Early in his career Maurice Ravel composed two pieces that take bells as their subject: “Entre Cloches” from Sites auriculaires, composed in 1897, and “La vallée des cloches,” the final movement of the 1905 work Miroirs. Although these pieces can be contextualized within a nineteenth-century lineage of French piano pieces that depict bell peals, they also set themselves apart by virtue of their heightened attention to the particularities of bell sonorities. Relying heavily on repetitive ostinato patterns, quartal harmonies, and intense dissonances, these pieces play in the nebulous space between transcription and composition. Ravel’s experimentation with bell sonorities in his piano music can be understood in relation to a broader discourse surrounding the sound of bells in nineteenth-century France. A complex sonic object, bell resonance lent itself to different modes of listening: the harmoniousness of bell peals was a common refrain among romantic poets, Catholic clergy, and campanarian historians, but toward the end of the century it became increasingly common for physicists and popular-science publications to complain that bells were inherently discordant. In this context Ravel’s depictions of bells in “Entre cloches” and “La vallée des cloches” suggest a shift in the place of musical listening in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultures of aurality. Ravel’s musical listening entailed heightened attentiveness to the empirical qualities of non-musical sound; his pieces negotiate in new ways the boundary between musical composition and the protean sonic world outside of music. This reorientation of musical listening participates in a broader questioning by early twentieth-century modernists of the nature of music and its sonic material.

In a review of 1895, Henry Gauthier-Villars described Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune as “musique de rêve,” a descriptor that has been attached to Debussy’s style ever since. Partly because of the importance of the Prélude within his compositional development, the distinctive sound of Debussy’s “dream music” has often been understood as a response to the hermetic and difficult literary style of French Symbolists, especially that of Stéphane Mallarmé. Yet Gauthier-Villars’s appellation of “musique de rêve” also invoked a specifically sonic (and largely forgotten) set of cultural reference points, an aural backdrop crucial for understanding Debussy’s early style in the 1880s and early 1890s—the widespread cultivation of the topos of reverie in French music in the final two decades of the nineteenth century. Settings of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé by Debussy and his young contemporaries around 1890 were infused with signifiers of dream and reverie that trace back to salon genres of the 1870s and that cross-pollinated with the harmonic language of the newly fashionable valse lente in the early 1880s. Hearing Debussy’s early works in the context of this reverie topos and its aural kinship to the popular valse lente sheds light on the extent to which the radical idiosyncrasy so vaunted by modernists was constantly evolving in tandem with—and could never truly free itself from—an aural culture defined by mass production, repetition, and cliché.

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Musicologists have long recognized that “sensation” played an important role in the musical culture of debussysme. Close readings of the writings of Debussy and his circle in the first decade of the twentieth century reveal that a key, though often overlooked, aspect of Debussyist sensation is a specifically auditory one—a special mode of attentive listening that claims a privileged knowledge of the natural phenomenon of sound. This account of sensation and listening, which both recapitulates and critiques central components of Helmholtzian sensory physiology, puts Debussy and Debussyism in dialogue with a network of late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century discourses on the limits of sensory knowledge and resultant problems of representation. Considering Debussyism in this light demonstrates the extent to which musical culture in this period negotiated a modernist crisis of representation salient across high-art culture around the turn of the twentieth century even as it inflected this problem specifically toward issues of sound and listening.