From its chapter titles (e.g. ‘In the Moog’, ‘Yo … Baudelaire!’), we might expect Debussy Redux to present a refreshingly iconoclastic exploration of Debussy's ‘impact on popular culture’. But this is no celebration of anarchic ripples of influence through multiple ‘registers’ of musical expression (in Michael Long's useful term).Footnote ¹ Instead, the book remains strangely in thrall to what we might deem a grim cohort of ‘austerians’ (in today's economic parlance) – including those stern Teutons, Schenker and Adorno; neo-Darwinian analytic philosophers; and earnest cognitive scientists. Even more bizarrely, it often becomes a defensive reaffirmation of ‘art’ as a ‘cultural universal’ that needs (once more) to be distinguished from kitsch and defended against postmodern relativism.

This is a surprising approach to the rich subject matter Matthew Brown has assembled. An Introduction glances to Debussy's ‘impact’ across a wide field and then raises ‘four basic issues’ purportedly drawn from M.H. Abrams's 1953 study of Romantic Theory, The Mirror and the Lamp:Footnote ² ‘the nature of musical structure and organic unity; the connection between authors and texts; the association between one author and another, and the relationships between the author and the audience’ (p. 7). Eight chapters (plus conclusion) then consider various Debussyan offshoots in light of these issues. The first focuses on the 1881 Rêverie for piano and Larry Clinton's 1938 swing adaptation; the next on the pseudo-Debussyan piano piece ‘Chicklings’ by soi-disant musical ‘medium’ Rosemary Brown alongside Debussy's Page d'Album (1915).Footnote ³ Chapter 3 turns to the 1948 film Portrait of Jennie, whose Dmitri Tiomkin score pastiches the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894), ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’ (1910), ‘Nuages’ and ‘Sirènes’ (1899), and the first ‘Arabesque’ (1891). A fourth chapter considers synthesizer versions of ten piano pieces by Isao Tomita and a single one by Juan Garcia Esquivel; a fifth traces the responses of rock group Art of Noise to a Baudelairean piano prelude; and a sixth treats the recasting of ‘La Cathédrale engloutie’ (1910) by John Zorn, on his album Grand Guignol (1992) and John Carpenter, in his film Escape from New York (1981). The next two chapters keep to cinema, with thoughts on Bruno Bozzetto's animated ‘choreography’ of the faun Prélude within Allegro non Troppo (a 1978 parody of Disney's Fantasia) and an early Kurosawa movie, Drunken Angel (1948), which boasts a Debussy-infused score by Fumio Hayaka. Finally, Brown builds on some echoes of the piano Rêverie once noted by Michael Long to offer a last Schenkerian analysis of Queen's ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.

Some quibbles to begin. The many homilies from cognitive science are unlikely to widen the ‘choir’ for such things, for when they don't read like phrasebook translations from an oddly unmusical species, they often state the blindingly obvious (e.g. ‘popular music often serves as a backdrop against which adolescents interact socially’ [p. 96].) The same mindset may explain the frequent attributions of clunky generalizations to some purely notional collective. When Brown asserts, about arrangements and adaptations, that ‘audiences want to be sure that the original composer's intentions have not been compromised’ he cannot have asked many happy dancers to (say) Walter Murphy's ‘A Fifth of Beethoven’ how much they care about ‘original intentions’ (p. 8). Nor can he have weighed the value to aficionados of Islamic decoration, or Persian carpets, or the paintings of Rothko or Frankenthaler, of the (statistically certified) statement that ‘people have an almost universal dislike for abstract art’ (p. 167). The conceptual bagginess of this last category is typical of his defences of ‘art’ against relativism. One ally is philosopher Denis Dutton: ‘Art itself is a cultural universal; that is, there are no known human cultures in which there cannot be found some form of what we might reasonably term aesthetic or artistic interest, performance, or artefact production’ (quoted on p. 78, my emphasis). Dutton's assertion, elsewhere, that ‘history’ will probably prove Rachmaninoff's accomplishment greater than Schoenberg's may or may not dent his authority on such matters.Footnote ⁴ But ad hominem squibs aside, it seems that neither he nor Brown is bothered by the way the blithe formulation ‘what we might reasonably term’ blatantly begs the question, by substituting a comfortable Anglo-American ‘universalism’ for any consideration of the culturally imbedded negotiations that give substance to all the concepts at issue.

Intractable debates about ‘art’ aside, a central, related idea first appears in the first of the four points Brown attributes to Abrams: ‘the nature of musical structure and organic unity’. But in truth, the passage he cites from The Mirror and the Lamp refers neither to ‘structure’ nor ‘organic unity’. Nor does Brown's redaction match Abrams's other points:

‘Artist’ (or ‘author’) and ‘audience’ make it into Debussy Redux, but the ‘universe’ of ‘ideas and feeling’ falls away. Meanwhile, ‘organic unity’ slips in to qualify a looser conception of ‘work’. By contrast, Abrams himself actually treats ‘organic’ ideas about art under one distinct strand of Romantic theory, to be distinguished from all others (e.g. ‘For Coleridge's organic idealism, Hazlitt had no patience whatsoever’.Footnote ⁶ )

In short, Brown largely proceeds as if Schenker's obsession with ‘organic unity’ was not, like Coleridge's, the contingent product of a particular culture, era and mindset, rather than the dominant ‘human’ universal he invokes (p. 7). Although he enlists Plato and Aristotle behind such ideals (pp. 29–30), we might instead recall the echoes of the Romantic ‘aesthetic of the fragment’ in Baudelaire's wry preface to his Petits poèmes en prose, from which Debussy quoted more than once. But this is only one instance of a recurring tendency to distil ‘organic unity’ from discussions in different terms. Later, for example, Brown challenges Adorno's disdain for Tin Pan Alley songs by claiming that an early song-writing manual ‘broach[es] the topic of organic unity’ (p. 27). The quoted comparison of a ‘melody’ to a ‘sentence’ (with a caution against ‘meaningless rambling’) hardly justifies the extrapolation.

The significance of such mistranslations extends beyond local terminology. In The Mirror and the Lamp Abrams suggests that while any ‘adequate’ theory likely touches all four elements, almost all ‘exhibit a discernible orientation toward one only’.Footnote ⁷ In Debussy Redux, it becomes ‘academics’ (not ‘theories’) who exhibit such orientations, and it is the conflict between orientations that has fuelled ‘the culture wars’ across several decades (p. 7). This change of purview suggests that for all his gestures towards ‘aesthetic theory’, Brown is primarily motivated by familiar battles within (and between) narrower fields of academic music research. Together, the new emphasis on ‘organic unity’ and the loss of that ‘universe of ideas and feeling’ go some way towards explaining why his contribution to these more parochial battles falls short of the even-handed ideals of its introduction.

I will illustrate by examining only a few of the more substantial cases. First, Brown's decision to focus on Portrait of Jennie (Chapter 3) is to be celebrated, for this 1948 Selznick production contains much of potential interest to Debussystes and scholars of film music alike. In summary: Eben Adams, a painter searching for creative voice, happens upon a young girl in Central Park. Through several subsequent meetings, he decides to paint her portrait; she seems to grow up much faster than normal; they fall in love. After she tells him she must leave he tries to track her down, only to learn that she had drowned in a storm years before they met. Believing that the storm may actually have yet to occur, he rushes to Cape Cod to save her, only to see her swept to her death. But his finished portrait, shown in the Metropolitan Museum as a full-colour coda to this black-and-white film, immortalizes her even as it marks his recovery of creative purpose.

After indicating how visual techniques infuse the film with ‘the trappings of high art’, Brown proceeds to catalogue Tiomkin's Debussyan ‘leitmotives’ (pp. 57–60). Most bear quite obvious signification: ‘Nuages’ sounds with images of clouds in the prologue and the storm scene; ‘Sirènes’ recurs as portent of drowning; ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’ sweetly infuses the portrait scenes. ‘Slightly less blatantly, fragments of the faun Prélude, eerily rescored, announce the reappearances of Jennie (who also brings a haunting song by Bernard Herrmann). As Brown notes, this is all standard ‘classical’ Hollywood fare. But he further suggests that the whole leitmotivic palette suggests a ‘conscious or unconscious’ recollection of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, and traces several plot parallels in this light.

The idea could have proven highly suggestive. But here it only becomes an occasion for invidious comparison. For Brown, not only does the film lack the ‘aesthetic depth’ of the opera, but its adaptation of its source novella produces ‘pure kitsch rather than genuine art’ (p. 62). His justification rests on a single, narrow interpretation of the film's message. Framing the ‘real issue’ in light of a prior, cognitive-scientific debunking of creative ‘inspiration’ (Ch. 2), he asserts that by effacing the ‘education, […] hard work, and […] debts to tradition’ that truly create ‘great art’, and replacing them with ‘mystical, but benign forces’ (that is, a ghostly visitation), the film ‘fails to offer a convincing account of how artists generally work’ (p. 65).

Such a reading perfectly exemplifies what is lost with Abrams's ‘universe of ideas and feeling’. For what reconnects Adams to his ‘work’ is not just the ‘mystical’ ghost of Jennie, but a more earthly ‘benign force’ she brings with her: the experience of love. ‘Mrs. Spinney’, an acerbic art dealer, highlights this point when she first sniffs that ‘there isn't a drop of love’ in any of Eben's paintings, and later insists: ‘You have to learn to care deeply for something’.Footnote ⁸ Of course this is a ‘sentimental’ notion – this is 1940s Hollywood – but attention to the verbal ‘leitmotives’ along with the visual and musical ones can unearth more subtle implications as well. A second plot theme appears with the very first voice-over (‘what is time?’) and recurs again and again (‘as though time were melting with the snow’; ‘there ought to be something timeless about a woman’) before coming into climactic counterpoint with love: ‘Time made an error, but you waited for me – and so we found our love’. A dialogue with Pelléas in light of these intertwined themes could surely prove richer than Brown's blunt evaluative contrast. It may even inspire further reflection about Tiomkin's use of Debussy's Prélude, a piece based on a poem about desire and artistic ‘perpetuation’.

The Prélude takes centre stage in Chapter 7. Here, an initial excursion through Foucault and historians of ‘counter-culture’ is intriguing enough, though it leaves little impact on the accounts of the piece, its literary sources and its afterlives (pp. 116–17). Brown's literary interpretation hinges on his assertion that ‘it was common knowledge that Mallarmé's poem ends with the faun masturbating’, though this is the first I have heard of it, after sampling a much wider literature than is evident here (p. 125).Footnote ⁹ Once we get to Debussy, it is exasperating to find only more voice-leading graphs and a list of intertextual harmonic echoes, as if these could bear the slightest relevance to a balletic or cinematic ‘hearing’.

It is Brown's prerogative to ignore relevant work in the field. But if he had skimmed my 2001 article on the Prélude he would have found an analysis of audible orchestral interactions that could (whether he agreed with it or not) have inspired more nuanced accounts than he is able to provide here of the Nijinsky and the Bozzetto.Footnote ¹⁰ As it is, he makes only a few large-scale observations and one purely fictive claim. Echoing his prior ‘reading in’ to Mallarmé, he asserts that Bozzetto also ‘ends with the faun masturbating’ (p. 130). In fact, the film ends with a wonderful sublimation of lost erotic objects, as the faun hobbles away on his cane to disappear behind the curves of a ‘landscape’ ultimately exposed as a massive female nude.Footnote ¹¹ It is absurd to suppose that this dispirited figure suddenly finds a belated burst of onanistic enthusiasm only after finally tottering ‘off screen’.

By neglecting the effect of Debussy's orchestra on Bozzetto's lushly colourful paintbrush, after overlooking the key themes of ‘time’ and ‘love’ in Portrait of Jennie, these two chapters bring into vivid relief the most egregious exclusions – timbre, rhythm, affect – of the Schenkerian methods Brown so strenuously defends. A closer look at one last chapter can add little to this diagnosis of his approach to ‘artistic products’. But it can serve to illustrate the book's treatment of ‘authors’.

The main point at issue in Chapter 6, the ‘avant-garde’ pedigree of Debussy and various others, brings partly into view the ‘universe’ ostensibly lost from Brown's redaction of Abrams. While it may be gratifying to find this unexpected opening towards ‘actions and events’, the snapshots of ‘radical’ aesthetics and politics soon prove to be just as unfocused as the interpretations of ‘works’. Baudelaire appears in unrecognizable caricature when Brown first writes that ‘instead of celebrating the benefits of modern city life, he examined the enormous costs’, and then invokes ‘the nameless people, or flâneurs, that crowd the streets but are too horrified to interact with one another’ (p. 102). Anyone familiar with the great essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ will recognize the misconstrual of key themes e.g. ‘for the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up home in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement […] he marvels at the eternal beauty and the harmony of life in the great capital cities’.Footnote ¹²

If this case illustrates the perils of hasty interdisciplinary ventures, it is harder to account for Brown's references to ‘Debussy's left-wing views’ and political ‘radicalism’ (p. 101). No evidence exists for either. François Lesure succinctly noted that ‘just as there is no point in seeking any trace of religious conviction in Debussy, so it is impossible to attribute any solid political opinion to him’; the famous photographs of the nattily suited composer by his hôtel particulier in the 16^th arrondissement support Erik Satie's observation that ‘this revolutionary in Art was extremely bourgeois in day to day life’.Footnote ¹³ Brown's casual equation of musical and political radicalism spawns a description of Pelléas as a ‘critique’, on behalf of ‘ordinary people’, of the ‘ruling classes’ (p. 106). But it has long been known that Debussy's revisions to Maeterlinck greatly reduced the presence of ‘the people’. The same sort of presumption, carried forth to (e.g.) John Zorn, bespeaks a shaky grasp of the slippery relationship between aesthetics and politics.

In sum, although it invokes broad ‘culture wars’ and targets the usual ‘postmodern’ musicological suspects, the real battle in Debussy Redux seems to me an internal one: between an openness to diverse modes of musical expression and an unshakeable faith in hallowed theoretical methods. Whatever satisfactions these may once have provided on the fields for which they were devised, the exclusions and inaccuracies apparent throughout this book clearly indicate how unhelpful they have become on a wider terrain. If Debussy Redux allows some readers to recognize a similar internal battle between the aesthetic experiences they savour and the academic methods they favour, it might also encourage them to wonder why scholars would choose to remain bound to the latter at clear detriment to the former. To echo an even more grimly influential Teuton than those named above: they have nothing to lose but their chains.