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An inscrutable man, born in a working-class family and yet aristocratic in his tastes and values; a self-defining composer who both built on and went beyond the techniques and aesthetics of the times; and an emblem of France, at home and abroad, since his death in 1918-Claude Debussy (b. 1862) and his music have continued to fascinate and elude us. Remaining mysterious, after all, was a personal as well as musical ideal. Did he not once tell a critic, "When will people respect our mystery, even to ourselves?"1 More than a hundred dissertations have been written, starting with Archibald T. Davison's "The Harmonic Contri - butions of Claude Debussy" (Harvard, 1908). Recently, new histories have shed light on what French identity meant to Debussy and Debussystes; monographs, largely analytical, have focused on individual works, genres, and theoretical approaches; and three short books have been written for the general public.2 But since François Lesure's "critical biography" of 1994,3 there has been no new full-scale scholarly examination of the composer and his oeuvre.
The project to understand Debussy and his music-largely collective- began with Numéro special consacré à la mémoire de Claude Debussy, ed. André Suarès, Revue musicale 2 (1920). Then came the 1962 centenary, with the founding of the Debussy Museum in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, an exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, another special issue of Revue musicale, an international symposium, and performances in Paris and abroad.4 Research on Debussy grew more international after an American, Margaret G. Cobb, founded the Centre de documentation Claude Debussy in Paris in 1972,5 Lesure created the Cahiers Debussy in 1974, publishing its articles in English and French, and American Musicological Society (AMS) sessions on the composer in 1982 and 1985 gave rise to a sense of community among Anglophone Debussy scholars. Since 1985, they have produced seven of the sixteen volumes of the new Debussy Oeuvres complètes, and edited seven multiauthored books on the composer6-fitting as the composer was quite the Anglophile.7 More - over, Debussy has increasingly been a subject of discussion at American Musicological Society/Society for Music Theory meetings since 2004, where special sessions were devoted to him in 2010 and 2012.
So it should not be surprising that, 150 years after Debussy's birth, celebrations have also been...