Aesthetic Reverberations across the Arts: Exploring the Life and Music of Claude Debussy
Presented by Marie Rolf
In spite of his reputation as a radical trailblazer, Claude Debussy was a man very much of his time who was keenly receptive to aesthetic ideas that were being explored by contemporary poets, artists, and other composers. He once told an American journalist, “I am called a revolutionary, but I haven’t invented anything. (…) There is nothing new in art.” Nevertheless, Debussy’s unique musical language and artistic expression were the result of his deep assimilation and combination of diverse influences.
Tracing his growth from representative early compositions to his mature works, we will encounter some of the most important friends and patrons, fellow composers, writers, visual artists, and aesthetic ideas that shaped Debussy throughout his life. As these connections were constantly in flux, so too were the composer’s musical responses to them. Debussy once amusingly quipped that, rather than tediously repeating himself, he “would immediately turn to growing pineapples in [his] bedroom.” He believed in music’s power to evoke thoughts, sensations, and ideas, and his personal musical experiments along these lines altered the course of music composition for the next century.
About Marie Rolf
Scholar, pianist, educator, and administrator, Marie Rolf is Professor Emerita of Music Theory and recently retired Senior Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at the Eastman School of Music. She is best known for her scholarship on French composer Claude Debussy, but her research interests range from the relationship between musical analysis and performance, keyboard skills, and the music and manuscripts of Debussy and Mozart, to the pedagogy of music theory. Rolf has translated and revised François Lesure’s seminal Claude Debussy: A Critical Biography (University of Rochester Press, 2019), and she is the sole American member of the editorial board for the critical edition of Claude Debussy’s works, the Œuvres complètes de Claude Debussy (40 volumes), published by Durand in Paris.
Rolf’s articles and reviews appear in the Cahiers Debussy, Intégral, the Mozart Jahrbuch, Music Theory Spectrum, The Musical Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Music, and MLA Notes, among other journals, and she has authored chapters in books such as Debussy’s Resonance, Regards sur Debussy, Rethinking Debussy, Berlioz and Debussy: Sources, Contexts and Legacies, Debussy and His World, Debussy Studies, and Haydn Studies. She is the editor of Debussy’s orchestral masterpiece La Mer, and a volume of early songs by the same composer. In 2004, Professor Rolf authenticated a completely “unknown” song by Claude Debussy, “Les Papillons,” publishing a transcription, facsimile, and monograph on the work (New York Public Library). She brought to light yet another unknown early song, “Séguidille,” releasing a critical edition of it in 2014 (Durand). She is also the editor-arranger of Mozart’s Rondo for Horn in E-flat, KV 371 (Bärenreiter), which is the first published edition of the work that incorporates sixty new bars of music that she discovered in 1991. This past summer, Bärenreiter released her critical edition and facsimile of an unknown work by Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn), the Ostersonate (Easter Sonata) for piano, a composition modeled in many ways on the Beethoven sonatas.
Professor Rolf has lectured in London, Paris, Tours, Geneva, Melbourne, Montreal, and throughout the United States. She has received research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, and she regularly serves as a reviewer of articles and grant applications for the NEH and various journals. In addition, she has concertized as a pianist, collaborating with musicians such as Marcia Baldwin, Charles Castleman, Jan DeGaetani, Brooks de Wetter-Smith, W. Peter Kurau, Robert Spillman, Millard Taylor, and Francis Tursi.
Under Rolf’s leadership as graduate dean at Eastman, new graduate degrees and diploma and certificate programs were developed in Jazz and Contemporary Media, Early Music, Opera Stage Direction, Conducting (Contemporary), Ethnomusicology, and Pedagogy. She chaired the interdepartmental committees that oversaw all graduate curricula and policies at Eastman, and she granted approximately 350 graduate awards and scholarships annually. In honor of her 27 years of innovative leadership and dedicated service to the Eastman School of Music, the graduate deanship has been endowed in perpetuity and named the Marie Rolf Dean of Graduate Studies.
Arts Speak is an educational series of lectures and performance lectures that celebrates the power of creativity through arts and music. Join us in person or tune in virtually to explore, learn, and connect on a wide variety of topics surrounding Arts and music with renowned experts. Presenters have included Dr. Samuel Adler, Susan Rogers, Michael Burritt, M. T. Anderson, and Ēriks Ešenvalds.
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