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<jats:p>The second performance of Debussy's String Quartet, given by the Ysaye Quartet on an all-Debussy program during the 1894 salon of "La Libre Esth&amp;#x8e;tique" in Brussels, offers an ideal context for a critical reexamination of his musical and aesthetic affinities at this pivotal moment. In the first place, a view to the salon's other three concerts, which honored Beethoven alongside recent works by Societe Nationale composers, encourages reconsideration of Debussy's own response to the "great tradition" in the work he ironically designated "Opus 10." But at the same time, due regard to his other contemporaneous compositional obsessions, as exemplified in the works programmed alongside the Quartet, raises the question as to how such self-conscious dialogue with Classical models related to more pressing, post-Wagnerian musical negotiations. Pursuit of this question through analysis of the first movement's reconfigured sonata form ultimately suggests ways to distinguish, from amid the myriad post-Impressionist artists on view in the "Free Aesthetic" salon itself, those painters whose visual explorations most tellingly paralleled Debussy's own "games" with musical syntax and expression in the early 1890s.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The popularity of the cake walk among Parisians in the early 1900s is usually attributed to the dance's assumed racial signification. Scholars have argued that the cake walk, owing to its African American origins, was welcomed by Parisians as iconic of a racial "other," a signifier of the primitive, uncultured, and grotesque. This article proposes an alternative reading, setting the standard scholarly line against other, more subtle impressions of the cake walk's cultural import. A consideration of popular response to the dance--on stage, on film, and in the circus arena--reveals Parisian tastes not only for distinct styles of gesture but for American chic, athleticism, and popular participation, as well as the world of the "other." These connotations invite us to consider afresh what is perhaps the most celebrated cake walk of the period, Debussy's "Golliwogg's cake walk" (1908), known particularly for its quotation of Wagner's Tristan. Debussy's piece, I argue, has a more complex significance than that of a mere canvas on which to poke fun at Wagner or a straightforward reference to a minstrel doll. By means of various cultural and aesthetic nuances, it suggests a persona shaped by buffoonery, slapstick, despondency, and irony: in short, a persona identified with that fetish of modernist art, the clown.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article examines the degree to which characters in Wagner's Ring might be heard to control the orchestra for specific rhetorical purposes. Using Edward Cone's work as a starting point, I adopt a "fully diegetic" perspective in which music is understood as a physical presence in the Ring, a continuous tissue of sound that can be altered, shaped, and re-created according to a given character's conscious or unconscious intentions. An analysis of Die Walkure, act III, sc. 3, clarifies the approach.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article develops what Deleuze and Guattari call an assemblage around Debussy's L'Isle joyeuse in order to account for its signifying power in terms of territory, time, and desire. An assemblage is a multiplicity that territorializes natural, cultural, biological, and artistic phenomena in search of objectives that are fueled by desire. In this article, the assemblage around L'Isle joyeuse begins with a study of the interpretive aporias concerning time and place in Watteau's Le Pelerinage a l'Isle Cithere, a putative inspiration for Debussy's piano piece. After a discussion of the parallels between Watteau's Cythera paintings and Debussy's L'Isle joyeuse, the article turns to the problem of apotheosis in the latter work, using Chopin's Barcarolle as an intertext. The article turns next to Debussy's compatriot, Bergson, whose early philosophical writing conceives of time as duration, freed from spatial metaphors. From the Bergsonian perspective, we can hear Debussy's piano piece as a musical correlate to a conception of time far from the linearity of space. The article concludes with a discussion of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus with particular emphasis on their ideas about chaos and ecstasy, illustrating how the desire and fulfillment in L'Isle joyeuse renew themselves as they participate in assemblages.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Critics have long viewed Mahler's Sixth Symphony in A Minor (1904) as the composer's consummate essay in musical tragedy or negativity, one with deeply personal implications. Its enormous finale draws together materials from all the preceding movements and enacts a terrible conflict ending in failure. Yet few studies have looked beneath the work's bombastic rhetorical-expressive surface to explore how its negativity might be reflected in its tonal, formal, and thematic processes. This study sets out to link that negative expressivity to a breakdown of what Adorno called the "novelistic" character of Mahler's symphonies. For Adorno, Mahler pioneered a new, emancipatory symphonic idiom, one that liberated its musical materials from the dictates of preconceived formal totalities. Unlike the Classical symphony, where the parts exist for the sake of a symmetrical, tightly knit whole, the "novel-symphony" follows no predetermined path. Instead, it unfolds according to the dictates of its constituent elements, realizing its unique form from the "bottom up" rather than the "top down."Yet (as Adorno suggests) in the finale of the Sixth this integrating totality returns with a vengeance. We can read the movement as a clash between Adorno's novelistic and Classical paradigms, a showdown between the impulsive freedom of certain recalcitrant thematic elements on the one hand, and the increasingly punitive demands of rigid minor-mode sonata on the other. This drama--one that caricaturizes "classicism" itself as a repressive or stifling force--plays out on both formal and thematic levels. Several writers have noted the claustrophobic effect created by Mahler's incessant recycling of certain key motives, an "inescapable" coherence in which the organicist imperatives of the grand tradition themselves become corrupt and, ultimately, corrosive. As these generic, subthematic particles proliferate, the movement's "novelistic" themes--those seeking to subvert the strict sonata--are systematically denuded of the differentiating features and dissolved beyond recognition. In the end, the movement's infamously brutal minor-mode conclusion reveals itself to be the culmination of a musical plot spanning the entire movement, one that gathers its many details into an inexorably tragic narrative whole.</jats:p>