Plus ça change…: Thinking again about Debussy and Ravel

No doubt the coincidental near-simultaneous appearance of the edited collections Rethinking Debussy (Oxford, 2011)¹ and Unmasking Ravel (Rochester, 2011)² has something to do with the fact that both these pre-eminent French composers were due for important anniversaries in 2012. And if, as it turned out, the celebrations of the sesquicentenary of Debussy’s birth proved more festive than those of the seventy-fifth anniversary of Ravel’s death, it is not hard to think of some obvious reasons why. Still, a glance to the titles of these two books finds more subtle openings to reflection about their representation of current scholarship on their chosen topics.

The two verbs capture a marked distinction in status. Claude Debussy, of course, has long been granted a monumental role in the familiar, progressive stories about modern music. Maurice Ravel has fared less heroically in such tales, due in part to the shadow cast by his older compatriot. We could definitely use some ‘rethinking’ of Debussy, in the hope of unsettling some of those historiographical clichés. And an ‘unmasking’of Ravel might aid that same project, given that his hitherto marginalized historical position, together with his unquestioned artistic brilliance, could promise telling, sidelong illumination of the priorities that have so often placed him in a post-Debussyan shade.

A first glance through these collections brings some slight deflation of the hopes (for Debussy) and the promise (of Ravel). Steven Huebner rightly claims, in his jacket blurb for Rethinking Debussy, that ‘on the level of name recognition in Debussy studies it would be very hard to do better’. But a glance over this ‘formidable’ list of scholars strikes a faint warning bell. No fewer than seven out of ten published their first thoughts on Debussy—or Bartók, in the case of Antokoletz—over forty years ago; two others in the later 1980s; and only one (co-editor Wheeldon) after the disciplinary upheavals of the 1990s. Such a generational breakdown significantly mutes the titular echo of Oxford University Press’s 1998 Rethinking Music, to note one convenient marker of those upheavals. A glance at the companion volume Rethinking Schumann (Oxford, 2011, ed. Laura Tunbridge and Roe-Min Kok) reveals, by contrast, that senior contributors stand alongside equal numbers of those who first entered the field in the late 1980s and 1990s, and considerably more from after the millennium. Maybe the Teutonic Schumann can still boast a wider scholarly field than even the most ‘revolutionary’ musicien français—but his editors also turned to thinkers more closely associated with Beethoven and Strauss. Could a ‘rethinking’ of Debussy not have profited from a similar opening, to scholars of Berlioz and Boulez, or indeed Tiomkin and Tomita?

Here, already, a contrast: lacking a raft of senior ‘Ravellians’ to choose from, Peter Kaminsky presents only a couple of senior figures (Antokoletz again, and Huebner) amid a markedly younger and more diverse set of voices. But a riffle through his book finds other reasons to wonder how revelatory its ‘unmasking’ will prove. At first glance, many essays breathe the familiar, default focus of institutionalized Music Theory on pitch structures, filtered through the usual systematic lenses. In view of Ravel’s pre-eminence as an orchestrator and his lifelong devotion to dance rhythm (to note only the most obvious possibilities) we might well wonder why such a collection would not seek to ‘unmask’ relatively neglected sides of his ‘medium’ (to recall Rose Subotnik’s useful term). Thankfully, closer inspection finds a few essays—including the two richest contributions to either volume—that suggest this sort of rebalancing is becoming a more viable possibility.

While both books exemplify the haphazard tendencies of their species, the most striking structural difference arises from the fact that Debussy’s revolutionary oeuvre boasts one work whose genre alone has made it, we might say after Orwell, ‘more revolutionary than others’. ‘Part I: Early Encounters’ consists of just two chapters; the editors then devote all four chapters of Part II to ‘New Perspectives on Pelléas et Mélisande’; two chapters are grouped (somewhat desperately) into ‘Part...