Debussy-Des Pas Sur La Neige

Mystéres limpides : Time and Transformation in Debussy's Des pas sur la neigeAuthor(s): Steven RingsReviewed work(s):Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Fall 2008), pp. 178-208Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncm.2008.32.2.178 .

Accessed: 04/03/2013 04:55

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19th-Century Music.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Mon, 4 Mar 2013 04:55:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncm.2008.32.2.178?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


178

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC

19th-Century Music, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 178–208. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2008 by the Regents ofthe 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.

An abbreviated version of this article was presented aspart of the University of Wisconsin-Madison music collo-quium series in November 2007. I am grateful for thecomments I received on that occasion from students andfaculty. I am also indebted to Michael Puri, Alex Rehding,Anne Robertson, and the reviewers for this journal fortheir trenchant reactions to earlier written drafts of thepaper.

1Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère (Neuchâtel:Baconnière, 1949), pp. 9–12 (quote, p. 10). See also his laterrevision and expansion of the book, Debussy et le mystèrede l’instant (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1976), pp. 15–19. Re-maining citations in the present article refer to the origi-nal 1949 edition, unless the later edition is explicitly speci-fied. Translations from either edition are mine.

Mystères limpides: Time and Transformationin Debussy’s Des pas sur la neige

STEVEN RINGS

Introduction: Secrets and Mysteries

Vladimir Jankélévitch begins his 1949 mono-graph Debussy et le mystère by drawing a dis-tinction between the secret and the mystery.Secrets, per Jankélévitch, are knowable, butthey are known only to some. For those not “inon the secret,” the barrier to knowledge cantake many forms: a secret might be enclosed ina riddle or a puzzle; it might be hidden by actsof dissembling; or it may be accessible only toprivileged initiates (Jankélévitch cites exclu-

Debussy est mystérieux, mais il est clair.—Vladimir Jankélévitch

sive religious orders). Mysteries, by contrast,are fundamentally unknowable: they are mys-teries for all, and for all time. Death is theultimate mystery, its essence inaccessible tothe living. Jankélévitch proposes other myster-ies as well, some of them idiosyncratic: themysteries of destiny, anguish, pleasure, God,love, space, innocence, and—in various forms—time. (The latter will be of particular interestin this article.) Unlike the exclusionary secret,the mystery, shared and experienced by all ofhumanity, is an agent of “sympathie fraternelleet . . . commune humilité.”1



179

STEVENRINGSDebussy’sDes pas surla neige

Debussy’s music, Jankélévitch famously pro-nounced, is a music of the mystery, not of thesecret. It does not hide its truths behind her-metic codes or arcane formalisms, but insteadlays bare essential mysteries of existence, mak-ing them palpably present to experience: “nomusician has gone as far as Claude-Achille inthe suggestion and transcription of the myste-rious. The inexpressible that Debussy expressesresembles an enigma that, we might say, ismeant to be loved, but not solved.”2

“But not solved. . . . ” The implication isclear: we are not to treat mysteries as secrets.That is, we are not to approach them as puzzlesto be solved, ciphers to be cracked, doors to beunlocked. In short, we are not to analyze mys-tery. Jankélévitch easily could have quotedDebussy himself on the matter: “Grownupstend to forget that as children they were forbid-den to open the insides of their dolls—a crimeof high treason against the cause of mystery.And yet they still insist on poking their aes-thetic noses into things that don’t concernthem! Without their dolls to break open, theystill try to explain things, dismantle them andquite heartlessly kill all their mystery.”3 Thereis much to relish here, most notably the mas-terful twist that allows Debussy to patronizeadults by comparing them to children, whoknow better than to analyze their pleasures.Citations of these (or similar) words from thecomposer have become a familiar ritual inDebussy criticism, offered as an admonition bythose not inclined to analysis, and as an expres-sion of anxiety by those who are.4

With Jankélévitch, the admonition againstanalysis rises to the level of an ethical indict-ment. He condemns the tendency to “seek out

in all problems the secret of technical con-struction,” considering the latent “scientism”of this approach a “philosophical indiscretion,mistaking for a secret the constitutional andnuclear mystery of existence.”5 Jankélévitch’sexclusive religious societies, quintessential cul-tures of the secret, are all too easily comparedto communities of musical analysts trained inhighly specialized approaches—methods acces-sible only to the initiate. (It is hard to imaginethat he did not intend the comparison.) Theanalyst not only does violence to music’s mys-tery, but exhibits something approaching a pa-thology—a “maniac antihedonism,” manifestedin a desire to flee from music’s most potenteffects: “Technical analysis is a means of refus-ing to abandon oneself spontaneously to grace,which is the request the musical Charm ismaking.”6 Analysis, in short, is in league withthe ideology of the secret and is anathema tomystery.

The scholarly literature of course aboundsin analytical and theoretical studies ofDebussy’s music. Jankélévitch’s view, if ac-cepted, would force us to regard all this workas, at best, orthogonal to what is most impor-tant in the composer’s music, or, at worst,deeply damaging to it. Some analysts may beuntroubled by this indictment, finding Jan-kélévitch’s notion of mystery too woolly tosupport rational academic discourse in the firstplace. Others may wish to dismiss Jankélévitchon more philosophical grounds, holding his

2Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère, p. 11.3Debussy on Music, ed. and trans. François Lesure andRichard Langham Smith (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 13.The quote comes from Debussy’s first published essay forLa revue blanche, dated 1 April 1901.4Roy Howat, for example, begins his monumental analyti-cal study of Debussyan form and proportion with this verycitation. See his Debussy in Proportion: A Musical Analy-sis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. ix.Edward Lockspeiser offers a characteristic admonitionagainst analysis in Debussy: His Life and Mind, vol. II(New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 234. Though Lockspeiserdoes not quote Debussy in this particular passage, he doesapprovingly cite Jankélévitch.

5Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère, p. 10.6Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans.Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press,2003), p. 102. Charme is a special term of art forJankélévitch, denoting a sort of unanalyzable poetic grace;Arnold I. Davidson discusses the concept in his introduc-tion to Abbate’s translation (pp. vii–xii). Abbate has ex-tended and elaborated on Jankélévitch’s arguments in hermuch-discussed article “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Criti-cal Inquiry 30 (2004), 505–36, in which she stresses theimportance that Jankélévitch places on the antimeta-physical materiality of music as experienced in perfor-mance. Echoing the passage quoted above, she states that“dissecting the work’s technical features or saying what itrepresents reflects the wish not to be transported by thestate that the performance has engendered in us” (pp. 505–06). These ideas of course have a history: most obviously,the notion that analysis is a form of “dissection,” whichturns a living body into a corpse, is a familiar trope inRomantic criticism.



180

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC

claims of musical ineffability suspect.7 Somereaders, however, may find this division of la-bor more or less satisfactory, falling, as it does,along familiar and well-fortified disciplinarybattle lines. In this view we are left with twononintersecting, irreconcilable discourses onDebussy’s music, one of them immersed in thefascinations of form, the other immersed in thefascinations of meaning (meanings worldly ormysterious, legible or ineffable). This split, fa-miliar and comfortable for some, will never-theless feel intellectually crippling for others.Not only does it divide the scholarly commu-nity into two populations who do not commu-nicate with one another, it also closes off awealth of insight into the ways in which thesounding details of Debussy’s music (variouslyrefracted or constructed through different ana-lytical discourses) might give rise to meanings(variously refracted or constructed through dif-ferent interpretive discourses).

Perhaps the most effective end run aroundJankélévitch’s binary is to demonstrate thatanalysis need not always work in the way hesays it does. Analysis, at its best, need not be ameans of “solving” a piece—of decoding it likea secret—but instead a process of making usmore alive to it as a material, sonic phenom-enon. The endeavor, thus conceived, aims notat knowledge understood in some discursivesense, but at intensified experience, whichyields a different sort of knowledge.8 The viewwas articulated long ago by David Lewin, whosuggested that the “goal [of analysis] is simplyto hear the piece better, both in detail and inthe large. The task of the analyst is ‘merely’ topoint out things in the piece that strike him ascharacteristic and important (where by ‘things’one includes complex relationships), and to ar-

range his presentation in a way that will stimu-late the musical imagination of his audience.. . . Analysis simply says: listen to this . . . nowremember how that sounded . . . hear the rela-tion . . . etc.”9 From this perspective—analysisas an invitation to listen, to experience in-tently—Jankélévitch’s charge of “maniacantihedonism” rings especially false. The chargewill surely come as a surprise to those who findanalysis and all of its attendant activities—listening, playing, singing, reflecting, recom-posing—a means of experiencing music’s physi-cality and immediacy, its presence effects andmeaning effects, as acutely as possible.10 Theexperiences so constructed are of course notextra-discursive; they are constructed by theanalytical act itself. I do not mean to naturalizeanalysis; it is a very special kind of activity,with an admittedly charged ideological and in-stitutional history. The analytical encounterwith music should not be facilely equated withour countless other encounters with music, allrichly interwoven in the fabric of our everydaylives, and all saturated with meaning.11 I sim-ply wish to stress that, rather than reflecting adesire to flee music’s effects, the act of analysisis often undertaken in an effort to intensifythose very effects. If a charge is to be madeagainst analysis so conceived, it would moreproperly be one of hedonism.12

If the mystery that Jankélévitch detects inDebussy is indeed experienced, can analysis—understood as a process of constructing an in-tensified experience—make us more attentive

7See, for example, Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music andPostmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of Califor-nia Press, 1995), pp. 10–19; idem, Musical Meaning: To-ward a Critical History (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2002), pp. 5–6, 145–72; and Susan McClary, Con-ventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berke-ley: University of California Press, 2000), esp. pp. 1–31.8Jankélévitch calls such experiential knowledge drastic, asopposed to gnostic; Abbate’s article “Music—Drastic orGnostic?” has given those terms new currency. One of theclaims of the present article is that music analysis canlead to drastic knowledge.

9David Lewin, “Behind the Beyond: A Response to EdwardT. Cone,” Perspectives of New Music 7 (1969), 63, maintext and n. 5.10On “presence effects” and “meaning effects,” see HansUlrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Mean-ing Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press,2004).11See Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2000). Nicholas Cook dis-cusses the differences between modes of listening informedby musicological discourse and more everyday modes oflistening in Music, Imagination, and Culture (Oxford: Ox-ford University Press, 1992).12That charge has of course been made. It is an implicitsubtext, for example, in much of Gary Tomlinson’s “Mu-sical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: A Response toLawrence Kramer,” Current Musicology 53 (1992), 18–24.See especially his comments on close listening on pp. 21–22.



181


to that mystery, or is it simply the wrong modeof attending for the task? To work our wayinto the question, we should first note thatJankélévitch understands the Debussyan mys-tery as a function not of obscurity, but of clar-ity. To capture the idea, he adopts the para-doxical locution of the mystère limpide, thelucid mystery: “What could be less labyrin-thine than the nude, arid simplicity of the Étudepour le cinq doigts, of Tierces alternées, or ofDoctor Gradus ad Parnassum? Whereas all se-crets require complication and profundity,Debussy is intelligible [patent] because his mys-teries are clear! Debussy is mysterious, but heis clear. The lucid mystery—epitomized bydeath—is this not the mystery par excellence?”13

Jankélévitch’s notion of the lucid mystery ispart and parcel of his broader critical project,which involves, among other things, a Gallicreaction against Teutonic profundity. Themystère limpide is as much a polemical con-struct as it is a positive assessment of Debussy’sstyle.14 I will not delve into these broad ideo-logical issues here, but instead simply adoptJankélévitch’s idea heuristically, as a way toget at the problem of contemplating artworksthat we value as mysterious. For the idea pro-vides an opening, suggesting that clarity neednot diminish a work’s mystery.

Analysis is well suited to clarity. It can fo-cus one’s hearing of a piece or passage, makingavailable a sharpness of perception where pre-

vious experience may only have been vague orinchoate. When we do not want clarity, thismay be a problem; some scholars have indeedsuggested that it is a problem in Debussy analy-sis. Richard Taruskin, for example, states thatanalysis of Debussy’s music runs the risk of“valu[ing] an ounce of light over a pound ofshadow,” a view that “does not accord verywell with the Symbolist scale of values.”15

Taruskin’s statement suggests that the best ap-proach to Debussy’s music might be a sort ofanalytical soft focus—one in which we do notseek to listen to the music too closely. Jankélé-vitch’s comments should give us pause, how-ever. If one of the vehicles of Debussy’s enig-mas is indeed clarity, might not the “light”shed by analysis be used to bring that clarityinto yet sharper relief, making our experiencenot one of less mystery, but of more?

I will test that idea in the following pages.But first, another question demands attention.If a mystery is clear, is it not clear immedi-ately—that is, on first listening, without anydiscursive intervention (analytical or other-wise)? And would this not stop us in our tracksat this point and oblige us to cease talking andsimply listen to Debussy’s music in silence?Jankélévitch, perhaps surprisingly, says no.While music is for him fundamentally a sound-ing surface—a sensuous, material phenom-enon—it is nevertheless a surface that willsour close attention and invites our contempla-tion. Through contemplation, the surface opensonto depths. These are not Teutonic, meta-physical depths, however; they are depths cre-ated by the work’s reticence to disclose itselfall at once: “The impression of depth is sug-gested to us by the very effort that will benecessary to delve into the intentions of thephilosopher, or the musician, or better yet, willbe suggested by the time required to actualizeall that is virtual in the text or the musicalwork; depth, which is a spatial metaphor, is inshort the projection of the time required for

13Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère, p. 11. Jankélévitchcontrasts the mystère limpide with the mystère occulte,which he associates with various mystical movements invogue in intellectual Paris in the 1880s, includingRosicrucianism and Pre-Raphaelitism. He recognizes theinfluence of these movements on Debussy, but suggeststhat the composer’s development traced a path from themystères occultes of early Pre-Raphaelite essays such asLa Damoiselle élue to the genuine mystères limpides ofmature works like Pelléas: “The distance from theDamoiselle to Pelléas . . . traverses the complete distancebetween the mystère occulte and the mystère limpide”(ibid., p. 13). On the early influence of the Pre-Raphaeliteson Debussy, see Richard Langham Smith, “Debussy andthe 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 hisbriefs against both analysis and hermeneutics. See the in-troductory essays by Arnold I. Davidson and CarolynAbbate in Abbate’s translation of Music and the Ineffable,pp. vii–xx.

15Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Mu-sic, vol. 4: The Early Twentieth Century (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2005), p. 92. Taruskin offers the com-ment specifically with reference to an interpretation ofthe large-scale tonal scheme of act IV, sc. 4 of Pelléas.



182

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC

actualization.”16 The “time required for actual-ization” is not the same as the time in whichmusic unfolds. Jankélévitch instead describesit—memorably—as “perpendicular” to musi-cal time:

It takes time for the listener to discover these virtu-alities, and for the spirit to delve into the core of thisimmanence: there is a time for sinking in, and thistime, perpendicular to the time of the performance(if one dares to use such language), is the time thatthe listener spends in delving into the thickness ofthis meaning devoid of meaning. . . . And time isnecessary, moreover, to familiarize oneself with un-familiar beauty, with harmonies that may be aliento our habits of listening. . . . “Deep” music is like arich essential nature in a human being: one cannotappreciate the personality and the resources in thefirst afternoon’s encounter. . . .

The “depth” of the temporal work is, in short,another name with which to designate reticence,the spirit that withholds and does not reveal all itsresources at first . . . [it] unfolds itself little by little,for patient, attentive ears: its depth calls out to ours.17

Jankélévitch’s comments are clearly relevantto our present work, suggesting that we do notbecome fully attentive to Debussy’s clear mys-teries through the simple fact of the musichitting our ears. The mysteries emerge intotheir full clarity only once we have inhabitedthe perpendicular time of musical reflection,carefully directing and redirecting our “patient,attentive ears” to the music’s many sonic pres-ences.

In what follows I want to do just that, bylistening closely to Debussy’s Des pas sur laneige (Préludes, book I, no. 6). The discussionof the piece is detailed; the reader may find itnecessary at times to draw on the patience thatJankélévitch counsels. But it is my hope thatpatience will be rewarded in an intensified ex-perience of certain of the work’s sonic pres-ences, and via them, certain of its mystèreslimpides. Chief among the Prélude’s myster-ies, I suggest, is the mystery of time, as re-

fracted through consciousness, emotion, andmemory.

The discussion begins by exploring thework’s ostinato in depth; a chronological passover the piece follows. The chronological orga-nization is a choice, not a default, meant todevelop and focus a particular experience of thePrélude as it unfolds in time. The matter oftemporal succession is indeed crucial andprompts an excursus in the second half of thearticle on the ways in which we might hear thework as a whole to encode temporality. Thediscussion moves freely between technical ana-lytical language and other styles of descriptiveand interpretive language. The technical dis-course is transformational theory, but its for-malities are worn lightly.18 I have sought toblend the transformational observations intothe overall interpretive narrative in an effort tosuggest that the technical is not a privilegedmode of interpretation, but merely one speciesof discursive mediation (among several) viawhich we can become attentive to the Prélude’spresence effects and meaning effects.19 In draw-ing on analytical and hermeneutic language,

16Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, p. 69. Jankélévitchis not speaking only of Debussy here, but of “deep” (i.e.,reticent) music in general; Jankélévitch’s archetypes forsuch music—in addition to Debussy—include Fauré,Mompou, Ravel, and Falla.17Ibid., pp. 70–71.

18The analysis is far from a “complete” transformationalaccount of the piece (were such a thing even possible); itinstead explores only those details that are central to thehearing I will develop. Arnold Whittall has recently sug-gested that “many of Debussy’s most individual worksmight one day be illuminated from within the parametersof [transformational] theory.” Arnold Whittall, “DebussyNow,” in The Cambridge Companion to Debussy, ed.Simon Trezise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2003), p. 280. The present article, however partial, repre-sents one contribution to such a broader project. My analy-sis takes its inspiration from David Lewin’s magisterialreading of Debussy’s essay “A Transformational Basis forForm and Prolongation in Debussy’s ‘Feux d’artifice’,” inMusical Form and Transformation: 4 Analytic Essays (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 97–159. For anadditional suggestive application of transformational meth-ods to Debussy’s music, one that also engages in questionsof meaning and interpretation, see Rebecca Leydon’s analy-sis of the second movement of the Cello Sonata in herNarrative Strategies and Debussy’s Late Style (Ph.D. diss.,McGill University, 1996), pp. 146–67.19On the value of avoiding a hierarchical relationship be-tween analysis and hermeneutics—one in which all herme-neutic statements are treated as dependent on analyticalstatements for their “validation”—see Lawrence Kramer,“Analysis Worldly and Unworldly,” Musical Quarterly 87(2004), 119–39. Kramer recommends not a reversal of hier-archy, with hermeneutics now taken as primary, but rathera negation of any hierarchical ranking between the ana-lytical and the hermeneutic, in what he calls a “principleof nonpriority” (p. 125).



183


the article deploys discourses anathema toJankélévitch for Jankélévitchian ends. In theconclusion I will evaluate the degree to whichthis paradoxical effort succeeds, returning tothe ideas about secrets and mysteries withwhich I began.

Let us, then, direct our “patient, attentiveears” to Debussy’s Prélude. Example 1a (pp.184–85) is a lightly annotated score of the piece.The annotations are cued to a rotational inter-pretation of the form in ex. 1b (p. 186).20 Thedouble-rotational, binary reading (A–B–A'–B',followed by a coda) agrees with other publishedanalyses of the piece, though it is certainly notthe only formal hearing possible.21 Rather thansurveying the rotational reading at this point, Iwill discuss it as the chronological passprogresses.

Footsteps, Footprints

We hear the ostinato immediately in m. 1. Itpersists, with a few telling interruptions,throughout the piece, serving as a focal point ofattention when it is present and becoming evenmore conspicuous in its momentary absences.The ostinato acts as a sort of perceptual andinterpretive fulcrum: a fixed point around whichall other musical and semantic signifiers re-volve; the interaction between the ostinato andits surroundings provides one of the centralfascinations of the Prélude. The effect is a fa-miliar one from Debussy’s music, in which asingle melodic or motivic element is reiteratedin ever-shifting harmonic and textural contexts.It is a critical commonplace to interpret thiseffect in impressionist terms, with the shifts in

harmony or texture acting like the shifts oflight and atmosphere around a stack of wheat,or Rouen Cathedral.

Debussy enigmatically marks the ostinatoCe rythme doit avoir la valeur sonore d’unfond de paysage triste et glacé (this rhythmshould have the sonic quality of a sad and fro-zen landscape). The pairing triste et glacé sug-gests the inseparability of affect and frozen en-vironment, or rather, their mutual infusion ofeach other. The resulting affective field—align-ing cold, winter, and despair on one side, andtheir excluded opposites (whose absence wefeel pointedly) on the other—is familiar from avast range of European literature. It remains aremarkably durable meteorological trope inFrench Symbolism, from Baudelaire to La-forgue.22 In Debussy’s Prélude this is not merelya poetic idea; it is something we are to hear—itis to be projected sonically in the ostinato’svaleur sonore, specifically in its rhythm. Theway in which the Prélude gives sonic embodi-ment to such an idea is the subject of the dis-cussion to come. Note for now that Debussydraws our attention immediately to theostinato’s temporal dimension, alerting us tothe centrality of time in the Prélude.

What is perhaps most striking about themarking, however, is what it does not say. Itdoes not say anything about footsteps. And yetthe resemblance can hardly be missed if onehas the Prélude’s title in mind.23 If these are

20For an overview of rotational theory, see James Hepokoskiand Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms,Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-CenturySonata (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 611–14.21For similar readings, see Arnold Whittall, “Tonality andthe Whole-Tone Scale in the Music of Debussy,” MusicReview 36 (1975), 262; idem, Musical Composition in theTwentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),pp. 22–27; and Siglind Bruhn, Images and Ideas in ModernFrench Piano Music (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon, 1997),p. 91. The five main subsections of the reading (A–B–A'–B'–coda) follow exactly the divisions of Richard Parks’sanalysis, though he hears these as five variations in a varia-tion form, making no mention of binary patterning. Rich-ard Parks, The Music of Claude Debussy (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1989), p. 225.

22Though no work (poetic or pictorial) is known to haveserved explicitly as inspiration for Debussy’s Prélude, itsfield of potential poetic intertexts is rich, embracingBaudelaire (Chant d’automne, Brumes et pluies), Mallarmé(Le vierge, le vivace, et le bel ajourd’hui), Verlaine(Colloque sentimental), Louÿs (Le Tombeau des naïades),Laforgue (Couchant d’hiver), and—reaching back to in-clude a medieval text well known to Debussy—Charlesduc d’Orléans (Yver vous n’estes qu’un vilain).23As in all of the Préludes, the title comes at the end of themovement, enclosed in parentheses and following an el-lipsis, allowing us perhaps to hold our knowledge of it inabeyance when hearing the piece. But once we are sensi-tized to the footstep-like qualities of the ostinato, the re-semblance is hard to shake. Most commentators have in-deed taken it for granted that the ostinato represents thepas of the title. See, for example, Whittall, Musical Com-position in the Twentieth Century, p. 23; and Bruhn, Im-ages and Ideas, pp. 89–96. In such interpretations,Debussy’s title acts an enabling hermeneutic window ontothe piece, of Lawrence Kramer’s first type: a textual inclu-sion. See his Music as Cultural Practice: 1800–1900 (Ber-keley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 9–10.



184

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC

�

� � 44 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �� 44 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � ��

��

�

�

�

�

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � ��

��

� � � ��

�

� � � � � � � � � � ��

� � � � � ��

� � �

�

� � � � � � � � � � � � ��

� � � � � � � ��

��

�

�

� �

� �

� �� più

Ce rythme doit avoir la valeur sonored’un fond de paysage triste et glacé

( = 44)�Triste et lent

A

expressif et douloureux

m.d.

a2

� ��

b1B

expressif

6

11

24( ) Cédez b2+b2 Retenu

A'

a1

a1'

� ��

��

16

Cédez a Tempo

m.d.

a2'

� � � ��

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � ��

��

� �

�

��

21 expressif et tendreEn animant surtout dans l’expression

m.g.

sempre

m.g.

�)(Retenu

più

Example 1: Debussy, Des pas sur la neige.

a. annotated score.



185

STEVENRINGSDebussy’sDes pas surla neige��

� ��

� �

� � ��

��

��

��

�

� � ��

� � �

� ��

� � � � � � �

�

��

26

31

B'b1'

a Tempo

m.g.

Comme un tendre et triste regret

b2'

��

Plus lent

Coda

Très lent

morendo

(. . . Des pas sur la neige)

�

a. (continued)

Example 1 (continued)

indeed footsteps, we are then in the presence ofnot only a landscape but a subject movingthrough that landscape—a persona making thepas sur la neige.24 Rather than uninhabited im-pressionist images like the Monet examplesabove, one thinks, perhaps, of an isolated figurein a winter scene of Pissarro or Sisley. Pissarro’sSnow at Louveciennes (plate 1) is exemplary.

But Debussy’s performance indication re-mains enigmatic: it is the landscape, we aretold, that the rhythm is to resemble—yet therhythm resembles the actions of a subject. Sub-ject and surroundings are hard to distinguish;they permeate one another, just as the tinyfigure in Pissarro’s painting threatens to disap-pear into the snowy background, to become afeature of the landscape, lost amid the far moreprominent trees. Jankélévitch identifies thisclose identification of persona and environmentas the mystère ambiant, in which “l’âme ‘est

un paysage’ comme le paysage est un étatd’âme” (the soul “is a landscape” just as thelandscape is a state of soul).25

This mystery becomes clearer still with therealization that the pas in the title may betranslated not only as “footsteps” but as “foot-prints.” Footprints are traces of a past subjec-tive presence on (or in) the landscape; the envi-ronment becomes a frozen record of past hu-man presence and action. Footprints also freezea past temporal process in space, engraving iton the ground: a temporal act is given spatialextension. Thus, if we hear the ostinato as some-how iconic of footprints—as frozen, sonic tracesof a past human presence—the temporal un-folding of the Prélude tracks not a process un-folding in time before our ears, a subject trudg-ing in the here and now, but instead the recordof that act—a frozen landscape marked off byrhythmic footprints.26

But we can no more completely accept this

24The concept of a musical persona is of course indebted toEdward T. Cone, The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press, 1974). On hearing music as iconicof human action, see also Fred Maus, “Music as Drama,”Music Theory Spectrum 10 (1988), 56–73.

25Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère, p. 31.26For apposite comments along these lines, see Taruskin,Oxford History, IV, 78.



186

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC

� �

� � � � � �

� � � � � � �

� �

� �

� � � � � � �

measures*

1–4a1

5–7a2

8–11b12

A

= CHR

= WT, DIA

11b23–13

14–15b2 WT+

B

16–19a1 ACOUSTIC (B' �, A�)

20–25a2'

A'

+ CHR lh

26–28b1'3

= CHR

= DIA

28b2'4

B'

–31

Coda 32–36 HARMONIC (B�, C )�* Superscript = beat (e.g., 112 = m. 11, beat 2)

Rotation 1(15 mm.)

Rotation 2(16 mm.)

(incipient 3rd rotation?)

b. formal outline.

Example 1 (continued)

“subject-less” hearing than completely acceptits opposite. The Prélude at once invites us toinfer the presence of an acting and experienc-ing subject and at the same time makes thatsubjective presence tenuous, allowing it to slipaway, or flicker in and out of focus, disappear-ing into the snowy environment. Debussy

heightens this mystery by developing thePrélude’s here-and-now mimetic aspects withexquisite precision, making it difficult to dis-count fully the idea that the music might betracking present-oriented processes, both psy-chic and physical, even as it calls those pro-cesses into question.



187


Plate 1: Camille Pissarro (French, 1830–1903, Snow at Louveciennesca. 1869, oil on panel, 32.3 x 47.5 cm.).

Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Endowment, 1973.673.Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago.

27As noted in Bruhn, Images and Ideas, p. 90.

28An exact pairing between “right–>left”/S and “left–>right”/S–1 (or, for that matter, the reverse) is of course not thepoint. What matters is the deeper structural isomorphism:S and S–1 are formal inverses, each of the other, just as“right–>left” and “left–>right” are somatic inverses, each ofthe other.

Present physicality registers in the finest de-tails of the ostinato. The D–E and E–F dyads areimmediately suggestive of right-foot/left-footalternation.27 They are also, appropriately, “onestep apart” within the diatonic gamut. If Smeans “transpose one diatonic step up” and S–1

(ess-inverse) means “transpose one diatonic stepdown,” then S(D–E) = E–F and S–1(E–F) = D–E.In the interpretive tradition of transformationaltheory, we can construe S and S–1 as thematizedmusical “actions.” These musical actions viv-idly enact the depicted physical action: S, andits formal inverse S–1, enact the walking mo-

tion “right-leg-to-left-leg,” and its somatic in-verse, “left-leg-to-right-leg.”28

A heel-toe motion within each two-note stepis also evident and remarkably precise: the E“toe” of the D–E step shares the same notewith the E “heel” of the E–F step, just as toeand heel of consecutive steps coincide on theground, with weight shifting from one leg tothe other. This relationship is altered when theE–F step returns to D–E across the bar line; D


http://www.jstor.org/action/showImage?doi=10.1525/ncm.2008.32.2.178&iName=master.img-000.jpg&w=455&h=305


188

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC

“heel” now follows F “toe.” One might pro-pose that the pattern can still be interpreted asiconic of a transfer of weight: F and D belongtogether within the tonic D-minor triad—the“transfer of weight” now occurs through themedium of the music’s “grounding” harmony.

Whether one finds that idea plausible orstrained, the fact that the footsteps do notprogress continually stepwise (for example: D–E, E–F, F–G, G–A, and so on) but instead repeatthe same two dyads, is of the essence for thepiece. The numb alternation between D–E andE–F emphasizes the somatic experience of re-peated physical action—right foot, left foot, rightfoot (again), left foot (again), . . . —rather thanprojecting a sense of distance traversed, or offorward progress. The footsteps fall on a snowyground in which each step is indistinguishablefrom the last, and attention turns to repetitivephysical effort. The footsteps make half-noteimpressions in the snow on the D4 ground(note the down-stemmed half notes).29 One can-not resist observing that D is also the piece’sGrundton. Debussy would not like that pun,but he would be very sensitive to the fact thatthe D4 half notes—the snowy footprints—areblanches.

This well-nigh Straussian mimetic specific-ity is dissonant with the popular conception ofDebussy as a “vague impressionist.” But recallin this connection the composer’s famous com-plaint (in a letter to Durand of 1908, one yearbefore the composition of the Prélude) that hewas “trying to write ‘something else’—reali-ties, in a manner of speaking—what imbecilescall ‘impressionism,’ a term employed with theutmost inaccuracy.”30 Leon Botstein glossesDebussy’s comment: “Debussy understood, as

many did not, impressionism’s recasting of re-alism.”31 He continues:

In an overwhelming number of Debussy’s instru-mental compositions and works for piano withouttext there is a reality at the core of the musicalexperience, as the composer himself asserted. . . .Real emotion and feelings in the world . . . were thegoals in Debussy’s musical project until very late inhis career. . . . For Debussy . . . music is an act ofexpression responding to the human being in life,creating consciousness through sound in response tothe external world.32

Botstein’s comments, following on Debussy’sown, are apposite here and invite us to hearcertain aspects of the Prélude as iconic of real-world action (even as other sonic details stead-fastly resist such hearings). But there remaincrucial respects in which the ostinato resistsreal-time iconic interpretation. Most notable isthe tempo: the steps move by at a glacial twenty-two beats per minute. Compare this with thoseother famous musical footsteps in the snow(ex. 2).33 One can easily imagine walking atSchubert’s tempo; in some performances wemight even feel that the tempo is too brisk tomatch the sentiments of the protagonist. It is,nevertheless, a real-world walking tempo;Debussy’s is not. This suggests that the time ofDebussy’s music does not map onto real timein any simple way. There is a significant gulfbetween Schubert’s temporalities and De-bussy’s, a product of the shift in constructionsof time in European culture from the first de-cades of the nineteenth century, the age of Kant

29The care with which this image is presentednotationally—with the D–E, E–F steps falling on half-note,D4 footprints “from above”—is characteristic of Debussy’smeticulous attention to the appearance of the score. SeeDavid Grayson, “Editing Debussy: Issues en blanc et noir,”this journal 13 (1990), 243–44.30François Lesure and Roger Nichols, ed. and trans.,Debussy Letters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1987), p. 188.

31Leon Botstein, “Beyond the Illusions of Realism: Paint-ing and Debussy’s Break with Tradition,” in Debussy andHis World, ed. Jane E. Fulcher (Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 2001), p. 150. Botstein traces Debussy’s link-ing of impressionism and realism to the theories of JulesLaforgue. See also the chapter “Impressionism and Real-ism: Debussy’s Réalités,” in Paul Roberts, Images: ThePiano Music of Claude Debussy (Portland, Or.: AmadeusPress, 1996), pp. 113–23. David Grayson also speaks of arealist impulse in Debussy’s work, particularly as it isused to balance out the Symbolist element in Pelléas. DavidGrayson, “Waiting for Golaud: The Concept of Time inPelléas,” in Debussy Studies, ed. Richard Langham Smith(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 26–50, esp. p. 45.32Botstein, “Beyond the Illusions of Realism,” p. 160.33Interestingly, though surely coincidentally, Schubert’sprotagonist also trudges on a D ground.



189


� � 24 � � � � � �� 24 � � �� 24 ��

��

��

�

� �

Müßig

� � ��

Example 2: Schubert, Gute nacht, mm. 1–6.

34As Debussy’s friend Louis Laloy observed in 1914, dis-cussing the “secret correspondences” between Debussy andBergson, “such a music could not be produced except inthe same environment as such a philosophy, and viceversa.” Quoted in Jann Pasler, “Debussy, Jeux: Playingwith Time and Form,” this journal 6 (1982), 74. Pasler alsonotes that Bergson himself expressed an affinity forDebussy’s music. For a recent discussion of the relevanceof Bergsonian durée to Debussy’s music, see MichaelKlein’s remarkable article “Debussy’s L’Isle joyeuse as Ter-ritorial Assemblage,” this journal 31 (2007), 41–48. As Kleinnotes, Adorno also heard Bergsonian temporality inDebussy’s music. For a broad and accessible treatment ofthe many cultural factors contributing to the shift in tem-poral sensibilities around the turn of the twentieth cen-tury—encompassing not only literature, philosophy, andart, but also technology and other aspects of material cul-ture—see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space:1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,2003, orig. edn. 1983).

35Suzanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (NewYork: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), p. 110. JonathanKramer discusses “vertical time” in The Time of Music(New York: Schirmer, 1988), pp. 54–57. See also Klein’sdiscussion of the “eternal present” in “Debussy’s L’Islejoyeuse,” p. 33, n. 9. To the thinkers cited by Klein, wemight add Maeterlinck, who characterized time as “animmense, eternal, motionless Present.” Maurice Maeter-linck, Thoughts from Maeterlinck, ed. Esther Stella Sutro(New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1903), p. 185,cited in Grayson, “Waiting for Golaud,” p. 32, n. 22.36One might detect a subtly ironic dialogue here withmelody-and-accompaniment textures in nineteenth-centurypiano miniatures: the measure of vamp preceding the entryof the melodic line at once suggests a Mendelssohn songwithout words while at the same time ironically distanc-ing itself from such a model by the austerity of the texture,the glacial tempo, and the semantic freight of the accom-paniment figure. In the same 1901 review cited toward thebeginning of this article, Debussy calls Mendelssohn an“elegant and facile notary” (Debussy on Music, p. 14).

and Goethe, to the first decades of the twenti-eth, the age of Bergson and Proust.34

The slowness of the steps suggests enerva-tion, a motion almost stopping—perhaps evena loss, or a slipping away, of our sense of thephysical. The loss of motion and physical im-pulse is most palpable in the yawning gapsbetween the steps. For it is not simply thatDebussy’s footsteps are “too slow.” The heel-toe rhythm within each step is quite close to anatural walking pace, and all out of proportionwith the frozen expanse between the steps. (Thepianist performing the work is well aware ofthis discrepancy, as she works to realize De-bussy’s rhythmic notation.) The result is a sortof temporal expansion and contraction, in whichdifferent phases of the music suggest differentrates of temporal unfolding. Within each foot-step, there is a clear, purposeful temporal im-pulse, suggesting physical effort, but betweenthe steps the temporal flow slackens, becom-ing indistinct: the tiny rhythmic subdivisionsof the heel-toe rhythm do not help us as listen-

ers to subdivide the entire half-note span frombeat 1 to beat 3 (or beat 3 to beat 1). When theostinato is first heard in m. 1, there is no clearframe of metric reference below the level of thehalf note. The effect of temporal stasis is height-ened by the piano’s sonic decay. If, as SuzanneLanger famously observed, music makes timeaudible, then the lack of musical activity be-tween the steps in m. 1 might seem to slow orstop time—to freeze it into what JonathanKramer has suggestively called “vertical time.”35

Kinetic action thus shades into frozen tempo-rality, physical impulse into stasis.

Section A (mm. 1–7)

After one measure of footstep vamp, a lyricalgesture enters in the right hand in m. 2.36 Thegesture is flowing and irregular, almost impro-visatory, in contrast to the numb repetition ofthe ostinato. If the ostinato immediately in-vites a richly textured mimetic hearing, the



190

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC

melodic line pulls back from such expliciticonicity. This is not to say that it cannot bemade to bear semantic content, but simply toobserve its far greater underdetermination inthis regard when compared with the ostinato.Throughout, the Prélude exhibits a play be-tween gestures that suggest iconicity or seem-ingly literal representation and those that re-sist this kind of literalism. Thus another mys-tery, which we might call the mystery of repre-sentation in the Prélude (and in Debussy’sPréludes in general). Such mystery prizes openvarious “semantic gaps” in the music—as thatbetween the right and left hands in mm. 2–4—within which our interpretive activity is givenconsiderable freedom of motion.

There is a “temporal gap” between the handshere as well. In contrast to the halting time ofthe ostinato—kinetic impulses shading into fro-zen, vertical stasis—the melodic line movessteadily forward, if not purposefully, then atleast with a certain directional focus towardthe cadential A in m. 4. The line further fo-cuses on the metric interstices between thefootsteps, its points of arrival and departurefalling largely on beats 2 and 4, the very beatswhere time and motion earlier seemed to goslack. This suggests the possibility that themusic might at times project of a sort of “tem-poral polyphony,” with two (or more) incom-mensurate species of temporality unfolding si-multaneously (I will address this idea furtherin the “temporal excursus” below).

We should be careful, however, not to over-state any opposition between upper voice andostinato in mm. 2–4. The upper line moves inloose coordination with the footsteps: the ev-ery-two-beats impulse of the ostinato is looselymaintained one beat later in the upper line.Further, the ascending third B�–C–D in the up-per part in m. 2 can be heard to respond to theoverall ascending third D–E–F of the ostinato.Both elapse over roughly the same period oftime, and the melodic C–D, in even eighthnotes, smoothes out the uneven heel-toerhythm in the ostinato.37 The upper part thus

does seem to respond to, or interact with, theostinato, despite their evident differences. Theinterest thus resides not in a crisp opposition,but in how we choose to figure the relation-ship(s) between ostinato and lyrical gesture,and how their interaction engages the seman-tic issues already mobilized.

We can begin by observing Debussy’s perfor-mance indication for the upper voice in m. 2:expressif et douloureux. The marking at oncerecalls and contrasts with the triste et glacé ofthe ostinato, investing those impassive termswith a personal, or subjective, charge. The lyri-cal gesture is thus at once less iconic than thefootsteps and yet seemingly shot through withsubjective consciousness: expressivity entersthe frozen landscape; numb sadness is replacedby douleur. The douleur registers sonically inthe work’s first three-note simultaneity, as themelodic B� in m. 2 sounds against the sustained{D, E}, creating a dissonant [026] stab. The mo-ment was prepared in m. 1: there the footstepsestablished a pattern of alternating dissonanceand consonance, with the dissonant {D, E} dyadin the first half of the measure relieved by theconsonant {D, F} in the second. The melodic B�sounds in the dissonant phase, entering in theexpansive pause between the D–E and E–F stepson beat 2, where our ears will be most sensitiveto it. The harmonic stab seems to set the me-lodic line in motion—the subtle forward trajec-tory of the line arises in part from the way thedissonant B� asks for resolution, which finallyarrives on the cadential A in m. 4, as analyzedin ex. 3.38 The cadential effect of the A is notonly harmonic and dynamic (note the hairpin),it is also metric: the note falls on beat 3, align-ing with the steps and seemingly closing thetemporal gap between the parts. The cadentialA aligns, moreover, with the steps’ consonantsegment and yields the work’s first root-posi-tion triad. The D-minor chord’s consonance

37As noted by Michael Puri in his talk “Caught in theThroes of Memory,” presented at a conference on musicand memory at the University of Virginia in April 2006.

38B �4 and A4 are the only two half notes in the phrase.One might also count the tied G4 in mm. 3–4 as an ersatzhalf note; it converges on the concluding A4 from below,just as the B�4 converges on it from above. Beyond theinformal linear reading of ex. 3, I will present no large-scale linear or quasi-Schenkerian account of the piece.Marion Guck offers a Schenkerian reading in her article“One Path Through Debussy’s ‘ . . . Des pas sur la neige’,”In Theory Only 1 (1975), 4–8.



191


� � � �–1�“B � B � ”

a.

� � �+1�“C �C� ”

b.

� � � � � � � � � �

� � � �–1�“B � B � ”

c.

� � �+1�“C �C� ”

� � � � � � � � � �invertaroundB /C� �

invert around D

invert around D

� � � � � � � � � � � ��B “stab” resolves to A�

[026]beat 2

Dmbeat 3� = black notes� = white notes

2

Example 3: Sketch of Des pas sur la neige, mm. 2–4.

Example 4: Transformational networks involving the four diatonic collections.

gradually settles into the ear as the phrase trailsoff. With the harmonic consonance there isalso a sort of temporal consonance, as the up-per voice is absorbed into the ostinato’s verti-cal stasis.

This kinetic profile encourages us to hearthe douloureux B� as a perturbing element,which sets the upper voice in motion. We mightalso hear it as the agent of the various concep-tual dissonances between the parts, as the wedgeor lever that distances the melodic line concep-tually from the accompaniment; with its reso-lution, the two parts seem to fall into phase.Note that B� is the only black key in the open-ing seven measures; as in so much of Debussy’spiano music, the black-key/white-key topogra-phy of the keyboard plays a central role in thework. It is only with the resolution of the per-turbing black-note B� to the white-note A thatthe first subsection of the piece—labeled a1 inexs. 1a and 1b—finds a point of repose, allow-ing a2 to emerge in m. 5.

As it does, the music undergoes multipleshifts: textural, rhythmic, harmonic. Theseshifts cause a2 to sound in many ways like aresolution of the various tensions and uncer-

tainties in a1. Most notably, the parts now movein perfect alignment, with upper and lower reg-isters in lock step, the ostinato footsteps regu-lating the pulse in the middle of the texture.Further, the music of a2 unfolds a purely white-note diatonic collection: having resolved thestab of the perturbing B� through the melodicwork of mm. 2–4, effectively clearing out thepainful effect of the sole flatted pitch, the mu-sic can now proceed in a placid, flat-free envi-ronment, one in which the temporal and ex-pressive aporiae of section a1 have been erased(or perhaps momentarily forgotten).

The little network of ex. 4a sketches theshift from the one-flat diatonic collection of a1to the no-flat collection of a2, using key signa-tures as shorthand. The same key signaturesmay be found in the first two rows of therightmost column in ex. 1b. In that column—which sketches aspects of the pitch content ofeach section—key signatures indicate thepiece’s purely diatonic passages (the Prélude’snotated signature of course remains one flatthroughout). The transformation that takes theone-flat collection to the no-flat collection inex. 4a is –1�, which subtracts one flat from a



192

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC

diatonic signature.39 The network is arrangedfrom left to right on the page to model thetransformation’s chronology in the piece, as a1proceeds to a2. The “B�–>B�” annotation beneaththe arrow indicates that the effect of the trans-formation is to replace the douloureux blacknote B� with the affectively blank white noteB�.40

Examples 4b and c present similar networks.It will be useful to explore them briefly here,though the relationships are somewhat abstractfor now; we will hear their concrete aural sig-nificance in the piece momentarily. Example4b shows a network similar to that in 4a, butnow involving two flat-heavy signatures: fiveand six flats. A glance at ex. 1b confirms thatthese signatures correspond to the diatonic col-lections presented in the flat-heavy arabesquesheard in sections b2 and b2' (more on thesearabesques below). Like the network in ex. 4a,the left-to-right layout of the network in ex. 4bfollows the chronology of the piece, but at adifferent level, taking the five-flat collection ofb2, in Rotation 1, to the six-flat collection ofb2', heard at the analogous location in Rotation2. The operative transformation is +1�, whichadds one flat to the signature. As the annota-tion “C�–>C�” indicates, the effect of the trans-formation is to replace C� with C�.

The complementary nature of networks inexs. 4a and 4b is evident: –1�, which links therelatively flat-free signatures in 4a, is replacedin ex. 4b by its inverse, +1�, which links therelatively flat-heavy signatures. The networksproceed toward the work’s two diatonic ex-tremes: no flats in 4a and six flats in 4b. Moststrikingly, the two transformations have the

effect of yielding the same pitch class, B�/C�,shown by the annotations beneath the arrows.B�/C� is a pivotal pitch class in the piece. Fornow we can observe that the polar-extremecollections, no flats and six flats, invert intoeach other around B�/C�;41 this is one of theways in which B�/C� is “pivotal.” The relation-ship is shown by the vertical arrow in ex. 4c,which combines the networks of exs. 4a and 4binto one larger network. The two polar-extremecollections connected by the vertical arrow arein fact directly juxtaposed in section a2', whichfunctions as the Prélude’s crux (see therightmost column of ex. 1b, in the row for a2').As we will see, inversion-about-B�/C� plays acritical role at this crux-moment, shunting usdownward along the vertical arrow in ex. 4c,from the blank, white-note collection to theaccidental-saturated six-flat collection.

Example 4c adds two additional looped ar-rows, showing that the no-flat and six-flat col-lections both invert into themselves aroundD.42 We already know how prominent D is inthe piece, as the ground on which the footstepsfall, and as the work’s Grundton. Inversion-about-D thus stabilizes the right-hand side ofthe network, orienting the no-flat and six-flatcollections with respect to the work’s frozen“ground.” We can therefore conceptualize theseas the work’s two polar tonic collections, de-spite the notated key signature. (There are othergood reasons—less formal ones—to hear theseas the work’s tonic collections, as we will see.)In this view, the two remaining diatonic col-lections (one- and five-flats) become collectionsmanqués: defective or incipient versions of thetwo tonic collections. In ex. 4c, the unstablecollections manqués on the left-hand side of

39This is an example of what Julian Hook calls a “signa-ture transformation.” I will treat the concept very infor-mally here. See Julian Hook, “Signature Transformations,”in Music Theory and Mathematics: Chords, Collections,and Transformations, ed. Jack Douthett, Martha Hyde,and Charles Smith (Rochester: University of RochesterPress, 2008), pp. 137–60. The present discussion also haspoints of contact with Dmitri Tymoczko’s “Scale Net-works and Debussy,” Journal of Music Theory 48 (2004),219–94.40The interaction between B� and B� here, as well as thatbetween the one-flat and a no-flat collection, recalls simi-lar issues at the outset of Debussy’s Canopes, discussed byDavid Lewin in “Some Instances of Parallel Voice-Leadingin Debussy,” this journal 11 (1987), 59–72.

41That is, if we take the white-note diatonic collection(the C-major scale) and invert it around B�/C�, the resultwill be the six-flat diatonic collection (the G �-major scale),and vice versa. The same effect is achieved if we invertaround F, a tritone away from B�/C�. F and B�/C� are alsothe only two pitch classes that the no-flat and six-flatdiatonic collections share.42Any major scale inverts into itself around 2̂. C majorthus inverts into itself around D; G� major inverts intoitself around A�. Pitch-class-inversion-around-A� is the sameas pitch-class-inversion-around-D. Inversion-about-D-or-A�is a quintessentially pianistic inversion: the pattern of whiteand black keys reflects symmetrically around D and A�.



193

STEVENRINGSDebussy’sDes pas surla neige� � � � � �

� � � � ��

� � ��

! � ��

" "

a. b. c.

pc inversionaround D

exact pitchinversion

around D4

5

Example 5: D-minor chord that ends a1 inverts into G-major chord that begins a2 (mm. 4–5).

the network gravitate toward the tonic collec-tions on the right, which are stabilized by in-version-about-D.

We hear inversion-about-D as we cross thethreshold from a1 to a2, and enter our firsttonic collection. Example 5 shows the inver-sion, as the cadential D-minor chord that endsa1 in m. 4 flips around D to become the G-major chord that begins a2 in m. 5. The inver-sion has a striking aural effect, resulting fromthe change in register, the shift from minorchord to major chord, the richly resonant newvoicing, and the new position of the footsteps,which had been below the harmony and arenow above it. The inversion is realized almostperfectly in pitch space. Example 5c shows whatthe exact pitch-space inversion would be, witha close-position D-minor triad flipping aroundthe D above middle C to a close-position G-major triad. The notes that do not behave inthis way in the music (ex. 5b) are the G in thebass, which sounds one octave too low, and theextra D, on the middle line of the bass clef. Thelow G and the added D give the G-major chordconsiderably more tonal heft than the D minorand a stronger root quality. G major also ac-crues metric weight by its placement on thedownbeat. These factors combine to give thechord a potential tonic charge, as though thepreceding cadential D minor has served in ret-rospect as a sort of modal dominant, and theentire a1 section as a four-measure anacrusis tothe structural downbeat of m. 5. This interactswell with ideas already proposed regarding a2’sresolution of the textural and conceptual apo-riae in a1, as well as the white-note collection’sresolution of the one-flat collection manqué.All of this aurally underwrites the sense of thewhite-note set as one of the work’s two tonic

collections.43 The music is able to settle in tothis tonic region by being leeched of the im-pulse that drove the melodic line in a1; thatleeching is enacted by the –1� transformation ofex. 4a, which removes the perturbing B�. Inplace of B�’s expressif et douloureux impulse,there is now blank, white-note numbness.

But the music here at least begins to move,or so it seems. The progressive potential of Sand S–1, heard thus far only in the go-nowherealternation of the footsteps, is now unleashedin progressive stepwise motion in the outerregisters: a chain of Ss in the treble and a chainof S–1s in the bass. This suggests that the mo-tion-stasis pendulum has swung decisively infavor of motion. Or has it? Examples 6 and 7provide analytical perspectives on a2 that en-courage us to keep the dichotomy at least some-what alive. Examples 6a and 7a present theprogressive, stepwise hearings just described,which unleash S and S–1. But, as ex. 6b shows,there is another, much more static way to hearthe descending chords in the bass: they palin-dromically invert into each other in pitch-classspace. The center of inversion is once again D,our grounding pitch class. This hearing mightseem like a stretch, but it interacts compel-lingly with the passage’s modal ambiguity, ana-lyzed in 6c. The progression may be heard ineither D Dorian or G Mixolydian; the latterhearing is abetted by the various factors dis-cussed above that lend the G chord of m. 5 atonic heft. The two hearings create a sort ofinversional balance of harmonic progressions;

43This is in contrast to Dmitri Tymoczko’s claim that theone-flat collection is the tonic collection for the entirepiece. See Tymoczko, “Scale Networks,” p. 288, n. 61.



194

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC � ��

��

a. as descending diatonic steps. b. as inversionally balanced.

� ��

S–1 S–1 S–1

S–3 Both arrows: pc inversion around D

IV iD :DOR

I vG :MIX

5

c. as a harmonic progression in D Dorian or G Mixolydian.

S n diatonic steps down–n:

Example 6: Analytical perspectives on the bass chords in mm. 5–6.

44Inversion-about-D maps the two tonic-candidate harmo-nies onto one another, just as it mapped a1’s cadential Dminor onto a2’s initiating G major, as modeled in ex. 5.The “flipping around D” in that example makes it sugges-tive to think of D minor and G major here as dual tonicsof a sort, both of them anchored by the D ground. Thedualism is not properly Riemannian, however, as it is theminor triad that radiates upward off of the grounding D,and the major triad that radiates downward. David Lewinhas nevertheless provided a theoretical model that accountsfor the possibility of such minor Oberklänge and majorUnterklänge. See David Lewin, “A Formal Theory of Gen-eralized Tonal Functions,” Journal of Music Theory 26(1982), 23–60. I am grateful to Brian Hyer for encouragingme to think about the dualistic aspects of the passage.45This descending harmonic progression from G to D sug-gests that the operative division of the D octave in thepiece is a plagal one (at G) rather than an authentic one (atA). This impression is confirmed not only by the Prélude’scareful avoidance of any A-centered music, but also by itsconcluding plagal cadence, which reiterates the G–D plagalmotion through four descending octaves in mm. 33–36.

the first and last chords of the passage bothseek to lay claim to tonic status.44 This attenu-ation of obvious harmonic directionality—doesthe progression lead to or away from its tonic?—both helps us to hear a certain inversional logicto the passage and problematizes our earlierimpression that the music moves forward herein any simple sense.45

The inversional hearing of ex. 6b becomesmore persuasive still when we notice the thor-oughgoing influence of inversion-about-D inthe inversional wedge created by the sopranoand bass, as analyzed in ex. 7b. The inversionbetween the outer voices is realized exactly in

pitch space. When we combine this inversionalwedge with ex. 6b, the result is a sort ofinversional loom that organizes both the hori-zontal and vertical dimensions of the passage.The loom binds the two dimensions togetherand creates a curiously static picture of thisotherwise progressive music. Most strikingly,even though the reiterated D4 half notes of a1are now gone, the continuing influence of D-as-ground is strongly felt, as D is the fixedpoint around which all of this inversional ac-tivity occurs. The footsteps, beginning alwayson D4, appropriately sound in the pitch spacedirectly between the two inversionally wedg-ing registers of mm. 5–6. If the pianist choosesto play the upper-staff notes with the left hand,the inversional structuring is physically pal-pable, with the inverting left hand leaping overthe anchoring right-hand footsteps.

But this balanced texture does not last long.The bass descent stops at D2 on beat 3 of m. 6;the melodic D5 that enters on beat 4 is theinversional partner of that D2. The inversionallywedging pattern is thus maintained until bothouter voices reach the grounding pitch-class D.But at this point the upper voice proceeds onestep further, to E5, reattaining the melodic apexfirst gained in m. 3. Notably, this gesture pro-duces the most vivid echo yet of the footstepsin the upper line: the D5–E5 in the right handbeginning on beat 4 of m. 6 echoes the initialD4–E4 footstep, with the heel-toe snap onceagain smoothed rhythmically into eighths. This



195

STEVENRINGSDebussy’sDes pas surla neige� � � � � ��

� ��

�

S–1

S–3

��

S–1S–1

S S S

S3

S: One diatonic step up (Sn: n diatonic steps up)

S n diatonic steps down–n:

5

a. as descending and ascending diatonic steps.

b. as an inversional wedge.

� � � � � ��

��

� � ��

Every arrow: pc inversion about D

5

Example 7: Analytical perspectives on soprano and bass in a2 (mm. 5–7).

event seems to stun the footsteps themselvesinto silence in m. 7—for the first time in thepiece, the ostinato does not sound. The mo-ment is dense with interpretive possibility. Onemight detect a dissolution of the ostinato’siconic identity; the footstep character has gradu-ally permeated the entire texture in mm. 5 and6, with the initial D–E footstep finally appear-ing explicitly in the upper voice, the voice thathad differed so pointedly from it in the openingphrase (a1).46 This disperses not only theostinato’s iconic force but also its steady mo-toric drive, which had previously kept the piecemoving. The music thus comes to a halt, asthough unsure how to proceed.47

From one interpretive perspective, one mightimagine the loss of contact here with the per-sona, as the strongest iconic marker of its pres-ence disappears—the subject flickers into in-visibility. Or perhaps one simply loses sight ofthe persona’s trace—the footprints followed—and confronts instead only the unblemishedwhite of the frozen landscape. Alternatively,one might choose to hear the ostinato’s pauseas itself highly iconic of present experience,suggesting a pause in the persona’s progress, orperhaps the persona’s momentary loss of con-sciousness of the footsteps, which neverthelessproceed (one thinks of Schubert’s Gretchen los-ing awareness of her spinning wheel). This lat-ter reading interacts with the notion of semioticdispersal, suggesting a dissolution of consciousfocus on the present (represented by the trudg-ing steps), perhaps caused by a plunge back intothought, or maybe memory.

A retrospective character is evident in thecadential fall of m. 7, which works over certain

46The initial footstep’s {D, E} pitch-class dyad is also fro-zen harmonically in the outer voices of the sonority thatspans the bar line between mm. 6 and 7 (the melody’ssustained E5 and the bass’s sustained D2).47Note how this cadential moment in m. 7—which con-cludes subsection a2—differs from the cadence in m. 4,which had concluded a1. The earlier cadence was achievedthrough a sort of coalescence, a coming-into-focus of theupper part and the ostinato; the latter results from dissolu-tion, a drifting-out-of-focus of the momentarily integratedtexture, as the rhythm breaks down and the sustainedchord falls apart into the descending melodic line. Thissensitizes us to the great variety of cadential effects in

Debussy, and the ways such varied effects can be heard toenact sharply differing affective or cognitive states (clo-sure vs. opening up, resolution vs. unraveling, etc.).



196

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC � � � ��

�� Every arrow: pc inversion about D

expressif

8compositional issues from the previous mea-sures. One of the more abstract issues is theinversional structuring around D, which perva-sively patterns the cadential gesture (see theright-hand side of ex. 7b). Less abstractly, thedescent from E5 explicitly recalls, via rhythmand contour, the descent from the same note inm. 3. This similarity draws our attention toanother lack in m. 7: the absent B�, last heardin the parallel descending gesture in m. 3. Thecadential fall in m. 7 carefully avoids any noteB (B� or B�), skipping instead from C to A, whichsuggests an awareness of the sensitive natureof diatonic note-class B in the piece: it is so farthe only diatonic note to have appeared in twochromatic forms (B� and B�). The two variantshave further embodied affective polar extremes:douloureux B� and expressively blank B�. Theavoidance of both in the cadential fall of m. 7creates a conspicuous absence.

Section B (mm. 8–15)

B� is the only pitch class that did not find itsinversional-partner-about-D within the A sec-tion. That inversional partner is F�/G�. Thisunderscores the sense of B� as a perturbing ele-ment in the section, which creates an imbal-ance in the inversional field around the ground-ing D.48 That imbalance is resolved in the whole-tone chord that begins section B in m. 8, inwhich B� reappears (along with the expressifmarking). As ex. 8 shows, B� is now paired withits inversional partner, F�, which sounds promi-nently in the bass. The entire chord in factexhibits inversional structuring about D, as thearrows in the example show. The logic of in-version-about-D is thus transferred from theblank, white-note realm of a2 to the accidental

Example 8: Inversional structuring ofwhole-tone chord, m. 8, beat 1.

48The reader can activate the relevant aural impression inthis way. At the piano, with the pedal down, first play aD4/D5 octave. Then, using a note-against-note, first-spe-cies texture, play a converging contrary-motion wedge us-ing white notes only: D4/D5–E4/C5–F4/B4–G4/A4. Thefirst-species verticalities are exactly those white-note pairsthat map onto each other under inversion-about-D. Thenplay those pairs in various registers, keeping the pedaldown and allowing them to settle into the ear. While thiswhite-note inversional field rings, play a B�4. The notewill stick out painfully, seeking its inversional partnerabout D, which is F�/G�.

rich music of b1. The aural character of themusic changes dramatically: warm seventhchords and whole-tone sonorities replace theearlier austere triads; the melodic genus, previ-ously diatonic, now becomes largely chromatic.The footsteps have also changed position: firstheard at the bottom of the texture in a1, thenmigrating to the middle in a2, they are now atthe top, with all other material sounding be-low. The low register creates a sense of diggingdeep, of dredging something up, something per-haps connected with the douloureux B�, whichhas now been recovered and worked into theinversional scheme.

Example 9 clarifies the textural situation,showing how b1 divides into three strata. Stra-tum (a) is the footsteps, at the top of the tex-ture. Stratum (b) is the alto and tenor, in oscil-lating chromatic semitones. Stratum c is thepassage’s largely chromatic bass line, whichpresents three closely related gestures endingon C�/D�. The alto in mm. 8–10 of stratum (b)worries over the B�–B� motion implicit in theshift in collections over the bar line betweenmm. 4 and 5, modeled transformationally inex. 4a. In its first two quarter notes in m. 11,the alto reverses course to project the motionC�–B�/C�. This motion is associated with thecollectional progression sketched in ex. 4b, fromthe five-flat collection to the six-flat collec-tion, as yet unheard in the Prélude. The altopulls the tenor along with it in these motions,sometimes in parallel, sometimes in contrarymotion, but always by semitone, moving withina chromatic genus.

The bass line in stratum (c) introduces thefirst hint of harmonic functionality to the mu-sic. (We have already heard, in ex. 6c, how themodal ambiguity of mm. 5–6 attenuates theharmonic functionality in those measures.) Thebass line in mm. 8–10 circles around G�/A�before leaping to C�/D�, creating a strong sense



197


� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � ��

� ��

###

###

$

%�

a.

b.

c.

&

expressif

10 118–9

Example 9: The three strata of b1 (mm. 8–11).

� � ��

��

'

V7 IG :�Example 10: Emergence of V7/G� in mm. 8–11.

49Interestingly, the “circling around G�/A�” in beats 1–3 ofmm. 8–10 participates in the inversion-about-D story. Thethree-quarter-note gesture in mm. 8–9 (F�–G–G�) seriallyinverts into that in m. 10 (B�–A–A�) around D. This isobvious when we recognize that the other axis of inver-sion for inversion-about-D is A�/G�, the goal tone of bothof these mini-chromatic Züge.50Brian Hyer, “Tonality,” in The Cambridge History ofWestern Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 731.

of the latter as a functional root of a dominantharmony.49 The sense of harmonic bass func-tion invests the upper voices with tonal en-ergy, as participants in a purposeful tonal har-mony, V7/G�, which emerges in the second halfof mm. 8–10 and the first half of m. 11. Thistransforms B�/C� and F into tendency tones—or, more aptly in the present context, notessensibles. Example 10 illustrates, presentingthe two notes sensibles as flagged half notes. B�and F had previously inverted blankly into oneanother within our frozen, white-note music ofa2. Now they are invested with harmonic pur-pose; the effect is like the return of feeling to anumb limb. Or perhaps like the recovery of amomentarily lost self-awareness; as Brian Hyerhas observed, to call a pitch a note sensible “isto ascribe sentience to it.”50

The beamed half notes in the bass of ex. 10project the strongly functional A�–D� bass line,which seems to announce an imminent G�tonic. Unflagged open note heads at the left-hand side of the example indicate the whole-tone pentachord with which the passage be-gins. I have respelled some of the notes in theexample so that the dominant chord is moreclearly recognizable as V7/G�; the chord is in

fact spelled “correctly” in m. 10 of the music.The anticipated G� tonic is included in paren-theses at the right side of the example. Twoarrows depart from the notes sensibles, C� andF, showing their strong tendency to call forth (àla Fétis) B� and G�, respectively.

The respelling of B� as C� is worth pausingover. I have so far developed a narrative inwhich white notes are figured as either repre-sentative of the frozen landscape, or of a cer-tain mental forgetfulness or numbness (one thatis obviously closely entwined with, and mani-fested in, the landscape, as per Jankélévitch’smystère ambiant). The black note B� has beenfigured as a painful intrusion on that landscape.B� indeed acts as a note sensible in m. 2, part ofthe sole tritone dyad of the one-flat diatoniccollection. It exhibits the directionality of thiskind of note, pulling toward resolution on A.Furthermore, it is a sentient note; Debussy’sperformance indication in m. 2 suggests asmuch, investing the B� with a subjective inten-sity and conscious presence notably absent fromthe marking for the ostinato in m. 1. B� in a2was a quintessential white note in this story, anote insensible, mechanically participating inthe inversional formalities of exs. 6b and 7b. Italso came on the scene in m. 5 as the antidote



198

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC

to the painful B�. But to respell B� as C�, theseventh of a dominant harmony on D�, is toinvest the note with subjective charge, turningthe insentient white-note B� into the ersatzblack-note C�, a note sensible.

As already observed in connection with ex.10, the notes sensibles call forth a G� tonic.Does it arrive? In the event, yes and no. TheV7/G� of mm. 8–112 does in fact yield a G�chord on beat 3 of m. 11, but the chord is insecond inversion, and the soprano F4, ratherthan resolving to G�, persists, resulting in amajor-seventh chord.51 Further, the G� tonicityof the music that follows (mm. 12–13) is throwninto doubt by the perturbing presence of C� .52

This is our five-flat (not six-flat!) music, whichpointedly avoids C�. Recall that we already dis-cussed this collection, in connection with ex.4, as a collection manqué, a deficient or incipi-ent version of the flat-loaded tonic collection.The five-flat collection gravitates toward thesix-flat collection via +1�, which replaces C�with C�.

The notes sensibles thus do not fully achievethe goal of bringing forth G�. What is achieved,however, is a music quite unlike anything heardthus far: an arabesque. Up to m. 11, the musichas been halting, held back by a plodding insis-tence on the meter, especially beats 1 and 3,anchored by the footsteps. Now, in mm. 12–13,the footsteps disappear for the second time andmelodic activity is smoothly flowing, freelydrifting across bar lines and creating in the lefthand a melodic arabesque that unfolds in agently undulating three-beat pattern:

The music bears the hallmarks of the De-bussyan arabesque: curvilinear melody, fluidrhythm and freedom from the bar line, har-

monic stasis, repetition, triplet ornaments.53

These characteristics project a highly differentsense of time than the footsteps music—a float-ing time, unanchored to the effortful physical-ity of the ostinato. The arabesque’s attendantimagery of sinuously twisting vines and ver-dant growth is also suggestive of a departurefrom the frozen present. The return of ara-besque-like music in Rotation 2 will providean opportunity for us to explore the signifi-cance of this music in greater depth.

For now, the departure from the frozenpresent is brief: the footstep rhythm returnsabruptly in m. 14. The rhythm is now throwninto the bass, outlining a very unstepliketritone. The unexpectedness of the interrup-tion is enhanced by its early metric placement:it follows the only non-44 measure in the piece,the 24 of m. 13. The effect is of a sudden, unex-pected return to present physicality. In fact,when heard iconically, it is remarkably sugges-tive of a stumble—a stumble that jars one backto consciousness of one’s physical surround-ings, and out of reverie. The whole-tone musicof m. 14 might even be heard as an awkwardeffort to regain balance. However we choose tohear it, the interruption of m. 14 makes clearthat something has failed, something connectedwith the interrupted arabesque of the previousmeasures. This failure brings about the pro-nounced caesura and Retenu in m. 15 and marksthe end of the first rotation.

Section A' (mm. 16–25)

The ostinato returns in m. 16 and creates asense of rebeginning. The D4 half notes (fig-ured above as footprints, blanches) also return.This underwrites a correspondence with theopening measures, signaling the onset of a sec-ond rotation. The idea of rotational form isespecially apt in the present interpretation, asit suggests a process of repeated action, of re-

51The tenor-register F3 does resolve correctly, however, asdoes the alto C� (though spelled once again as B�). This isshown clearly in ex. 9, stratum (b), m. 11.52It is unclear what modal center one might want to hearin the music of b2. If one clings to G� as tonic/final, themusic might be heard as projecting G� Lydian. On theother hand, one may hear a prolongation of V7 of D� inmm. 12–13, suggesting D� Ionian. The G�/D� ambiguityreenacts, one semitone lower, the G/D ambiguity of a2,discussed in connection with ex. 6c.

� � � � � � �# #

53These characteristics of the arabesque are discussed inGurminder Bhogal’s valuable article “Debussy’s Arabesqueand Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé,” Twentieth-Century Music2 (2006), 171–99. Bhogal also provides citations of the manyother discussions of the Debussyan arabesque in the sec-ondary literature. Debussy’s own well-known publishedcomments on the arabesque may be found in Debussy onMusic, pp. 27 and 84.



199


tracing the same ground in an attempt toachieve some goal, albeit one that remains un-clear. The second rotation thus begins a pro-cess of “trying again,” of starting over in anattempt to succeed where the first rotationfailed.54

There are notable changes in the second ro-tation, however. The first three measures of a1,mm. 16–18, return not to the diatonic purityopening, but to an acoustic-collection variantof it, adding an A� to the previous one-flat col-lection. A� was the melodic highpoint of thestumble in m. 14. The music thus seems shakenup still, with whole-tone and A� residues inevidence throughout the first measures of thesecond rotation. The A� is present not only inthe right hand, but also in the left hand’s re-peated G–A�–B�, which sounds beneath theostinato, perhaps suggesting a new (or residual)layer of cognitive activity.55 This new layerdisappears in m. 19, however, as the melodiccadence on A4 once again clears out the psy-chic tension. The familiarity of the turn to thea2 music in m. 20 (as a2') is strangely wel-come—a return to the balance and clarity ofmm. 5–7, however numb and mechanical.

Then—the work’s crux. The music of mm.20–211 tracks exactly that of mm. 5–61. But onbeat 2 of m. 21 the melodic pattern breaks: B�4,instead of progressing up diatonically to C5 viaS, is enharmonically respelled as C�5. (Debussymarks the disruption by breaking the continu-ous slur of mm. 5–7 into two slurs in mm. 20–22; the seam falls between B� and C�.) Thereader will recall the earlier interpretation ofthe B�/C� enharmony as thematic for the piece.Specifically, I stated that “to respell B� as C� . . .is to invest the note with subjective charge,

turning the insentient white note B� into theersatz black note C�, a note sensible.” Debussynow makes the respelling explicit, investingthe blank B� with C� sentience. The sentient C�triggers a seismic shift in the left-hand har-mony: instead of progressing down diatonicallyto a D-minor chord via S–1, the music lurchesto D �7 at m. 213. The melodic interval in thebass line is an awkward step indeed: an aug-mented second from E to D�. Though the lurchfrom the expected D-minor triad to the surpris-ing D � 7 is most naturally heard as a semitonaldisplacement, it may also be interpreted toproject the operative inversion around B�/C�that maps the no-flat collection into the six-flat collection: in ex. 11, the D-minor triad,when inverted around B�/C�, yields a D�-majortriad, the root harmony of the D� 7 chord. Wemight also understand the earlier respelling ofthe melodic B� as C�—indicated by an arrowabove the staff in ex. 11—as forecasting thisinversion, inverting the melodic B� itself intoC�. Thus understood, it is the inversion thatinvests the numb B� with the sentience of C�,just as that inversion takes the numb white-note collection to the subjectively saturatedsix-flat collection. The seismic shift thus shuntsdownward along the vertical arrow in ex. 4c, asnoted before, moving us between the work’stwo D-balanced polar collections.

The D � 7 chord of course recalls the sameharmony (in various enharmonic spellings)heard in mm. 8–11. There the harmony calledforth a manqué version of G� major in mm.113–13 (including C� and avoiding C�). Begin-ning at the crux-moment of m. 213, by con-trast, a genuine six-flat collection emerges in

� � � � � ��

��

��

��

��

etc.

expressif et tendre

Both arrows:inversion about B ��/C

20

Example 11: No-flat collection invertsinto six-flat collection at crux (m. 213).

54As Warren Darcy notes, in some rotational works “thesuccessive rotations become a sort of generative matrixwithin which [a] telos is engendered, processed, nurtured,and brought to full presence.” Warren Darcy, “‘Die Zeitist da’: Rotational Form and Hexatonic Magic in Act 2, Sc.1 of Parsifal,” in A Companion to Wagner’s Parsifal, ed.William Kinderman and Katherine R. Syer (Rochester, N.Y.:Camden House, 2005), p. 216. Darcy and Hepokoski callthis process “teleological genesis.” The notion of telos isperhaps too strong for Debussy’s Prélude, but the idea thatthe two rotations act to achieve, or bring to fulfillment, asingle, highly desired event, is apposite, as we will see.55The G–A�–B� ascending third echoes the ascending D–E–F third of the footsteps, just as the melodic ascendingthird B�–C–D had in m. 2.



200

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC

the right hand, extending through m. 25, withthe note sensible C� now remaining through-out the new arabesque melody. Again, the as-sociations of the arabesque with vegetal (notwinter) imagery are apt; the D �7 chord, for itspart, sounds lush and rich, in stark contrast tothe icy triads of the previous measure-and-a-half. The left-hand harmonies surge upward bysemitone, as though swelling with psychic en-ergy at the music’s final achievement of thesix-flat tune.56

But there is a problem: the footsteps arestuck. From the crux of m. 213 through the endof m. 24, the footsteps repeat E–F, rather thanalternating, as before, with D–E. In fact, stepstructuring via S and S–1 is disrupted in variousways around the crux-moment: the melody vio-lates the expectation of diatonic ascent by S inm. 23 by enharmonically repeating B�4 as C�5;the harmony violates the expectation of dia-tonic descent by S–1 in the same measure bylurching from E minor to D � 7; and the foot-steps, rather than alternating between S andS–1, as before, now get stuck on the reiteratedE–F, projecting no S/S–1 alternation at all. Thestepwise alternation of the footstep motive waslast distorted in the stumble of m. 14, where itwas bent into a repeated tritone. That momentwas read above as a somatic interruption, asthe stumble impinged upon (and ended) thefragmentary arabesque. At the crux, there isthe reverse, as a now fully realized G� ara-besque impinges on and distorts the walkingmusic.

I have already explored in detail the ways inwhich the D–E, E–F footsteps may be heard asiconic of an alternating right-left (or left-right)walking motion. By maintaining that under-standing, the repeated E–F step creates the im-probability of a single footstep repeated seventimes.57 What are we to make of this repeated

footstep? We could simply discard the originalnotion of alternating steps manifested in theD–E, E–F ostinato, and treat the mimesis moreflexibly. I suggest, however, that it will be pro-ductive to take the problem seriously and con-sider the repeated E–F as genuinely iconic of arepetition of a single footstep. I suggest furtherthat we can interpret it as one footstep—a singlephysical action—heard seven times. One canimagine the effect like the scratch of a record,as the needle skips back to repeat the same stepover and over. We can thus hear the seven-folditeration as an “unfolded” presentation of asingle, highly charged moment.

Above this repeated step, however, we havea tune that unfurls continuously over five mea-sures. If we are to interpret the footsteps asindeed reiterating the same moment—the samestep—we would seem here to have a genuineinstance of “temporal polyphony”: two tempo-ralities unfolding simultaneously. Earlier I sug-gested this possibility in connection with sub-section a1; the idea is far more vivid here. Inorder to theorize the issue more fully, I willnow momentarily step out of the chronologicalnarrative in order to think carefully about theways in which we might hear the Prélude toencode time.

A Temporal Excursus

The following discussion draws on some famil-iar concepts from narratology and Russian for-malism to help us think about time inDebussy’s Prélude.58 Using them, I will pro-pose six modes of temporal interpretation wemight adopt when hearing, playing, or imagin-ing the Prélude, considering possible relation-

56The melodic apex and temporal center point of this cli-mactic passage—the A �5 of m. 234—coincides exactly withthe piece’s golden section (GS). On the pervasiveness ofGS proportioning in Debussy’s music, see Howat, Debussyin Proportion. The melodic apex reattains the highest pitchin the Prélude thus far: the A�5 from the stumble of m. 14.57There is a delectable irony here for the performer: it isonly at this moment that the pianist is obliged to alter-nate hands in realizing the footstep ostinato, as indicatedby Debussy’s m.g. indications in mm. 22 and 23.

58The following discussion engages issues of musical nar-rative. The focus and scope of this article prohibit mefrom surveying the vast literature on the subject of narra-tive in music (pro and con). For a thorough recent surveyand defense of theories of musical narrative—one that ad-dresses objections to the concept by Jean-Jacques Nattiezand Carolyn Abbate—see Byron Almén, “Narrative Arche-types: A Critique, Theory, and Method of Narrative Analy-sis,” Journal of Music Theory 47 (2003), 1–39. For anotherrecent defense, see Michael Klein, “Chopin’s Fourth Balladeas Musical Narrative,” Music Theory Spectrum 26 (2004),23–55. One issue that I sidestep here, which Klein ad-dresses with admirable clarity, is the problem of the mi-mesis/diegesis distinction in musical narrative.



201


ships between the time the Prélude takes andthe time(s) it evokes.59

A temporally congruent hearing. In this inter-pretation, the events or processes depicted inthe piece occur in order and occupy the sameduration as the piece itself. Thus, if a perfor-mance of the Prélude lasts five minutes, thePrélude depicts or enacts a process that itselflasts exactly five minutes in the imaginaryworld evoked by the piece.60 The events de-picted in m. 36 occur exactly five minutes afterthose in m. 1, and all events in between flow ata coordinated and even regular rate; the clocktime of the piece and the imaginary temporal-ity are exactly aligned.

To draw on a well-worn distinction fromRussian formalism, this hearing maps story anddiscourse (or Viktor Shklovsky’s fabula andsyuzhet) exactly onto one another. The story isthe series of events depicted in the narrative;the discourse is the way in which those eventsare told in the words of the narrative itself. Thechronology of the discourse need not followthe chronology of the story, nor do their dura-tions as they unfold in time need to be of thesame length (indeed, they rarely are). A simpleexample: when one reads the sentence “Thestorming of the Bastille lasted approximatelyfour hours, from beginning to end,” the processof reading takes considerably less time than ittook the events themselves to unfold. (Andthis is a mild example. Consider the sentence“Centuries passed.”) Further, if I say “Thestorming of the Bastille lasted approximatelyfour hours, from beginning to end, on the after-noon of July 14; prior to that, the Estates Gen-eral had convened in Versailles on May 5,” thediscourse not only condenses temporality, butalso reverses chronology. The temporally con-

gruent hearing rejects such compressions andreversals, however, detecting an exact chrono-logical and durational isomorphism betweenstory and discourse in the Prélude.

A chronologically ordered but variably pacedhearing. In this hearing, the events depicted inm. 36 do indeed occur after the events depictedin m. 1, but they do not necessarily occur ex-actly five minutes later in the imaginary worldof the piece. More generally, in this interpreta-tion the events of m. n+1 occur after the eventsof m. n, but not necessarily at the temporalinterval of one measure (or the clock-timeequivalent) in the imaginary world. The chro-nology of the musical discourse thus followsthe chronology of the story, but at variablerates (in a temporally stretchable or compress-ible way). I drew on such ideas of stretchable orcompressible time in the discussion of the foot-steps. This is also an eminently familiar ideafrom the world of number opera, in whichrecitatives and various action scenes unfold inloose correspondence to “real time” (that is,they are temporally congruent), whereas ariastypically slow time drastically, by expanding asingle moment of reflection.

An anachronous hearing. I adapt the term fromGérard Genette, who defines anachrony as anyviolation in the order of story events as theyare told in the narrative.61 In this hearing, theevents depicted in m. n+1 of the Prélude neednot necessarily occur after those depicted in m.n in the imaginary world. Musical depictionsof memory represent a complex, and perhapsproblematic, instance of anachrony. If a musi-cal “memory episode” reenacts a past event,the events rehearsed in the episode do indeed“happen before” those preceding and followingthe memory episode in the musical flow. Onthe other hand, the memories are brought intothe present and rehearsed there. That mentalrecovery and rehearsal may indeed occur inchronological sequence with surroundingevents.

59I paraphrase here from Michael Klein, “L’Isle joyeuse asTerritorial Assemblage,” p. 33, n. 9, who traces thinkingalong these lines to Thomas Clifton and Jonathan Kramer.Klein also presents a sensitive discussion of the play oftime (specifically narrative time and lyric time) in Chopinin “Chopin’s Fourth Ballade as Musical Narrative,” draw-ing on the ideas of Raymond Monelle.60The notion here of an artwork’s “imaginary world” takesits inspiration from Kendall Walton’s theories of fiction,especially as presented in Mimesis as Make-Believe: Onthe Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

61Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay inMethod, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1980), pp. 35–36 and passim.



202

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC

Less problematic instances of musicalanachrony are easily adduced in the operaticliterature; in the prelude to La traviata, wetrack through the events of the opera in essen-tially reverse order, hearing the music ofVioletta’s act III illness first. Britten’s Billy Buddbegins with Vere in the present, reflecting onthe mysteries of human nature, before movingbackward in time to recount the events thatled to that reflection. Closer to the presentsubject, David Grayson has explored possibleinstances of anachrony in Debussy’s Pelléas.62

A temporally polyphonic hearing. This hearingrecognizes the possibility that the music mightpresent incommensurate temporalities unfold-ing at the same time: different contrapuntalstrata of the music, for example, might enactevents in the imagined world that unfold atdifferent rates. This hearing, though radical, isan instance of what cultural historian StephenKern has called the phenomenon of temporal“simultaneity”: the simultaneous presentationof multiple, and perhaps conflicting, tempo-ralities in an artwork. Kern detects the phe-nomenon in many artistic works and move-ments from around the time of Debussy’sPrélude, extending from visual art (Picasso’sanalytical cubism) to literature (Joyce’sUlysses).63 The possibility of a temporally poly-phonic hearing is central to the present hearingof Debussy’s Prélude, as the previous discus-sion has demonstrated, and as I will explorefurther.

An instantaneous hearing. This hearing, radi-cal in a different way, suggests that the Préludedepicts no passage of time at all. In hearing theostinato as iconic not of footsteps but foot-prints, we might be led to this mode of tempo-ral understanding and treat the Prélude as asnapshot of a frozen expanse, which we maysurvey, but which itself does not evolve in time.Alternatively, one could understand the musicas presenting a snapshot of an instant of lived

experience, one in which the vertical density ofa psychological moment is sliced up and un-folded horizontally, given temporal extensionwithin the music. One might imagine this asanalogous to a linear spreading out of the trans-parencies from an anatomy text: the variouslayers of some complex, dense, multifacetedbody are presented and contemplated one at atime, rather than simultaneously.64

A temporally indeterminate hearing. The pro-ponent of this hearing recognizes that the pieceunfolds in time, but argues that it is inappro-priate to try to be too specific about just howthe music’s temporality relates to the time ofsome depicted world and its events. One mightargue that this is a Prélude, after all, not a pieceof program music, and there need be no deter-minate relationship between the time of thepiece and any other depicted or imagined time.In the extreme version of this view, there needbe nothing depicted at all—the piece is a workof absolute music referring to nothing but it-self. The Prélude’s temporalities are thus purelymusical and have no relationship to any otherworldly or imaginative temporalities.

Different readers will find some of thesemodes of experiencing time in the Prélude morecongenial (or plausible) than others. A singlelistener might further choose to adopt differentperspectives on different occasions when play-ing, hearing, or imagining the piece. Several ofthese perspectives have already been evident(to varying degrees) in the discussion to thispoint. To draw some of these disparate tempo-ral threads together, and to demonstrate theinterpretive efficacy of some of the modes ofconceiving musical time just surveyed, I willnow present one particular way we can orga-nize our temporal experience of the music thusfar, via a narrative account of events up to andincluding the crux-moment.

62Grayson, “Waiting for Golaud.”63Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918, pp.67–81.

64The notion of the instant is an idée fixe in Jankélévitch’swritings on Debussy. The idea appears in the 1949 mono-graph and is extended and developed in the 1976 revisionDebussy et le mystère de l’instant. Jankélévitch explicitlydiscusses Des pas sur la neige in terms of the poetics ofthe instant on pp. 293–95 of the revised text.



203


A Proustian Hearingof Events Thus Far

We can hear the densely packed crux-momentof mm. 21ff. as enacting a Proustian momentbienheureux—a “felicitous moment” in whicha memory resurfaces.65 The G � memory, onlypartially and inaccurately reanimated in sec-tion b2, now rushes back in all of its fullness.The process follows the stages of the Proustiannarrator’s famous episode with the madeleine,in which partial but failed attempts to retrievea memory—which had initially arrived unbid-den with the taste of the cookie and the tea—are followed by a complete reemergence of thememory, which, despite the intervening effort,also arrives somewhat by surprise, as thoughunwilled.66 The interpretation of the crux as aProustian moment bienheureux allows us tomake sense of both the temporal polyphony ofthe passage and the instantaneity of the E–Ffootsteps. For the Proustian narrator’s memoryfinally comes flooding back in all its fullness inan instant. He remembers not a momentaryimpression, but a whole string of activities fromhis youth (Sunday mornings with his aunt, timespent in the town square, running errandsthrough the streets, etc.). The memories are ofevents with temporal extension, but they ar-rive in a moment of no temporal extension.Debussy’s music enacts this temporal di-chotomy, as the remembered arabesque unfoldswithin the expanded instant of the E–F step.

Tracing the earlier stages of this process, wecan hear the B� stab in m. 2 as the initial,unexpected upsurge of the memory. The foot-steps serve as a sort of somatic trigger for thispsychic upsurge (just as the madeleine servesas a trigger for Proust’s protagonist). Thememory set in motion is only inchoate, how-ever, and drifts away (resolution to A in m. 4).

The numbness that follows in a2 comes as some-thing of a relief; but the absence of the memoryis noted in the pause of m. 7, which also repre-sents a dissolution of focus on the physicalactivity of the present. Then, in mm. 8ff., theB� is brought back deliberately, in an attemptto recover the memory’s source with greaterclarity. The effort is only minimally success-ful, however, yielding an arabesque fragment.67

This initial arabesque is marred, however, bythe Lydian C� and is further broken off prema-turely by the somatic interruption of m. 14.With the rebeginning of Rotation 2 the personaretraces the initial steps that led to the firstmemorial upsurge, just as Proust’s protagonistdeliberately seeks to re-create the conditions ofthe first taste of the madeleine. This effort ulti-mately succeeds: at the crux-moment thememory emerges in all of its fullness.

These ideas interact suggestively with thetransformational actions sketched in ex. 4. The–1� transformation of ex. 4a models the slip-ping out of consciousness of the initial B�, pull-ing the music back into white-note forgetful-ness/numbness. The +1� of ex. 4b models thework that must be done to recover the G�memory more fully after the failed attempt ofsection b2, turning the five-flat collectionmanqué into the six-flat tonic collection byreplacing the Lydian C� with the sentient C�.The sentient C� returns exactly at the onset ofthe crux, with the respelling of B� as C� in theright hand in m. 21, triggering the “seismicshift” that yields up the full memory. We caninterpret this respelling as modeled by the ver-tical arrow in ex. 4c, inversion about B�/C�,which takes us from the forgetful white-notemusic to the complete recollection of the six-flat music, as flat-note sentience floods intothe previously blank, white-note diatonic space.

65My interpretation of a musical moment bienheureux hereis indebted to Michael Puri’s discussion of Proust in hisdissertation, Theorizing Memory in Maurice Ravel’s“Daphnis et Chloé” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2004).On the Proustian moment bienherueux in general, seeRoger Shattuck, Proust’s Way (New York: Norton, 2000).66Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1, Swann’sWay, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrief and Terence Kilmartin,rev. D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 2003), pp.60–64.

67The retrospective nature of the arabesque is not only“internal” to the piece, but is also historical and stylistic:the arabesques in the Prélude—especially that in sectionb2' (mm. 284–31)—closely resemble the texture and har-monic palette of Debussy’s own Deux arabesques of 1890,as well as the lyrical, flowing styles of Massenet andDelibes. Debussy himself associated the arabesque withearly music—Palestrina, Victoria, Bach—though there islittle in the Prélude to suggest those composers. Moresuggestive is the fauxbourdon accompaniment that even-tually surfaces in section b2', extending the musical retro-spection back even further.



204

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC

This hearing adopts a perspective on theevents of Rotation 1 that largely corresponds toa chronologically ordered but variably pacedhearing. To the extent that we treat the memoryepisodes as rehearsing events that “happen be-fore” those of the present-tense action of thePrélude, the hearing also engages aspects ofanachronous hearing (though we should takeinto account the caveats already mentionedabout memory episodes in this respect). Thevariable pacing of the hearing is especially at-tractive here and suggests fluctuating experi-ences of time and duration as the personatrudges along, drifting in and out of awarenessof the physical present, and in and out ofmemory. We need not specify, for example, thelength of clock time that elapses during thefailed memory episode in section b2. Indeed, itseems suggestive to leave this question open,in order to engage the experience of being “lostin thought,” only to emerge later (as here, sud-denly, at m. 14) without being aware how muchclock time has passed. The complex temporal-ity of the ostinato can be understood in thishearing as a product of the persona’s affect (tristeet glacé), which distorts the perception ofpresent time and action: melancholy and numb-ness here slow or perhaps blur the awareness ofthe footsteps in time.68 These ideas are relevantas well to the hearing of section a2 as criss-crossed by a static inversional loom.

Proustian ideas further interact suggestivelywith Debussy’s performance indication in m.1, and with Jankélévitch’s mystère ambiantmore generally. Proust’s narrator experiencescertain objects and elements of the environ-ment as, in some sense, porous to conscious-ness: they seem almost to absorb conscious-ness and then reemit it as they take on per-sonal significance. This quality is most vivid inthe narrator’s accounts of various objects and

places from his childhood summers in Combray:the steeple on the church, the varnished stairsin the house, the hawthorns along Swann’sway.69 Debussy’s performance indication en-courages us to conceive of the Prélude simi-larly—the snow and the footsteps in it are po-rous to the persona’s tristesse, both absorbingand reemitting it. That idea is given its mostvivid sonic embodiment in the ostinato, in waysexplored above.

I introduced this story as one particular wayto organize our temporal experience of thePrélude. As Fred Maus notes, we should recog-nize the provisional, heuristic, and incompletenature of any story that we tell about a piece ofmusic; the music will always exceed, and insome ways elude, any single story.70 All thesenarratives will contain omissions or indetermi-nacies, which analysis and interpretation neednot fill or resolve definitively. They are alsoselective, highlighting some aspects of the mu-sic and neglecting others. (For example, theProustian story, with its focus on a presentpersona, does not engage fully with the ways inwhich the ostinato might be heard as iconic ofa trace left by a now-absent subject, an ideaproposed toward the beginning of the article.)Further, Maus observes that no single storyneeds to be “felt as obligatory” for all listeners,or for the same listener on different occasions.71

This does not mean, of course, that all narra-tives will be equally compelling. The Proustiannarrative, as a heuristic framework, is quitecompelling for our purposes, especially in theways it focuses our attention on the temporalmystères of the crux-moment, encouraging us

68In this sense, the tempo of the footsteps—not onlyDebussy’s marking—gives us crucial insight into the psy-chological state of the persona. In Peircean terms, theostinato acts as a sign on two levels, in a manner dis-cussed by Raymond Monelle: it is iconic of footsteps, butthose footsteps—in their slowness, their distorted tempo-rality—are then indexical of the persona’s psychic state.See Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music: Semiotic Es-says (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 19.

69Proust, Swann’s Way, pp. 85–91 (steeple), 36 (stairs), 193–97 (hawthorns).70Maus, “Music as Drama.” See also Maus, “Music as Nar-rative,” Indiana Theory Review 12 (1991), 1–34. LawrenceKramer discusses similar issues regarding the play betweenhermeneutic “contingency” and musical “autonomy”—the excess of musical presence that remains after anyhermeneutic act—in Musical Meaning, pp. 1–28, 145–72,and passim.71Maus, “Music as Drama,” p. 68. For stories about thePrélude that differ considerably from the Proustian one Itell here, see Bruhn, Images and Ideas, pp. 89–96; andWhittall, Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century,pp. 22–27.



205

STEVENRINGSDebussy’sDes pas surla neige � � � � � ��

�� S–1

hS: half step uphS–1

: diatonic step down

: half step down

a2'[ ] b1'[ ]

S–1 S–1hS hS hS

hS–1 hS–1

S–1 (S–1)

20 23 27

72Though biographical “evidence” is not necessary to un-derscore the suggestiveness of a given narrative, it is worthnoting that Debussy and Proust knew one another, thoughthey were not close. Lockspeiser presents a humorous ac-count of one of their meetings in Debussy: His Life andMind, vol. I, p. 135.

the musical flow by a rising and then fallingsurge of half-step motion (hS and hS–1), iconicof the psychic surge and ebb caused by thememory. The arrival of the D-minor chord inm. 272 can thus be heard to signal the persona’sfull return to consciousness of present surround-ings, as the effects of the moment bienheureuxfinally drift away entirely. Appropriately, theD minor in m. 27 returns us to the piece’sGrundharmonie.

Section b2', in mm. 284–31, then comes as asurprise, or perhaps a culmination: it presentsthe complete arabesque alone, unobscured byfootsteps and surging harmonies and filled outwith diatonic fauxbourdon accompaniment (in-tensifying the sense of stylistic/historical ret-rospection; see n. 67). The connection withmemory is now made explicit in Debussy’sperformance indication: Comme un tendre ettriste regret. The moment may be interpretedas a memory of the crux-moment itself, as themusic revisits (and fleshes out harmonically)the arabesque first heard in the right hand. Adifferent understanding may be more persua-sive, however: we need not necessarily under-stand b2' as occupying some precise momentwithin the temporal flow of the persona’s expe-rience—itself a memory of an “earlier event.”Instead, the music can be heard to present herethe remembered arabesque alone and unob-structed. It is as though the music says: “Thisis what was remembered.” Interpreted in thisway, the music of b2' does not “happen after”that of a2' in any simple sense. Rather, it occu-pies no specific location along the temporalchain of the persona’s experience. It is instead anarrative element, one that allows us as listen-ers a direct experience of the memory itself,just as Proust’s narrator goes on to tell us ingreat detail about his childhood in Combrayafter the madeleine episode (“This is what wasremembered”).

to seek out their consequences in the musicthat follows, to which I now turn.72

Section B' and Coda (mm. 26–36)

The arabesque-memory dies away in the me-lodic cadence of m. 25. The effect of the epi-sode, however, lingers into b1' (mm. 26–283).The chromatic impulse of the harmony in themoment bienheureux overflows into section b1',as the chromatically upsurging seventh chordsof mm. 23–24 are answered by the chromati-cally sinking minor triads of mm. 26–272. Theeffect is of psychic energy cresting and ebbingaway. Strikingly, the chromatic descent in b1'is broken at the very moment that the diatonicdescent in a2' was broken: after the third chordof the sequence. Instead of the expected E-mi-nor triad (or some enharmonic variant thereof)at m. 273, there is a D-minor triad. Even morestrikingly, this is exactly the triad expected atthe crux-moment in a2', at m. 213, when weheard the D �7 that initiated the memory epi-sode. The voicing and register of the D-minorchord make the connection explicit.

As shown in ex. 12, we can hear the chro-matic progressions of mm. 213–272 as an ex-tended parenthesis that interrupts the expectedarrival of the D-minor harmony. Harmoniesproceed chromatically within the parentheses,and diatonically outside of them. The paren-theses enclose the moment bienheureux andits aftereffects. The example draws a vivid pic-ture: the steady stepwise progress of the de-scending chords (via S–1), iconic of a physicalprocess in the frozen present, is interrupted in

Example 12: Parenthetical chromatic progression interrupts diatonic descent (mm. 20–27).



206

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC

Though we achieve the six-flat tonic collec-tion here, the notes sensibles C� and F are lefthanging and unresolved: G�-as-tonic-harmonynever emerges.73 C�6 in m. 304, the highestpitch in the piece thus far, does not call forthb�5, but instead arpeggiates downward throughan unresolved D �7 arpeggio, via three iterationsof the arabesque’s characteristic sighing figure.74

Ascending left-hand chords move in contrarymotion to this descent, reaching over the cb5

highpoint to d�6 in m. 314, which sits atop astrangely unsatisfying D�63 chord. The lack ofresolution gives the memory itself an unful-filled, retrospective quality, as though directedtoward a remembered but still unattained G�.This idea suggests a seeming regress of recol-lection within recollection, the ultimate objectof which continues to recede out of reach intothe past. Only the memory’s affective shell,tender and regretful, is evident.75

The striking disjunction between the unsat-isfying D� triad and the following coda—Puriaptly calls it a “harmonic non sequitur”76—closes off the possibility of G� resolution andfurther detaches the memory from the snowypresent. In a piece in which the music so often

flows across formal boundaries, the disjunctionis especially jarring: the D�6/D�5 octave at theend of m. 31 shifts enigmatically and withoutmotivation up to the D6/D5 octave that beginsthe coda. The footsteps return, now in octavesat this higher register. Their rebeginning sug-gests the onset of a potential third rotation, butthat incipient rotation quickly dissolves. If thesteps as originally heard seemed immediatelyunderfoot in the temporal here and now, theynow sound distant, as though the persona isslipping once again from our interpretive reach.The widely spread concluding D-minor har-mony entirely avoids the corporeal middle reg-ister of the piano, where all earlier somaticactivity took place, further reinforcing the senseof the persona’s physical disappearance.

But we still hear the ostinato, however dis-tant. Is it possible that it is now the footstepsthat are remembered? The high, octave-doubledostinato can easily be heard as a recollection ofthe ostinato of the piece’s opening, whichseemed to unfold in the present tense (even asit triggered the past). This redoubling of memo-rial activity—a further regress of the piece intothe past—represents a final, anachronous foldin the temporal fabric. This anachronous com-plexity combines with the earlier break in nar-rative continuity (the out-of-time presentationof the memory episode in b2') to create a thor-oughly disintegrating effect at the Prélude’sclose, calling into question the very psychiccontinuity of the persona, whose identity seemsto melt away (or die, morendo) with the musicitself.

Conclusion:Secrets and Mysteries (Again)

In the introduction I asked whether analysismust by definition be allied with Jankélévitch’ssecret, or whether, by contrast, it might notprovide a mode of attending whereby we be-come more alive to a work’s mystères. I framedthe issue in terms of the kind of musical en-gagement analysis can provide, leading not to adecoding but to an intensified experience ofmusic’s materiality, its physical sound, whichmight bring a clear mystery into yet sharperrelief. The reader may wonder, however,whether the discussion above is still beholden

73We might thus choose to hear a D� Mixolydian modalityhere, rather than G� Ionian. As before in section b2 (seen.52), the D�-or-G� ambiguity reenacts, a semitone lower,the D-or-G ambiguity of mm. 5–7. The “semitone lower”idea relates directly to the semitonal shift in m. 213 fromthe expected D minor to the actual D�7 that begins thememory episode. D-or-G thus represents an ambiguity inthe frozen present, while D�-or-G� represents a parallelambiguity in the remembered past.74The same descending arpeggio acted as a cadential ges-ture in the first appearance of the arabesque, in mm. 23–24, but there it sounded a third lower, beginning on A�5rather than C�6. Puri hears the sighing figure as a sublima-tion of the footsteps’ “snap rhythm” (“Caught in the Throesof Memory”).75This idea, of a continuous regress of memory, is notparticularly Proustian, though it seems apt for the Prélude.What is Proustian is the regret attached to the memory. InTime Regained, the narrator reflects that the very work ofreanimating memory itself leads to suffering and regret, asone bores through the “thickness of time” to uncover pastexperiences with greater clarity and focus. It is thus notthe memories themselves that are painful; rather, the painand regret arise from the effortful act of recollection itself.See Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 6, Time Regained,trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrief and Terence Kilmartin, esp.pp. 262–66, 297–304, and 505–07. I am grateful to MichaelKlein for drawing my attention to this connection.76Puri, “Caught in the Throes of Memory.”



207


to the ideology of the secret. I have, after all,drawn attention to many details in the piecethat one would not likely notice without theintervention of hermeneutic and analytical ef-fort. I have even gone so far as to construct aProustian narrative around the Prélude. Arethese not the very kinds of secrets—revealedby the guild practices of a music theorist, noless—that Jankélévitch would warn us against?

Perhaps. But some reflection may lead us towonder whether Jankélévitch’s distinction be-tween the secret and the mystery is really soclear-cut when we are in the act of aestheticcontemplation. Recall the sonic details high-lighted by the analysis, the special temporalquality of the ostinato, the harmonic stab of m.2, the sonic effect of the various shifts in dia-tonic collection, and so on: were these detailsreally hidden before, like secrets? Or were theyalways there, waiting to be heard—perhaps evenclear—in the music’s sounding surface? If ananalytical or interpretive statement makes usmore attentive to a sonic detail of one kind oranother, have we necessarily succumbed to theideology of the secret? To be sure, some of therelationships pointed out above are less soni-cally immediate than others, but no observa-tion is so esoteric that it cannot be experiencedwith a small amount of aural focusing (likely atthe piano). One exercise along these lines isdiscussed in n. 48; it sensitizes us to an auraleffect that is itself highly limpide in its struc-ture, even though we may become fully atten-tive to it only by inhabiting the “perpendiculartime” of musical reflection and re-creation.

Discursive intervention need not always bean act of ferreting out what is hidden or eso-teric, but can instead be an act of directingattention with great focus to a material phe-nomenon, seeking to develop an experience ofthe phenomenon that is as richly tangible aspossible. To keep us focused on the materialityof artworks, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht urges usto engage in deictic talk about them—talk thatfocuses attention on details in the physical ar-tifact (talk that “points to”), and that does notlapse into metaphysical interpretation.77 It is

hard to imagine a more deictic perspective thanLewin’s view of musical analysis: “Analysissimply says: Listen to this . . . now rememberhow that sounded . . . hear the relation . . . etc.”Analysis of course does more than just point—it also constructs experience, asking us not onlyto listen, but to listen in a particular way, away shaped by the theoretical discourse. Nev-ertheless, analysis, at its most effective, can bea powerful way of drawing our attention closelyto the sonic material of music, and focusingour aural attention on its presence effects indeictic fashion. This is surely one of the rea-sons many musicians and scholars continue tofind the analytical act deeply satisfying.

It is possible to draw a distinction, how-ever, between analytical observations and her-meneutic observations in this regard—between,say, the various sonic effects just discussed andthe Proustian narrative. For, while Gumbrechtmay or may not agree with my assertion aboveregarding the deictic character of music analy-sis, it is clear that he is at pains to draw a brightline between the deictic and the hermeneutic,suggesting that reflection on a work’s meaningblunts our sensitivity to it as a physical phe-nomenon: “If we attribute a meaning to a thingthat is present, that is, if we form an idea ofwhat this thing may be in relation to us, weseem to attenuate, inevitably, the impact thatthis thing can have on our bodies and oursenses.”78

But is this always true? Do Foucault’s virtuosicobservations about spectators, mirrors, and rep-resentations in Las Meninas distance us fromthe myriad physical details of Velázquez’s paint-ing? Do Cone’s ruminations on Schubert’s healthreally make us less attentive to the sonic effectof that E� in the sixth Moment musical, the notethat he made famous?79 Isn’t the opposite in facttrue: that both of these interpretations—andmany others—draw us into the physical details

77Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, pp. 91–132. Deixisis closely related to two other ideas that Gumbrecht pre-sents: “epiphany” and “presentification.” As these con-

cepts overlap somewhat, I use deixis here as a synecdochefor the entire complex.78Ibid., p. xiv.79Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeologyof the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970), pp. 3–16; Edward T. Cone, “Schubert’s Promissory Note: AnExercise in Musical Hermeneutics,” this journal 5 (1982),233–41.



208

19TH

CENTURYMUSIC

of the work in the process of interpreting them,making us more alive to their material pres-ences? Such interpretive writing, when effec-tive, is capable of “bringing us to our senses” inthe most literal meaning of that phrase, as Jo-seph Dubiel has noted in a related context.80 Thebright line that Gumbrecht draws between thedeictic and the hermeneutic thus strikes me asdubious—the sensitive hermeneutic observa-tion, like the sensitive analytical observation,can have a strongly deictic character.

The reader can evaluate the degree to whichthe Proustian narrative above succeeds in thisregard. To the extent that it seems a distractionfrom the work’s sounding surface—an overlyelaborate story that gets in the way of one’spresent experience—it fails as a deictic gesture(though it may still have other interpretive val-ues). On the other hand, to the extent that itmakes one more attentive to the complex waysin which Debussy’s Prélude unfolds in timeand evokes a network of other times in theprocess, it has succeeded deictically, makingsome of the Prélude’s temporal mystères morepalpably present to experience.

The most prudent position thus would seemto be to avoid any blanket statement on thenecessary relationship between talk about mu-sic and musical experience. The former mayenhance as well as inhibit the latter, in waysthat are often unpredictable and vary case bycase. In any event, we must avoid the mistakenassumption that talk about music necessarilydisplaces musical experience: that to say some-thing is always to retreat from the physical tothe metaphysical. Gnostic intervention anddrastic experience need not be antithetical, theformer blocking access to the latter, or worse,representing a desire to flee it, as Jankélévitchand Abbate suggest.81 For talk can often lead us

back to the physical with renewed focus, gnosticintervention feeding into heightened drasticawareness. Experience intensified through con-templation is no less intense for that. The dras-tic moment need not come upon us all at oncethrough a sort of discursive asceticism; it issomething that we can cultivate and preparefor, focusing our attention, and listening closely.By listening in this way to Debussy, we mighthear, along with Jankélévitch, mysteriesthat deepen as they grow clearer.

Abstract.Vladimir Jankélévitch heard Debussy’s music as asonic manifestation of certain nuclear mysteries ofexistence: mysteries of death, destiny, anguish, plea-sure, love, space, and—in various forms—time. Todescribe these mysteries, he developed the paradoxi-cal locution of the mystère limpide, the “lucid mys-tery.” Debussy’s mysteries are lucid, Jankélévitchargued, in that they are not hidden behind arcanecodes or hermetic formalisms, but are instead palpa-bly present to experience, sensually manifest in themusic’s sounding surface. As such, they prove resis-tant to hermeneutic and analytical attention, which,per Jankélévitch, seek always to penetrate beyondsounding surfaces in search of hidden meanings.

This article takes Jankélévitch’s ideas as a pointof departure in both a positive and negative sense,adopting his notion of the mystère limpide as avaluable heuristic in Debussy study, but challenginghis highly limited views of analysis and hermeneu-tics. The article takes as its focus Debussy’s PréludeDes pas sur la neige and explores the ways in whichit can be heard to manifest mystères of time, repre-sentation, and consciousness. It does this, however,with the aid of analysis and hermeneutics, drawingon transformational theory, familiar concepts fromnarratology, and Proustian notions of memory. Inshort, the article deploys discourses anathema toJankélévitch for decidedly Jankélévitchian ends. Theconclusion explores the degrees to which such aparadoxical effort succeeds, ultimately arguing thatdiscursive intervention—technical or otherwise—need not be a means of seeking out hidden mean-ings, but can instead be a means of drawing us closerto music as a physical, material phenomenon.Key words: Claude Debussy, Vladimir Jankélévitch,time, memory, Marcel Proust, transformationaltheory.

l

80Joseph Dubiel, “Analysis, Description, and What ReallyHappens,” Music Theory Online 6.3 (2000).81For additional reactions to the gnostic/drastic oppositionas presented by Abbate, not necessarily similar to mine,see Lawrence Kramer, “Music, Metaphor and Metaphys-ics,” Musical Times 145 (2004), 5–18; Karol Berger, “Musi-cology According to Don Giovanni, or Should We GetDrastic?” Journal of Musicology 22 (2005), 490–501;Michael Puri, review of Programming the Absolute byBerthold Hoeckner, Journal of the American Musicologi-

cal Society 59 (2006), 488–501; and Ian Quinn, “MinimalChallenges: Process Music and the Uses of Formalist Analy-sis,” Contemporary Music Review 25 (2006), 283–94.



Documents

Debussy-Des Pas Sur La Neige