ABSTRACT
Deeply inspired by the arabesque, Claude Debussy used the melodic figure—with its soft dynamics, musty timbre, metric instability, short rhythmic values, and narrow range—to evoke mythical images in Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894) and Syrinx (1913). Although musical arabesque faded in popularity with the rise of neoclassicism, it did not die with Debussy: the figure appears prominently in music by Edgard Varèse, Olivier Messiaen, André Jolivet, and Pierre Boulez, all of whom appropriated the melodic line to serve innovative manipulations of musical pitch, time, and space. Building on Gurminder Bhogal’s scholarship, this chapter shows the melodic arabesque’s continued significance in the modern and postmodern eras. The first section traces its translation to music through art, aesthetics, and literature in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The second section introduces Debussy’s influential melodic arabesque idea, focusing on conventional and late archetypes. The third section shows radical reenvisionings of Debussy’s approach in Varèse’s Amériques (1918–1921), Messiaen’s L’Ascension (1932–1933), Jolivet’s Incantation ... Pour que l’image devienne symbole (1937) and Boulez’s Mémoriale (…explosante-fixe… Originel) (1985). This avant-garde appropriation of arabesque extends beyond music, stimulating a broader discussion of the ornament’s role in the twentieth-century quest for absolute art.
