Debussy Claude - The Cambridge companion to Debussy

Often considered the falther of twentieth-century music, Debussy was a visionary whose influence is still felt. This book offers a wide-ranging series of essays on Debussy the man, the musician and composer. It contains new insights into his character, his relationship to his Parisian environment and his musical works across all genres, with challenging views on the roles of nature and eroticism in his life and music. His music is considered through the characteristic themes of expression, sonority, rhythm, tonality and form, with closing chapters considering the performance of his music and our view of Debussy today as a major force in Western culture. This wide-ranging view of Debussy is written by a team of specialists for students and informed music lovers.

Simon Trezise is a Lecturer in Music at Trinity College, Dublin. He is the author of Debussy: La mer in the series Cambridge Music Handbooks and has written on French music and on Schoenberg.

For a list of titles published in the series, please see .

For a list of titles published in the series, please see .

For a list of titles published in the series, please see .

The Cambridge Companion to Debussy

Edited by

Simon Trezise

In memoriam Franois Lesure, 19232001

Contributors

Mark DeVoto, composer and writer, has been Professor of Music at Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts since 1981. He edited the fourth and fifth editions of Walter Pistons Harmony ; edited Altenberg Lieder , Op. 4 for the Alban Berg Smtliche Werke ; he recently completed Debussy and the Veil of Tonality: Essays on His Music .

Dirdre Donnellon graduated in music from the University of Manchester in 1993 and completed her M.Phil. at the University of Liverpool in 1996. She recently completed a Ph.D., Debussy, Satie and the Parisian Critical Press, at the University of Liverpool.

David Grayson is Professor of Music at the University of Minnesota. He wrote The Genesis of Debussys Pellas et Mlisande, and contributed to the Cambridge Opera Handbook on Pellas , Debussy Studies and Debussy and His World . He is editing Pellas for the uvres compltes de Claude Debussy and is on the editorial board of Cahiers Debussy . He has also written a Cambridge Music Handbook on two Mozart piano concertos.

Barbara L. Kelly is Lecturer in Music at Keele University. She is author of the Ravel article for New Grove 2 and of a forthcoming book on Darius Milhaud. Her research is focused on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French music, and on issues of French national identity from 1870 to 1939.

Julie McQuinn is a Ph.D. candidate and part-time lecturer at Northwestern University. In her dissertation she examines the forces behind perceptions of gender and sexuality in Parisian society at the turn of the twentieth century and their connection to the creation and reception of a handful of highly individual operas performed at the Opra-Comique.

Roger Nichols read music at the University of Oxford and subsequently lectured at various universities before becoming a freelance writer and broadcaster in 1981. He has published widely on French music of the last 200 years, including Ravel (Dent, 1977), Ravel Remembered (Faber, 1987), Debussy Remembered and A Life of Debussy .

Robert Orledge is Professor of Music at the University of Liverpool. His research field is French music between 1850 and 1939 and his main publications are Gabriel Faur (Eulenburg, 1983), Debussy and the Theatre , Charles Koechlin: His Life and Works (Harwood, 1995), Satie the Composer (Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Satie Remembered (Faber, 1995).

Richard S. Parks is Professor of Music Theory at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. He has been exploring theoretical-analytical issues in Debussys music for thirty years and has published articles on the subject in The Journal of Music Theory, Music and Letters and Music Theory Spectrum, and a chapter in Debussy in Performance . His The Music of Claude Debussy appears in the Yale University Press series Composers of the Twentieth Century.