An analysis that accounts precisely for the nature of Debussy's musical forms and how forms of different works are related. Geometric systems found here throw new light on Debussy's intense interest in the other arts and provide links with artists he admired in other fields.

An essential resource for scholars and performers, this study by a world-renowned specialist illuminates the piano music of four major French composers, in comparative and reciprocal context. Howat explores the musical language and artistic ethos of this repertoire, juxtaposing structural analysis with editorial and performing issues. He also relates his four composers historically and stylistically to such predecessors as Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, the French harpsichord school, and Russian and Spanish music. Challenging long-held assumptions about performance practice, Howat elucidates the rhythmic vitality and invention inherent in French music. In granting Fauré and Chabrier equal consideration with Debussy and Ravel, he redresses a historic imbalance and reshapes our perceptions of this entire musical tradition. Outstanding historical documentation and analysis are supported by Howat’s direct references to performing traditions shaped by the composers themselves. The book balances accessibility with scholarly and analytic rigor, combining a lifetime’s scholarship with practical experience of teaching and the concert platform

Some of Debussy's most beloved pieces, as well as lesser-known ones from his early years, set in a rich cultural context by leading experts from the English- and French-speaking worlds. The music of Claude Debussy has always been widely beloved by listeners and performers alike, more perhaps than that of any of the other pioneers of musical modernism. However rich in itself, his creative output also participated, and continues to participate, in a network of cultural connections, the scope and meaning of which can only be gleaned through multiple interpretive frameworks. Debussy's Resonance offers twenty new studies by some of themost active and respected English- and French-language scholars of French music. The book treats a large swath of the composer's music, from previously unexplored mélodies of his early years to late pieces such as the ballet Jeux and the Douze Études, and takes into consideration the numerous contexts that helped shape the works and the different ways that musicologists and critics have explained them. CONTRIBUTORS: Katherine Bergeron, Matthew Brown, David J. Code, Mark DeVoto, Michel Duchesneau, David Grayson, Denis Herlin, Jocelyn Ho, Roy Howat, Steven Huebner, Julian Johnson, Barbara L. Kelly, Richard Langham Smith, Mark McFarland, François de Médicis, Robert Orledge, Boyd Pomeroy. Caroline Rae, Marie Rolf, August Sheehy FRANÇOIS DE MÉDICIS is Professor of Music at the Université de Montréal. STEVEN HUEBNER is Professor of Music at McGill University.

'That great blue Sphinx', Debussy called the sea. Debussy himself was something of a Sphinx: in the early 1890s he was thinking of 'founding a society for musical esotericism', and although, on the surface, most of his music is instantly engaging and accessible, at a deeper level run currents that are dangerous, unpredictable, destructive. In this new biography, Roger Nichols considers the life and music of this seminal figure charting the currents and the whirlpools in which other humans were sometimes unlucky enough to get caught. Debussy's status is such that no modern composer has been able to ignore him, asking, as he does, any number of riddles to which late twentieth-century music is still searching answers.

Debussy and the Theatre means, in effect, 'Debussy and Pellias et Milisande', the opera both established Debussy's mature style and changed the course of operatic history.

This book challenges and replaces the existing view of Mallarmé's mission to 're-possess' music on behalf of poetic language. Professor Heath Lees shows that Mallarmé's early knowledge and experience of music was much greater than commentators have realis

A brilliant analysis of the music of the twenties and thirties, also discusses the music of composers like Stravinsky, Satie, Gershwin, and considers the contributions of jazz and other pop music of the time with classical music.

Composer, pianist, and critic Claude Debussy's musical aesthetic represents the single most powerful influence on international musical developments during the long fin de siècle period. The development of Debussy's musical language and style was affected by the international political pressures of his time, beginning with the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and the rise of the new Republic in France, and was also related to the contemporary philosophical conceptualization of what constituted art. The Debussy idiom exemplifies the ways in which various disciplines - musical, literary, artistic, philosophical, and psychological - can be incorporated into a single, highly-integrated artistic conception. Rethinking Debussy draws together separate areas of Debussy research into a lucid perspective that reveals the full significance of the composer's music and thought in relation to the broader cultural, intellectual, and artistic issues of the twentieth century. Ranging from new biographical information to detailed interpretations of Debussy's music, the volume offers significant multidisciplinary insight into Debussy's music and musical life, as well as the composer's influence on the artistic developments that followed. Chapters include: "Russian Imprints in Debussy's Piano Music"; "Music as Encoder of the Unconscious in Pelléas et Mélisande"; "An Artist High and Low, or Debussy and Money"; "Debussy's Ideal Pelléas and the Limits of Authorial Intent"; "Debussy in Daleville: Toward Early Modernist Hearing in the United States"; and more. Rethinking Debussy will appeal to students and scholars of French music, opera, and modernism, and literary and French studies scholars, particularly concerned with Symbolism and theatre. General readers will be drawn to the book as well, particularly to chapters focusing on Debussy's finances, dramatic works, and reception.

Is business, for music, a regrettable necessity or a spur to creativity? Are there limits to the influence that economic factors can or should exert on the musical imagination and its product? In the eleven essays contained in this book the authors wrestle with these questions from the perspective of their chosen area of research. The range is wide: from 1700 to the present day; from the opera house to the community centre; from composers, performers and pedagogues to managers, publishers and lawyers; from piano miniatures to folk music and pop CDs. If there is a consensus, it is that music serves its own interests best when it harnesses business rather than denying it.

Offers the most detailed account yet of the early works of these four minimalist composers.