Rather than solid frames, some less than perfect aesthetic objects have
permeable membranes which allow them to diffuse effortlessly into the
everyday world. In the parallel universes of music and literature, Linda
Cummins extols the poetry of such imperfection. She places Debussy's
work within a tradition thriving on anti-Aristotelian principles: motley
collections, crumbling ruins real or fake, monstrous hybrids, patchwork
and palimpsest, hasty sketches, ellipses, truncated beginnings and
endings, meandering arabesques, irrelevant digressions, auto-quotations.
Sensitive to the intermittences of memory and experience and with a
keen ear for ironic intrusion, Cummins draws the reader into the Western
cultural past in search of the surprisingly
ubiquitous aesthetic of the unfinished, negatively silhouetted against
expectations of rational coherence. Theories popularized by Schlegel and
embraced by the French Symbolists are only the first waypoint on an
elaborately illustrated tour reaching back to Petrarch. Cummins
meticulously applies the derived results to Debussy's scores and finds
convincing correlations in this chiasmatic crossover. CONTENTS
Introduction Chapter 1: Ruins of Convention; Conventions of Ruin
Chapter 2: Beginnings and Endings Chapter 3: Arcadias and Arabesques
Chapter 4: The Sketch Chapter 5: Auto-Quotation Chapter 6: Preludes: A
Postlude Bibliography
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