclose itself contrasts the mystère limpide with the mystère occulte, all at once: “The impression of depth is sug- which he associates with various mystical movements in vogue in intellectual Paris in the 1880s, including gested to us by the very effort that will be Rosicrucianism and Pre-Raphaelitism. He recognizes the necessary to delve into the intentions of the influence of these movements on Debussy, but suggests philosopher, or the musician, or better yet, will that the composer’s development traced a path from the mystères occultes of early Pre-Raphaelite essays such as be suggested by the time required to actualize La Damoiselle élue to the genuine mystères limpides of all that is virtual in the text or the musical mature works like Pelléas: “The distance from the work; depth, which is a spatial metaphor, is in Damoiselle to Pelléas . . . traverses the complete distance between the mystère occulte and the mystère limpide” short the projection of the time required for (ibid., p. 13). On the early influence of the Pre-Raphaelites on Debussy, see Richard Langham Smith, “Debussy and the Pre-Raphaelites,” this journal 5 (1981), 95–109. 14Jankélévitch’s animus toward the Austro-Germanic tra- dition was a driving force in his thought; it underlies his 15Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Mu- briefs against both analysis and hermeneutics. See the in- sic, vol. 4: The Early Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford troductory essays by Arnold I. Davidson and Carolyn University Press, 2005), p. 92. Taruskin offers the com- Abbate in Abbate’s translation of Music and the Ineffable, ment specifically with reference to an interpretation of pp. vii–xx. the large-scale tonal scheme of act IV, sc. 4 of Pelléas.
181 19TH actualization.”16 The “time required for actual- fracted through consciousness, emotion, and CENTURY MUSIC ization” is not the same as the time in which memory. music unfolds. Jankélévitch instead describes The discussion begins by exploring the it—memorably—as “perpendicular” to musi- work’s ostinato in depth; a chronological pass cal time: over the piece follows. The chronological orga- nization is a choice, not a default, meant to It takes time for the listener to discover these virtu- develop and focus a particular experience of the alities, and for the spirit to delve into the core of this Prélude as it unfolds in time. The matter of immanence: there is a time for sinking in, and this temporal succession is indeed crucial and time, perpendicular to the time of the performance prompts an excursus in the second half of the (if one dares to use such language), is the time that article on the ways in which we might hear the the listener spends in delving into the thickness of work as a whole to encode temporality. The this meaning devoid of meaning. . . . And time is necessary, moreover, to familiarize oneself with un- discussion moves freely between technical ana- familiar beauty, with harmonies that may be alien lytical language and other styles of descriptive to our habits of listening. . . . “Deep” music is like a and interpretive language. The technical dis- rich essential nature in a human being: one cannot course is transformational theory, but its for- appreciate the personality and the resources in the malities are worn lightly.18 I have sought to first afternoon’s encounter. . . . blend the transformational observations into The “depth” of the temporal work is, in short, the overall interpretive narrative in an effort to another name with which to designate reticence, suggest that the technical is not a privileged the spirit that withholds and does not reveal all its mode of interpretation, but merely one species resources at first . . . [it] unfolds itself little by little, of discursive mediation (among several) via for patient, attentive ears: its depth calls out to ours.17 which we can become attentive to the Prélude’s presence effects and meaning effects.19 In draw- Jankélévitch’s comments are clearly relevant ing on analytical and hermeneutic language, to our present work, suggesting that we do not become fully attentive to Debussy’s clear mys- teries through the simple fact of the music 18The analysis is far from a “complete” transformational hitting our ears. The mysteries emerge into account of the piece (were such a thing even possible); it their full clarity only once we have inhabited instead explores only those details that are central to the hearing I will develop. Arnold Whittall has recently sug- the perpendicular time of musical reflection, gested that “many of Debussy’s most individual works carefully directing and redirecting our “patient, might one day be illuminated from within the parameters attentive ears” to the music’s many sonic pres- of [transformational] theory.” Arnold Whittall, “Debussy Now,” in The Cambridge Companion to Debussy, ed. ences. Simon Trezise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, In what follows I want to do just that, by 2003), p. 280. The present article, however partial, repre- listening closely to Debussy’s Des pas sur la sents one contribution to such a broader project. My analy- sis takes its inspiration from David Lewin’s magisterial neige (Préludes, book I, no. 6). The discussion reading of Debussy’s essay “A Transformational Basis for of the piece is detailed; the reader may find it Form and Prolongation in Debussy’s ‘Feux d’artifice’,” in necessary at times to draw on the patience that Musical Form and Transformation: 4 Analytic Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 97–159. For an Jankélévitch counsels. But it is my hope that additional suggestive application of transformational meth- patience will be rewarded in an intensified ex- ods to Debussy’s music, one that also engages in questions perience of certain of the work’s sonic pres- of meaning and interpretation, see Rebecca Leydon’s analy- sis of the second movement of the Cello Sonata in her ences, and via them, certain of its mystères Narrative Strategies and Debussy’s Late Style (Ph.D. diss., limpides. Chief among the Prélude’s myster- McGill University, 1996), pp. 146–67. ies, I suggest, is the mystery of time, as re- 19On the value of avoiding a hierarchical relationship be- tween analysis and hermeneutics—one in which all herme- neutic statements are treated as dependent on analytical statements for their “validation”—see Lawrence Kramer, 16Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 69. Jankélévitch “Analysis Worldly and Unworldly,” Musical Quarterly 87 is not speaking only of Debussy here, but of “deep” (i.e., (2004), 119–39. Kramer recommends not a reversal of hier- reticent) music in general; Jankélévitch’s archetypes for archy, with hermeneutics now taken as primary, but rather such music—in addition to Debussy—include Fauré, a negation of any hierarchical ranking between the ana- Mompou, Ravel, and Falla. lytical and the hermeneutic, in what he calls a “principle 17Ibid., pp. 70–71. of nonpriority” (p. 125).
182 the article deploys discourses anathema to harmony or texture acting like the shifts of STEVEN RINGS Jankélévitch for Jankélévitchian ends. In the light and atmosphere around a stack of wheat, Debussy’s conclusion I will evaluate the degree to which or Rouen Cathedral. Des pas sur this paradoxical effort succeeds, returning to Debussy enigmatically marks the ostinato la neige the ideas about secrets and mysteries with Ce rythme doit avoir la valeur sonore d’un which I began. fond de paysage triste et glacé (this rhythm Let us, then, direct our “patient, attentive should have the sonic quality of a sad and fro- ears” to Debussy’s Prélude. Example 1a (pp. zen landscape). The pairing triste et glacé sug- 184–85) is a lightly annotated score of the piece. gests the inseparability of affect and frozen en- The annotations are cued to a rotational inter- vironment, or rather, their mutual infusion of pretation of the form in ex. 1b (p. 186).20 The each other. The resulting affective field—align- double-rotational, binary reading (A–B–A'–B', ing cold, winter, and despair on one side, and followed by a coda) agrees with other published their excluded opposites (whose absence we analyses of the piece, though it is certainly not feel pointedly) on the other—is familiar from a the only formal hearing possible.21 Rather than vast range of European literature. It remains a surveying the rotational reading at this point, I remarkably durable meteorological trope in will discuss it as the chronological pass French Symbolism, from Baudelaire to La- progresses. forgue.22 In Debussy’s Prélude this is not merely a poetic idea; it is something we are to hear—it Footsteps, Footprints is to be projected sonically in the ostinato’s We hear the ostinato immediately in m. 1. It valeur sonore, specifically in its rhythm. The persists, with a few telling interruptions, way in which the Prélude gives sonic embodi- throughout the piece, serving as a focal point of ment to such an idea is the subject of the dis- attention when it is present and becoming even cussion to come. Note for now that Debussy more conspicuous in its momentary absences. draws our attention immediately to the The ostinato acts as a sort of perceptual and ostinato’s temporal dimension, alerting us to interpretive fulcrum: a fixed point around which the centrality of time in the Prélude. all other musical and semantic signifiers re- What is perhaps most striking about the volve; the interaction between the ostinato and marking, however, is what it does not say. It its surroundings provides one of the central does not say anything about footsteps. And yet fascinations of the Prélude. The effect is a fa- the resemblance can hardly be missed if one miliar one from Debussy’s music, in which a has the Prélude’s title in mind.23 If these are single melodic or motivic element is reiterated in ever-shifting harmonic and textural contexts. 22Though no work (poetic or pictorial) is known to have It is a critical commonplace to interpret this served explicitly as inspiration for Debussy’s Prélude, its effect in impressionist terms, with the shifts in field of potential poetic intertexts is rich, embracing Baudelaire (Chant d’automne, Brumes et pluies), Mallarmé (Le vierge, le vivace, et le bel ajourd’hui), Verlaine (Colloque sentimental), Louÿs (Le Tombeau des naïades), 20For an overview of rotational theory, see James Hepokoski Laforgue (Couchant d’hiver), and—reaching back to in- and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, clude a medieval text well known to Debussy—Charles Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century duc d’Orléans (Yver vous n’estes qu’un vilain). Sonata (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 611– 23As in all of the Préludes, the title comes at the end of the 14. movement, enclosed in parentheses and following an el- 21For similar readings, see Arnold Whittall, “Tonality and lipsis, allowing us perhaps to hold our knowledge of it in the Whole-Tone Scale in the Music of Debussy,” Music abeyance when hearing the piece. But once we are sensi- Review 36 (1975), 262; idem, Musical Composition in the tized to the footstep-like qualities of the ostinato, the re- Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), semblance is hard to shake. Most commentators have in- pp. 22–27; and Siglind Bruhn, Images and Ideas in Modern deed taken it for granted that the ostinato represents the French Piano Music (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon, 1997), pas of the title. See, for example, Whittall, Musical Com- p. 91. The five main subsections of the reading (A–B–A'– position in the Twentieth Century, p. 23; and Bruhn, Im- B'–coda) follow exactly the divisions of Richard Parks’s ages and Ideas, pp. 89–96. In such interpretations, analysis, though he hears these as five variations in a varia- Debussy’s title acts an enabling hermeneutic window onto tion form, making no mention of binary patterning. Rich- the piece, of Lawrence Kramer’s first type: a textual inclu- ard Parks, The Music of Claude Debussy (New Haven: sion. See his Music as Cultural Practice: 1800–1900 (Ber- Yale University Press, 1989), p. 225. keley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 9–10.
183 19TH a. annotated score. CENTURY MUSIC A a1 a2 Triste4 et lent ( = 44) 4 m.d. expressif et douloureux 4 4
più Ce rythme doit avoir la valeur sonore d’un fond de paysage triste et glacé
B b1 6 expressif b 2 b + 2 4 Cédez 2 Retenu 11 ()
A' Cédez a Tempo 16 a1' a2' più m.d.
En animant surtout dans l’expression Retenu 21 expressif et tendre ( )