The centenary of Debussy's death, 2018, was a banner year for the composer, marked by conferences, publications, concerts, and new releases of recordings of his complete works. Debussy's Resonance, edited by Steven Huebner and François de Médicis, is a worthy contribution to these centenary celebrations and is, indeed, essential reading for those interested in the current state of musicological thought on the composer. The collection brings together many of the foremost figures in Debussy scholarship from the past several decades, highlighting the strides the field has made since the centenary celebration of the composer's birth in 1962 – foremost among them the work performed thus far on the Œuvres complètes begun in 1982, with 21 volumes of the projected 36 now complete (including the vocal score of Pelléas et Mélisande and all of the piano music); the publication in 2005 of the Correspondance, edited by François Lesure and Denis Herlin, a magisterial collection of over 3,000 letters (mostly written by Debussy) over the course of his lifetime; and a comprehensive dossier de presse from the early reception of Pelléas et Mélisande, edited by Christophe Branger, Sylvie Douche and Herlin.Footnote ¹

Debussy's Resonance appropriately reflects on these achievements of the past few decades. The first essay in the volume, ‘Debussy Fifty Years Later: Has the Barrel Run Dry?’ by Richard Langham Smith, takes this retrospective viewpoint very explicitly. Langham Smith lays out a compelling overview of Debussy studies since the 1960s – not as a dry blow-by-blow of biographies and editions, but as a field of endeavour tied to the emergence of a community of scholars, on both sides of the Atlantic, committed to promoting the work of Debussy. Complementing Langham Smith's account, Roy Howat's contribution, ‘The Œuvres complètes de Claude Debussy Thirty Years On’, discusses the editorial work of the Œuvres complètes, focusing on the volumes of piano music (some of which Howat himself edited). In addition to highlighting the contributions to our knowledge of Debussy's body of work that the Œuvres complètes has made, Howat offers the reader valuable insights into the editorial decisions that informed the project, including the use of recordings made by Debussy of a number of his works (including the Préludes, Book 1) on piano rolls in 1912 to supplement and even correct the textual record.

One clear theme that emerges from Debussy's Resonance is a growing interest in Debussy's early compositions of the 1880s and early 1890s – largely songs and piano works that in the past have often been relegated to the margins of Debussy scholarship. Studies of Debussy's early work were long plagued with an unavailability of source material, as many of the early songs were never published and the manuscripts were scattered in private collections as well as libraries – a situation that has been greatly improved by scholarship of the past few decades. The endeavour has been newly reinvigorated by the recent reappearance of previously unknown manuscript copies of nine early songs in Debussy's hand, bound in a sketchbook that belonged to Henry Kunkelmann, a composer not previously known to have had an acquaintance with Debussy. Denis Herlin's contribution to Debussy's Resonance lays out his research on Debussy's relationship to Kunkelmann as well as the considerable insights to be gleaned from the Kunkelmann manuscripts. Two of the nine songs contained in the sketchbook were previously known to scholars only through fragments or sketches, and another two – Les elfes and Le matelot qui tombe à l'eau, both dated by Herlin to 1881 – have no other known copies at all and were thought to be lost before the rediscovery of the Kunkelmann manuscripts.

Other essays in Debussy's Resonance address Debussy's early period not through a dramatic rediscovery of source material but through painstaking revisiting of the existing archival record. David Grayson's essay tackles the initial composition and subsequent revisions of Paysage sentimental, a song first composed in 1883 (and included in the Recueil Vasnier, a manuscript of songs presented to Debussy's lover Marie Vasnier, in 1885), and later revised for publication in 1891 and again in 1903, a process that sheds further light on Debussy's compositional development through these years as well as shifting aesthetic values at play in the reception of his music. Marie Rolf's essay on two other early songs – Séguidille and Rondel chinois – extends the discussion about Debussy's exoticism, often talked about in the context of the composer's experience of the Javanese gamelan in 1889, into a period before this encounter, when his exoticism took a more conventional form mediated by cultural representations of Spain and China that were widespread in France at the time.

A number of essays in the volume also shed new light on the perennially contentious topic of Debussy's stylistic development – the question of whether his style was very nearly fully formed in the young Achille Debussy, hidden from his Conservatoire professors and manifested only in improvisations with which he dazzled his classmates, or whether it developed gradually over the course of the 1880s and early 1890s, coming to full maturation only as he began to compose Pelléas et Mélisande in the mid-1890s. Barbara Kelly's contribution, ‘Fashioning Early Debussy in Interwar France’ – the only essay in the volume to address the posthumous reception of Debussy's music – traces the origins of this debate to the 1920s, demonstrating the extent to which the conversation about Debussy's early music in the years shortly after his death helped to shape conceptions of Debussy as a composer for the rest of the century.

Approaching the question of Debussy's early style from a different vantage point, the essays by Steven Huebner and François de Médicis challenge conventional wisdom with respect to Debussy's stylistic influences in the 1880s and 1890s. Huebner's ‘Between Massenet and Wagner’ revisits Massenet's influence on Debussy, an influence that has often been dismissed as irrelevant to the development of the composer's mature style (Charles Koechlin jokingly referred to it as a ‘poison’.) Huebner compellingly argues that such assessments are rooted in later prejudice against Massenet as a commercial sell-out – everything that Debussyan modernism was not. In the context of the 1880s, Massenet represented a less anxiety-charged compositional model than Wagner, and Huebner demonstrates Massenet's influence on the young Debussy in his winning Prix de Rome cantata L'enfant prodigue, the unfinished cantata Diane au bois, and the 1884 setting of Mallarmé's Apparition.

Also taking a historically ‘on the ground’ (as opposed to backwards-looking) perspective, de Médicis's contribution, ‘Composing After Wagner: The Music of Bruneau and Debussy, 1890–1902’, positions Debussy's early style vis-à-vis the realist composer Alfred Bruneau. Because of his connection to novelist Émile Zola, Bruneau has often been understood as occupying a different aesthetic world than Debussy and the Symbolist poets; moreover, since the middle of the twentieth century Bruneau has largely fallen off of the scholarly radar, with his compositional style seen as too conservative to have been a meaningful influence on such a radical composer as Debussy. Yet, taking what he calls a ‘prospective’ (as opposed to ‘retrospective’) approach that ‘considers the artistic values and the musicians on the scene at the time that Debussy was composing – even though they may have since been forgotten’ (p. 176), de Médicis finds compelling parallels between Pelléas et Mélisande and Bruneau's 1891 opera Le Rêve, including a similarity between Debussy's opposition of F-sharp major and C major and Bruneau's use of F-sharp major and E Phrygian; and the use of whole-tone collections to convey dream-worlds.

More broadly, Debussy's Resonance encompasses an admirable range of traditional methodological approaches to Debussy; the volume contains music-theoretical essays by Matthew Brown, Mark DeVoto, Boyd Pomeroy and Mark McFarland. There are readings of Debussy's engagement with Symbolism by Katherine Bergeron – with an essay on Maeterlinck and Pelléas et Mélisande – and by Julian Johnson, who revisits Debussy's settings of Mallarmé. Essays by David Code and August Sheehy propose new ways of understanding familiar pieces: Code considers the Debussyan ‘song triptych’, which he argues should be understood apart from the legacy of German ideas of organicism, and Sheehy gives a reading of the piano prelude Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir through the lens of ‘embodied hermeneutics’, tying the piece to the bodily feeling of discombobulation that accompanies the turning motions of the waltz. In addition to its value to scholars, moreover, several essays in the volume will be valuable resources to performers of Debussy's music, including Langham Smith's extended discussion of recent developments in performance practice in ‘Debussy Fifty Years Later’, and Robert Orledge's apt description of Debussy's orchestration. Pianists, in particular, will surely be interested in Jocelyn Ho's fine-grained analyses of Debussy's piano-roll recordings of 1912 and Carolyn Rae's history of the French pianist Marius-François Gaillard, who in 1920 was the first pianist to publicly perform all of Debussy's (then-)known piano compositions (and who was later censured for collaborating on musical projects with the Nazis during the Occupation).

In sum, Debussy's Resonance is an impressive compendium of and reflection on accomplishments in the field of Debussy studies of the past several decades. If there is a weakness to the collection, it is one of relative insularity from recent methodological developments beyond Debussy studies in the broader scholarly conversation of musicology. This is a challenge for any volume focused on a single composer, at a time when composer-centric musicology is, increasingly, no longer seen as the discipline's raison d’être, and especially a challenge for a field whose object of study has long inspired such intense and heartfelt aesthetic appreciation. Love of Debussy's music has spurred the great monuments of scholarship to which Debussy's Resonance bears witness; yet, this same love can tend towards an idea of Debussy as a creative force that transcends limitations of cultural and historical circumstance rather than, as Jann Pasler has written, ‘a composer deeply rooted in his times, his reputation linked to the discourses that helped to construct it’.Footnote ² Debussy's Resonance – despite a title suggestive of outward reverberations of the composer's influence – has surprisingly little material on Debussy's broader impact on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries or the constellation of discourses through which this music, from Debussy's own lifetime onwards, was made and remade.

These discourses were, of course, intimately connected to white European identity and ideas of racial hierarchy, topics which are central to understanding Debussy's music and its place in the cultural imagination of early twentieth-century France. Michel Duchesneau's contribution, ‘Debussy and Japanese Prints’, is one of the only essays in the volume on the topic of Debussy's interest in non-Western cultures (the other being Rolf's essay on exoticism in Debussy's early songs). Duchesneau takes Debussy's well-known affinity for japonisme (most famously the Hokusai print ‘The Great Wave Off Kanagawa’ that Debussy chose for the cover of the published score of La mer) as a starting-point for considering the ‘complex constellation of knowledge about Chinese and Japanese art with which Debussy engaged’ (p. 301). When he turns to the aesthetic issues, however, much of Duchesneau's discussion – in the absence of written testimony from Debussy himself on what he found compelling about these prints – is somewhat speculative, and Duchesneau concludes, disconcertingly, by celebrating, rather than interrogating, the cultural dynamics at play:

Such an approach necessarily elides the specific, historically local configurations of power and knowledge through which Debussy and his contemporaries encountered and understood racial and cultural difference. These are topics that have recently been explored by scholars including Pasler and Annegret Fauser, but about which much historical work remains to be done.Footnote ³

It is worth returning to the question in Langham Smith's subtitle (a question that also frames the introduction by Huebner and de Médicis): ‘Has the Barrel Run Dry?’ The question is not entirely ingenuous; the answer, of course, for both Langham Smith and the editors, is no, and the volume as a whole certainly bears out the rich variety of projects that continue to sustain the field of Debussy studies, confirming that the ‘barrel’ has, indeed, not gone dry (nor is it in danger of doing so). It is easy to imagine, too, that the continued relevance and dynamism of Debussy studies – the ‘resonance’ of Debussy's music – extend more broadly than Langham Smith, Huebner and de Médicis suggest, as part of an ever-expanding musicological enterprise.