After Debussy

Julian Johnson is Regius Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, having earlier been a Reader at the University of Oxford and Lecturer at the University of Sussex. He was for many years an active composer, receiving professional performances and broadcasts in Europe, the USA and Japan, a background that continues to shape his musicological work. He has published widely on music and musical aesthetics from the late 18th century to the present, with a particular focus on the cultural and historical significance of musical modernism. His work is always shaped by questions of musical meaning and value, evident in an engagement with the philosophy of music, ideas of nature and landscape, and the relation of music to literature and visual art. In addition to being a regular invited speaker at international academic conferences, Julian is committed to fostering a wider public understanding of music. For the last 25 years he has been a frequent guest on BBC Radio and given numerous public talks for leading orchestras and opera companies. In 2005 he was awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association and, in 2013, became the first holder of the Regius Chair of Music at Royal Holloway. In 2017 he was elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy.

Prologue: Music and Language
Music, Logos, Musicology
After Debussy
The margins of philosophy

Part I: Saying Nothing

1. Sirènes
Wordless voices
Shipwreck and abyss
Constellation

2. Mélisande and the silence of music
Framing nothing
Orchestral voices
Being mute

3. Mallarmé and the edge of language
Breathing
Fold upon fold
Empty words

Part II: Appearing

4. Coming to presence
Apparition
Present absence
Evanescence

5. Mirrors
Reflection
Threshold
Echo

6. Taking place
Listening to landscape
Le jardin clos: dwelling in music
Landscapes without figures

Part III: Touching

7. The art of touch
Debussy at the piano
Bathers
Towards an erotics of music

8. Writing the body
L'écriture musicale
Imaginary bodies
The philosopher's body

9. Thinking in sound
The play of the sensible
The grammar of dreams
Music as knowing

Epilogue: Being musical
After words
Before words
The margins of music

Bibliography

Guide to discussion of individual works