Conference Agenda

Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune has posed a question for more than a century: what, precisely, is its relationship to Stéphane Mallarmé’s eponymous Symbolist poem? Debussy resisted literal correspondence, insisting that his orchestral work was inspired by—though not directly derived from—Mallarmé’s “L’Après-midi d’un faune.” As he remarked, the music should be understood as a general impression of the poem, since “if music were to follow more closely, it would run out of breath like a cab-horse competing for the Derby with a thoroughbred.” Yet the coincidence that score and poem both comprise 110 measures/lines has continued to invite speculation about structural or symbolic alignment.

Existing accounts have approached the work through structural correspondence (Wenk 1976; Code 2000), Symbolist aesthetics (Barricelli 1985; Zielonka 2000; Venanzi 2026), and music analysis (Bernstein 1976; Crotty 1982; Brown 1993; DeVoto 2014). This paper offers a different vantage point by returning to the poem’s theatrical premise and reading the Prélude as a musical gloss of Mallarmé’s poetic mechanism rather than as a line-for-line analogue. Drawing on Mallarmé’s underexplored “Crayonné au théâtre,” I argue that the Faune poem theorizes a “theater of matter” in which a monologic voice activates a semiotic network— Mallarmé’s “rythmes entre rapports” —that guides the emergence of imagery. Mallarmé weaves interdependent motifs to stage the illusion of nymphs for the faun; Debussy, in turn, constructs a motivic network through developing variation, projecting the “nymphs’ theme” as an ephemeral, listener-facing illusion. In both works, non-linear relations among signs invite audiences to intuit—rather than witness—the faun’s romantic encounter through the suggestion of poetic and musical parameters.

I further argue that, by constructing “rhythms of relations” through associative play among parameters, Mallarmé and Debussy create a non-linear experience grounded in internal relations. In doing so, both pursue a comparable modernist aim: breaking inherited molds (the alexandrine line; tonal norms) to realize a Symbolist aesthetic that privileges suggestion over statement. On this view, what Debussy most profoundly transposes from Mallarmé is not narrative content or structure, but the poem’s creation mechanism and aesthetic ideal.

Pierre Bernac’s (1899–1979) The Interpretation of French Song has been the essential method book for Anglophone singers since 1970, offering a comprehensive guide to the mélodie and to the French language. Yet, for a guide written not by a musicologist but “by an interpreter,” the book incorporates a surprising amount of reflection on aesthetics. The philosophical bent of the treatise is evident particularly in Bernac’s theorization of musical performance, which he derives primarily from Gisèle Brelet (1915–1973), a musicologist whose writings Nadia Boulanger had recommended to Stravinsky as required reading.

In this paper, I investigate how Brelet’s thought intersected with and energized Bernac’s theory of performance. Bernac cites Brelet from the very first page, writing that “only the performer’s presence can give expression to [the composer’s] rendering.” For Brelet, “presence” means the performer’s physicality and inner life, which constitute music’s true reality; drawing heavily on the thought of Henri Bergson, her philosophy is predicated on the theory that music is the unified product of sound and gesture. Bernac adopts this idea wholesale in his guide, describing the musical work as nonexistent before the performer’s “personal vision” brings it to life. Yet Bernac stops short of endorsing Brelet’s claim that this is reversible, that music-making is “necessarily the construction of the self,” instead describing performance as inevitably a “spiritual improvisation” effected by the experience of the performer.

Both Bernac and Brelet turn away from score-based interpretation of musical “works,” describing music as a set of gestures, habits, and performance techniques. Through examination of Bernac’s and Brelet’s separate analyses of the music of Debussy, I point to the ways they illuminated the “liveness” of music: Bernac, by stressing the technique necessary to enable its flash of inspiration, and Brelet, by hearing its formal qualities as the depiction of shared human time. Together, the unlikely pair embodies the midcentury’s foray into a new musicology that could capture the somatic, holistic—and truer—experience of music.

This paper explores the interpretative afterlives of Gabriel Fauré’s Après un rêve through a comparative analysis of 24 historical recordings (1915–1999) for voice and cello. Focusing on expressive timing, dynamics, vibrato, portamento, and soloist–accompanist coordination (i.e., (a)synchrony), it argues that recorded performance operates not as a neutral container of works but as an active site of expressive negotiation. In this context, Après un rêve becomes a medium-transversal space, where musical meaning is continually re-voiced through the timbral and temporal specificities of each performance body.

Drawing special attention to Pau Casals’s influential recordings and transcription, the paper shows how cellists and singers deploy overlapping rhetorical strategies—rubato, glissando, and dynamic contouring—to shape phrase structure and poetic trajectory. Singers, grounded in breath and text, engage prosodic inflections and timing elasticity, while cellists invoke voice-like gestures through bow articulation and vibrato shaping. These idiomatic grammars often blur, creating zones of stylistic convergence that transcend traditional medium boundaries.

The study adopts a mixed-methods approach combining close listening with micro-analytical tools—timing graphs, vibrato plots, and expressive asynchrony metrics—framed not as definitive explanations but as heuristics for artistically informed analysis. These data illuminate how expressive decisions are shaped by embodiment, medium affordances, and historical context. Through this lens, vibrato speed, portamento placement, and rubato arcs are interpreted as performative gestures that reflect broader interpretive values and evolving aesthetic norms.

Rather than treating transcription as mere transfer, the chapter examines it as expressive re-articulation. The cello versions of Après un rêve do not simply imitate the voice but reinterpret its affective and rhetorical functions, often highlighting different aspects of the work’s emotional and structural grammar. Casals’s phrase shaping, for instance, mirrors poetic syntax, while later recordings exhibit smoother, more coordinated profiles reflective of shifting performance cultures.

Ultimately, Après un rêve emerges as a performative palimpsest—an expressive field where historical practices, corporeal constraints, and idiomatic creativity intersect. The findings contribute to broader discourses on the historiography of interpretation, intermediality in performance, and the embodied politics of musical time, offering a model of analysis that bridges musicology, performance studies, and artistic research.