In the opening lines of Julian Johnson's After Debussy: Music, Language, and the Margins of Philosophy, we are offered a provocation: ‘All music is pró-logos; it comes before the discourse it provokes’ (1). Almost as soon as this is offered, its purchase is restricted, however: ‘isn't the opposite also true? Isn't all music made and heard in a world already pervasively discursive?’ Not only does ‘the tension between these ideas shape this book’, but also this pattern of delivery is important for what follows: similar to the frequently watery themes of much of the music ‘after Debussy’, the initial claim is immediately turned back upon itself like a wave breaking land as it simultaneously foams and pulls back to the sea. The crucial factor here is the liminality of the water/foam: that it cannot be clear when one ends and the other begins, much as the ‘gap’ between music and language holds or structures both, whilst remaining elusive, imprecise, ineffable and so on. And so, like Rodin's La cathédrale – the figure which opens the book and an image to which Johnson repeatedly returns – we are often invited to be attentive to a space held indistinguishably between music and language, as much, if not more than, what lies clearly either side.

A more lucid statement of Johnson's central claim is made in the concluding ‘Epilogue’:

And though he goes on to emphasize a dependent and relational, rather than straightforwardly oppositional link between, for example, signification and sense (‘the signifying function of language and the sensuous appearing of (poetic) artworks are not utterly cut off from each other, unrelated and unrelatable’ (290)), we nonetheless have a clear sense of the historically oppositional tensions that animate Johnson's thinking: music and language, meaning, bodies, resonance, presence and absence, gender (albeit fairly indirectly, and to which I will return), repertoire, the canon and value consequently accorded to an elite European (largely German) musical tradition and a (mostly French) intervention.

So far, so standard, at least to some degree. But what sets Johnson's eminently readable, astoundingly interdisciplinary, and richly evocative text apart is, first, Johnson's ability to weave together compelling arguments drawing not only on a wide repertoire of music (Debussy, but also Fauré, Ravel, Dutilleux, Boulez, Grisey, Murail, and Saariaho), but also philosophy (particularly Jankélévitch, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Nancy), poetry/literature (above all Mallarmé, but Proust probably deserves mention too) and the visual arts (notably Monet and later on, Cézanne); and second, his refusal to fall prey to a simplistic inversion of the binaries at play through a facile rehabilitation of ‘the sonorous’ or ‘the body’ (or whatever else). Indeed, though the book purports to turn the idea that (classical) music should be understood through a linguistic frame of reference – with an emphasis on expression, representation, and discourse – on its head (though this it certainly does), it does not do this through a denial of music's language-like features. It is this willingness to cut both ways, as well as the focus on the between (rather than the ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ of language), that stands out as one of the book's real strengths, and the reason why – despite an emphasis on the body/sense/experience and so on – it mostly manages to evade the trap of figuring music (cf. Romanticism/German Idealism) in essentializing terms as an originary wholeness or plenitude that compensates for language's (or the linguistic subject's) shortcomings.

Moreover, this is certainly linked to what is probably my favourite aspect of the book: its comparative and resolutely intermedial approach; music is thus shown to share, refract, or even anticipate certain ideas, approaches, and ways of thinking with other arts and philosophy (and beyond). Just as symbolist poetry is in need of music (or at the very least, an ‘idea’ of music) for its own aesthetic explorations of what is constrained or limited by the semantic precision of language proper, music too reflects upon what is beyond, or alongside, in the foamy space between, in order to speak, however mutely. As he states, ‘if poetry was liberated by music, it is equally clear that music was liberated by the poetry it had itself set free’ (110). Johnson's book makes a strong case for an alternative to either a reactionary return to formalism or a continued emphasis on ‘the material and discursive contexts in which music takes place’ at the expense of the music ‘itself’ (can we say that yet/again?) – something Johnson laments early on (7). Johnson's approach does not deny context (which is abundantly clear from the comparative approach, which draws multiple parallels and highlights key points of contact with contemporary movements in other domains), but it is definitively not ‘about’ the context, nor is context ever mapped or projected onto the music.

Between the ‘Prologue’ and ‘Epilogue’ already mentioned, the book is structured into three sections – ‘Saying Nothing’, ‘Appearing’, and ‘Touching’ – each of which is further divided into three chapters. In the first section we are treated to three chapters that orbit around ‘Sirènes’ (both the mythological figures and Debussy's orchestral nocturne of the same name), ‘Mélisande and the silence of music’, and ‘Mallarmé and the edge of language’. This first trio of chapters has as its overriding concern the relationship between music and language, and certain key assertions are staked out in this regard. Whilst it is claimed that ‘Debussy's Sirènes demarcates an important cultural exploration of the resonant space between music and language [through] its presentation of a pre- or a-linguistic voice’ (33), the second chapter focuses on music's capacity for mute articulation, and the paradox of saying nothing, where the ‘nothing’ is rather ‘a palpably audible and articulate musical saying, a sonorous voicing of nothing’ (57). Debussy, Johnson claims, ‘uses musical tone to make linguistic silences speak’ (59), and shows persuasively on a number of occasions in this chapter how the orchestra often ‘speaks’ for those characters who speak little. The third chapter takes Debussy's late settings of Mallarmé's poetry as a reflection upon ‘aesthetic principles that shape his music as a whole’ (85). The ‘nothingness of thin air’ (the poems are Soupir, Éventail, and Placet futile) is the guiding thread of the particularly rich analysis in this chapter, which shows how Debussy's music often elaborates the internal movement of a single moment (87), and also oscillates ‘between sonority and grammar, sense and signification’ (97). Johnson also sketches out the contours of a more complex and sometimes paradoxical relation between music, language, and poetry in this period. One particular paradox worth highlighting is how ‘as poetry became more musical, the vocal line of the French mélodie became more like speech’ (110), an observation that would appear to run counter to his larger claim that music ‘after Debussy’ entails an increased ‘emphasis on sonority, colour and gesture’ (111). However, as he points out (whilst segueing rather neatly into the overarching theme of the second section, that of ‘appearing’), the ‘pared down voice’ is rather ‘the singing voice's complement to the new poetry's manner of framing a plenitude by pointing beyond itself’ – and all the better in order to be able ‘to foreground the act of saying itself’ (111).

If it is fair to suggest that the primary concern in the first section is music's relationship to language, then the second part, ‘Appearing’, takes a distinctly visual turn. It again comprises three chapters, ‘Coming to presence’, ‘Mirrors’, and ‘Taking place’, which show how in ‘music “after Debussy”’, analogously to Mallarmé's poetry or even the philosophy of Heidegger, Bergson or Merleau-Ponty, ‘the act of appearing, of becoming present rather than the familiar tasks ascribed to an art of mimetic representation or the expression of emotions’ is foregrounded (127). We are persuasively shown, with myriad examples, how music, too, ‘thinks’ through the nexus of concerns circulating around music/language, or presence/absence, though it does so ‘from the other side’ (139). As mentioned, though language remains a concern throughout, this section has a particularly visual focus, and Monet is introduced as a captivating analogue in the visual arts, where the play between the real and the irreal or unreal is explored, and heterotopic spaces (cf. Foucault) are aesthetically cultivated (150). Drawing again on the visual arts and on landscape specifically, Johnson advances the claim that ‘Debussy stands at the beginning of a musical practice that foregrounds an essentially ecological mode of address’, and turns his attention to ‘music that works upon its listeners in comparable ways to the aesthetic perception of landscape’ (173). I have to confess I'm not sure what the latter claim means in practice, though it sounds compelling in the context in which Johnson makes it; at the very least it seems to be part of a wider claim that music ‘after Debussy’ is immersive, aesthetically lingering in an extended moment, rather than advancing in a linear or narrative (and therefore representational) fashion (187). The parallels with Impressionism are neither surprising nor controversial, but Johnson has a gift for writing comparatively, making the resonance of these comparisons poignant and evocative, whilst setting out clearly what is at stake:

The final section, ‘Touching’, moves on to considerations concerning the haptic and the bodily in the three chapters that comprise this part: ‘The art of touch’, ‘Writing the body’, and ‘Thinking in sound’. In this section the most developed analogy is with dance, particularly that of Loïe Fuller, whereby Johnson suggests that ‘Debussy's unloosening of the pianist's body from the strict entrainment of the five-finger exercise might thus be heard in parallel with developments in dance away from the disciplined lexicon of classical ballet’ (233) as well as noting the ‘development of a notational system for dance’ – certainly another mode of ‘writing the body’ (234). In foregrounding ‘sound over structure, sensation over syntax, Debussy's music quietly insists we listen through the body’ (248). The extended resonance of these claims is brought back into dialogue with the comparisons already made with the literary and visual arts earlier in the book to stake out the critical purchase that underpins, it seems to me, the entire book:

What Johnson announces so compellingly is the way in which music ‘after Debussy’ discloses, pre-figures, or explores the terrain that philosophy, for example, has either only explored more recently, or about which it has not yet recognized the ramifications; that the aesthetic revolutions of Debussy's musical écriture often pre-date philosophies with which it seems to have an affinity (Derrida, Barthes, Marion, Nancy, and so on, see also 22). Further still, perhaps, that were we to take listening to (music after) Debussy seriously, we would find ourselves presented with something we (already) know, pre-, non- or a-linguistically – and perhaps philosophically, too (269).

It warrants a brief excursus to note that this final section is also marked by a degree of hesitancy, perhaps for good reason, that is not found earlier in the book, and Johnson errs more often towards telling us what he is not doing here: he is not interested in ‘the body itself so much as the writing of the body’ (204); he tells us that he will not be falling into ‘a new fetishism of the body’ (205), or a return to a natural body (not least because, as he rightly asserts, ‘before the composer writes, the body has already been inscribed – both into musical materials in general, and into the embodied habitus of instrumental lexicons in particular’ 208); and he similarly advances a scepticism towards the way in which the acousmatic body has too often been wheeled in to fill the gap left by idealism (229). Likewise, he casts doubt on the extent to which ‘some of the most insightful writers on music and language’ can be taken wholesale: even Proust, Jankélévitch, Kristeva, and Barthes (I would certainly add a few more!) have at times ‘fetishized [music] as pure immediacy (ineffable, ideal, beyond language, irrational, feminine)’ (254).

And this leads me to return to the thematic of gender that, though acknowledged by Johnson, is never substantially developed. For example, Adriana Cavarero's warning about the ‘misogynistic overtones’ of the mythical siren figures is noted early on (35) and later in the book Ravel's exploration of ‘colour, texture, and tone’ is couched in unambiguously gendered – perhaps even feminist – terms, such that these works are seen to ‘ignore the phallocentric ordering and linear purposiveness of goal-directed tonal structures. The pianist is necessarily involved in a constant self-touching as the two hands overlap’ (264, I assume we are meant to hear echoes of Irigaray's infamous lèvres, here, though that is not expressly acknowledged). But it strikes me as at least as significant that the figures evoked in order to explore music's ‘secondary parameters’ are relentlessly feminine/feminized (to quote Johnson, albeit to different ends): ‘from the shy nymphs of the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, to their later instantiations as the two girls in Jeux, from the half-seen, half-heard sirènes of the Nocturnes to the already-departed naiads of the Chansons de Bilitis and, of course, Mélisande’ (141–2). This is less a criticism of Johnson's book than a simple observation that it makes the fundamentally gendered nature of these considerations – the extraordinary extent to which ideas about the relationship between music and language are interwoven with patriarchal ideas about gender – utterly plain, even if this is not the stated aim of Johnson's text.

It was only in the turn to evolutionary and cognitive theories in the ‘Epilogue’ (which I'll confess I found a little out of place anyhow!) that my feminist hackles were – admittedly gently – raised. This section is again advanced with a good deal of hesitancy (‘the scientific accuracy or theoretical plausibility [of these approaches] are not my concern here’ (296)), but their inclusion raised a number of queries. In this literature, a (universal) origin to a communicative but non-signifying musicking is identified both in the pre-history of hominid evolution and in the infant's cognitive development (through the idea of infant-directed speech, formerly ‘motherese’), and it is this ‘pre-linguistic mode of understanding’ that, Johnson claims, is cultivated and ‘kept open by aesthetic experience’ (296). Though he concedes that the repertoire he has focused on (but which foregrounds the sonorous rather than the linguistic) ‘is no more than the blink of an eye’, he nevertheless insists on a productive overlap and the way in which, to cite Gary Tomlinson whose musico-evolutionary theories he draws on, it speaks to ‘a musical absence at the heart of language’ (295). Not only did I wonder why we needed the scientific detour (hasn't Kristeva already said much the same thing some thirty or even forty years before the ‘science’? Maybe Nancy, too? Perhaps, even, Rousseau.) but I was also reminded of the quick slide into (gender) essentialism that this route tends to take, such as when ‘the musically feminine returns like a gently incoming tide’ (285).

Quibbles and queries aside, all that remains is to admire Johnson's commanding navigation of the problem that faces anybody writing a book about music: the difficulty of not being able to cite, except in score/notated form, the music to which you refer. Though Johnson relies on scores in abundance, as well as using analytical and musicological terminology, his real skill – and one of the most enjoyable facets of the book to boot – is his capacity to write about music: vividly, evocatively, and poetically. Towards the end of the book he draws on Michel Serres, whose concern with language is that it desensitizes or anaestheticizes us, but who, according to Johnson, is able to evoke ‘through the sheer richness of … language, an experience of the world outside, before, and after the word’ (288). Well here, too, is a book that aestheticizes us, and so powerfully reminds its readers why we cannot help but keep speaking – and writing – about music.