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"Code, David J"
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Analyse, que me veux-tu? Interpreting Stravinsky's Memorial to Debussy
Soon after Debussy's death in March 2018, Stravinsky began work on a memorial, the Symphonies d'instruments à vent (1920). This piece was to become iconic both for music-theoretical reflection on modern approaches to musical time and for musicological archaeologies of Stravinsky's debts to ‘Russian traditions’. Along both avenues, particular emphasis has long been given to the work's closing chorale, initially published separately in the 1920 Debussy tombeau issue of La Revue musicale. This article argues for a radical reappraisal of the Symphonies, which builds anew on Stephen Walsh's 1996 study of the sketches and shifts the emphasis onto temporal questions long neglected under pitch-focused analysis. Exposing ‘thematic’ concerns of rhythmic and metrical parsing (as distinct from unifying motives or pitch sets), and interpreting Stravinsky's hommage in light of Debussy's famous 1907 definition of music as ‘de couleurs et de temps rythmés’, I ultimately bring fresh metacritical perspective to fundamental questions of analytical method and purpose long entertained (e.g.) by Joseph Kerman, Carl Dahlhaus, Kofi Agawu, and Robert Walser.
Journal Article
Claude debussy
French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918) created music that was revolutionary, with a distinctly modern sound that highlighted the intersection of art and life. Here, in this unique biography, David J. Code explores the important moments in the development of Debussy's literary interests that shaped his music-and in the process brings to life Debussy's sardonic personality. Claude Debussy presents an in-depth look at how Debussy's love for poetry influenced his musical compositions. Code explores both Debussy's earlier years, filled with student cantatas inspired by Verlaine and Baudelaire, as well as his later works, dominated by nationalistic pieces inspired by French Renaissance poets and composed in the lead-up to World War I. Along the way, Code looks at Debussy's orchestral compositions and operas, inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé and Maurice Maeterlinck. This book will give readers a fresh way of listening to Debussy's classic music by offering the most up-to-date critical analysis of the intersection of Debussy's literary interests and musical compositions and will appeal to any reader with a love of Debussy, as well as modern music, literature, and the arts.
eBook
Don Juan in Nadsat: Kubrick's Music for A Clockwork Orange
The critical reception of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) often circles around two related questions: its relationship to Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel and the implications of its classical 'compilation' soundtrack. Revisiting both, this article challenges the pervasive emphasis in existing musicological literature on the film's use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by offering a formal analysis of its excerpts by (among others) Rossini, Elgar and Purcell. A fresh look at Purcell's Funeral Music for Queen Mary (1695) serves to open a dramatic lineage leading back to the seventeenth-century 'Don Juan' archetype, which brings in tow the vast musicological literature on Don Giovanni along with philosophical accounts from Kierkegaard through Bernard Williams. The film's notorious references to Gene Kelly's dance routine in Singin' in the Rain (1952) add to its confrontation with individual and collective ideals of 'liberty' a cinematic reflexivity that can serve (with some help from Marshall McLuhan's influential 1964 study Understanding Media) to shed new light on Luis Buñuel's assertion that this is 'the only movie about what the modern world really means'.
Journal Article
Real Feelings: Music as Path to Philosophy in 2001: A Space Odyssey
A recurring trope in the literature on Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey holds that the HAL 9000 computer has more feelings than any of the human characters. But the film itself presents the question of HAL's ‘real feelings’ as something no one can truthfully answer. One way to begin negotiating this contradiction is by attending anew to the way the Jupiter Mission episode, in which HAL appears, is cut to the Adagio from Khachaturian's ballet Gayane, the excerpt that remains the least discussed in this renowned compilation score. Suggesting that the elusive affect of this music, as it is deployed through several interrelated scenes, brings focus to questions of emotion and embodiment that fundamentally inform the conflict between human and machine, I go on to offer a new hearing of HAL's unforgettable death song ‘Daisy Bell’ in this light, and to re-evaluate some of the director's own words about his film. Ultimately, I carry the same questions forward to inform a contribution to the ongoing debate about the Nietzschean philosophical inflections occasionally thought to enter the film with its much more famous cue from Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra.
Journal Article
The Synthesis of Rhythms: Form, Ideology, and the “Augurs of Spring”
At the time of the premiere ofThe Rite of Spring, Stravinsky suggestively described its first dance, “Augurs of Spring,” as a “synthesis of rhythms.” Later, he characterized the whole ballet as an “architectonic” work. Richard Taruskin, in arguing for the ballet's overall aesthetic of “primitive simplicity,” polemically rejects this latter adjective as a typical formalist lie. But detailed analysis demonstrates the architectonic intricacy of the rhythmic synthesis in “Augurs” alone. Not only are the composer's labors toward such local intricacy clearly evident in the sketches, but a dialectical account of formalism and immediacy in this one dance confirms both the documented “neonationalist” background and initial reception, while pointing to a finer understanding of this ballet's position in the stylistic development of Stravinsky's Russian period.
Journal Article
Debussy's String Quartet in the Brussels Salon of \La Libre Esthetique\
The second performance of Debussy's String Quartet, given by the Ysaye Quartet on an all-Debussy program during the 1894 salon of \"La Libre EsthŽtique\" in Brussels, offers an ideal context for a critical reexamination of his musical and aesthetic affinities at this pivotal moment. In the first place, a view to the salon's other three concerts, which honored Beethoven alongside recent works by Societe Nationale composers, encourages reconsideration of Debussy's own response to the \"great tradition\" in the work he ironically designated \"Opus 10.\" But at the same time, due regard to his other contemporaneous compositional obsessions, as exemplified in the works programmed alongside the Quartet, raises the question as to how such self-conscious dialogue with Classical models related to more pressing, post-Wagnerian musical negotiations. Pursuit of this question through analysis of the first movement's reconfigured sonata form ultimately suggests ways to distinguish, from amid the myriad post-Impressionist artists on view in the \"Free Aesthetic\" salon itself, those painters whose visual explorations most tellingly paralleled Debussy's own \"games\" with musical syntax and expression in the early 1890s.
Journal Article
The Formal Rhythms of Mallarmé's Faun
ABSTRACT The eclogueL'Après-midi d'un faunehas long been seen as a breakthrough to the mature “symbolist” phase of Mallarmé'soeuvre. Clichés about the “mystery” essential to symbolist poetic style have, however, forestalled rigorous analysis of the work's structure. Exposing a formal “rhythm” that draws the strophic sections into a pattern of virtual “folios and bifolios,” this article reads the faun eclogue as a secret model of “le Livre,” “the Book,” lodestar of Mallarmé's aesthetic project. In giving new focus to the work's pointed dialogue with classical Virgilian pastoral, this reading also draws on Benveniste's writings about linguistic subjectivity to understand its enactment, through the character of the faun, of an agonistic search for voiced presence.
Journal Article
Hearing Debussy Reading Mallarmé: Music après Wagner in the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
Debussy's Prélude à Vaprès-midi d'un faune has so far been thought to relate only obliquely to Mallarmé's poem L'Après-midi d'un faune. The actual sophistication of Debussy's reading of Mallarmé becomes apparent through a newly precise formal analysis of the poem, and a new analytical emphasis on the orchestration of the prelude. In adapting the conventions of classical pastoral, notably the quasi-dramatic textual presentation of both Virgil's Eclogues and Theocritus's Idylls, Mallarmé focuses his text on an irresolvable moment of conflict between sensuous speech and literary writing. The faun, the poem's main \"character,\" comes to symbolize the reader's divided experience of a text composed on the cusp of a loss of Romantic lyricism to modernist impersonality. In Debussy's reading, a recurring contrast between strings and winds audibly tracks Mallarmé's poetic template and also, more subtly, signals an esoteric layer of puns on Wagnerian leitmotifs in its syntax. A division between hearing and analytical reading is created, which encapsulates a historical moment in which the Romantic orchestral poetics exemplified in Berlioz's influential treatise is losing its immediacy, and the Romantic harmony that attained an expressive limit in Wagner's music dramas is being broken up by systematic analysis.
Journal Article