Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:44am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Interpreting Early 20th Century French Art Music Session Chair: Sylvia Kahan | |
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Rhythms of Relations: Mallarmé’s Theatrical Vision in Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune The Chinese University of Hong Kong 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. | |