Rewriting Modernism: Bergson, Debussy, and Early Twentieth-Century Psychologie
The idea that the philosophy of Henri Bergson, trenchantly represented by the notion of durée, shares some essential substance with the music of Claude Debussy has long captured the imaginations of music commentators. Indeed, in 1914 Debussy’s close friend Louis Laloy claimed that “there are secret links that unite them, and one could say that such a music could not have been produced except in the proximity of such a philosophy, and vice versa” (Comoedia [19 February 1914]).
Such comparisons between Debussy and Bergson were, however, seemingly nonexistent before 1909 (when Bergson’s philosophy was experiencing a meteoric rise in popularity). In this paper I argue that the Bergsonian frame for Debussy’s music invoked by Laloy in 1914 was a departure from Laloy’s own earlier views of this music and, more broadly, from the critical priorities of debussysme that had emerged and crystallized in the decade following the 1902 premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande. Laloy’s extensive writings about Debussy from this decade suggest a very different set of intellectual reference points and influences, some of which—including Helmholtzian sensory physiology and the emerging “scientific” discipline of psychology as advocated in France by the philosopher-turned-psychologist Théodule Ribot—were explicit targets of Bergson’s critique. Laloy’s justifications for Debussy’s music in this period, then, were part of a broader conversation in early twentieth-century French musical culture that understood Debussy’s music in relation to newly materialist ideas about sound and its action on the individual, and historically particularized, human person—ideas which contravened Bergson’s account of the heterogeneous flux of durée. In this context, Laloy’s turn to Bergson’s philosophy in 1914, far from epitomizing or distilling the ideas of debussysme, retrospectively reimagined Debussy’s aesthetic to accommodate it to new ideals and critical priorities on the eve of the First World War.
The idea that the philosophy of Henri Bergson, trenchantly represented by the notion of durée, shares some essential substance with the music of Claude Debussy has long captured the imaginations of music commentators. Indeed, in 1914 Debussy’s close friend Louis Laloy claimed that “there are secret links that unite them, and one could say that such a music could not have been produced except in the proximity of such a philosophy, and vice versa” (Comoedia [19 February 1914]).
Such comparisons between Debussy and Bergson were, however, seemingly nonexistent before 1909 (when Bergson’s philosophy was experiencing a meteoric rise in popularity). In this paper I argue that the Bergsonian frame for Debussy’s music invoked by Laloy in 1914 was a departure from Laloy’s own earlier views of this music and, more broadly, from the critical priorities of debussysme that had emerged and crystallized in the decade following the 1902 premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande. Laloy’s extensive writings about Debussy from this decade suggest a very different set of intellectual reference points and influences, some of which—including Helmholtzian sensory physiology and the emerging “scientific” discipline of psychology as advocated in France by the philosopher-turned-psychologist Théodule Ribot—were explicit targets of Bergson’s critique. Laloy’s justifications for Debussy’s music in this period, then, were part of a broader conversation in early twentieth-century French musical culture that understood Debussy’s music in relation to newly materialist ideas about sound and its action on the individual, and historically particularized, human person—ideas which contravened Bergson’s account of the heterogeneous flux of durée. In this context, Laloy’s turn to Bergson’s philosophy in 1914, far from epitomizing or distilling the ideas of debussysme, retrospectively reimagined Debussy’s aesthetic to accommodate it to new ideals and critical priorities on the eve of the First World War.