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<jats:p>Debussy disapproved of Nijinsky's 1912 choreography for Prélude à “L'Après-midi d'un faune,” perceiving dissonance between his fluid melodies and Nijinsky's angular, two-dimensional poses. Because of the patent differences between the music and choreography, commentary on the work has focused primarily on what makes the ballet and music distinct instead of how the ballet might transform our reading of the music; but the Faune ballet is best identified as an adaptation of Debussy's music in which the music is made to tell Nijinsky's version of Debussy's story. As an adaptation, Nijinsky's ballet creates a context that affords a fresh encounter with Debussy's work in a different medium, resetting our understanding, making new interpretations possible, and thus continuing the music's narrative legacy by varying its appearance.</jats:p> <jats:p>Nijinsky's notation of the dance reflects his novel conception of corporeal movement for the ballet, in which the planes of the body are dislocated from traditional organic formations in order to face constantly outward and to move in grooves along the stage. The dominating imagery of dislocation resonates with the polymetric climax in the B section of Debussy's work, which treats the orchestra like a body in pluralistic motion as it establishes a newly eclectic order of movement. Nijinsky's scenario provides a narrative framework to explain the implications of the polymetric event for the subsequent musical plot. The physicality of Debussy's work, which is also highlighted in Ravel's piano transcription, comes to the foreground of the ballet at a moment of crisis: in Nijinsky's story, the B section contains the only touch between faun and nymph as well as their tragic separation, which leads to the faun's emotional instability. This context renders Debussy's polymetric climax a symbol of both fulfillment and loss that affects the return of A-section material, where the flute theme splits into conflicting expressive characters that mirror the faun's emotional vacillation. Undergirding these dissociated themes is a subtle polymeter, which remains as a symptom of the tragic climax.</jats:p>

<jats:p>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.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The rise of military music around 1800 offers a suggestive context in which to examine the connections between science, music, and the military. Olinthus Gregory was representative of a community of reform-minded mathematicians and astronomers who sought to introduce greater precision and more mathematics into science, applying mathematical calculation to music and the sciences. His proposal to regulate tempo with a pendulum followed what was no doubt a familiar sight for him at the Woolwich Arsenal—the use of the pendulum by the drum-major to regulate marching music. Indeed, a number of such projects converged on Woolwich, an experimental space where new scientific and musical regimes emerged. The “calculating eye” secured authority by presenting science as objective and freed of emotions, but music's ability to evoke emotions was powerful. Thus, while music was a resource for the exact science promoted at the Arsenal, it could also threaten it.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The icon of the machine in early-nineteenth-century Britain was subject to a number of contemporary critiques in which pedagogy and the life of the mind were implicated, but to what extent was education in music composition influenced by this? A number of journal articles appeared on the topic of music and phrenology, bolstered by the establishment of the London Phrenological Society (1823), and its sister organization, the British Phrenological Association (1838). They placed the creative imagination, music, and the “natural” life of the mind into a fraught discourse around music and materialism. The cost of a material mind was a perceived loss of contact with the “gifts of naturer … the dynamical nature of man … the mystic depths of man's soul” (Carlyle), but the concept of machine was also invested with magical potential to transform matter, to generate energy, and can be understood as a new ideal type of mechanism. These confliciting ideals and anxieties over mechanism, as paradigm and rallying cry, are here situated in the context of music pedagogy during the second quarter of the century, with particular reference to amateur musicians and the popular appeal of phrenological “exercise,” and of devices such as Johann Bernhard Logier's “chiroplast.”</jats:p>

<jats:p>In some descriptions from the first half of the nineteenth century, scientific categories are used syncretically to explain opera singers' talents, including their innate and acquired dispositions, and their effects on audiences. Phrenology sought to read on the surface of skulls the developments of cerebral zones that corresponded to various instincts, or to affective and intellectual faculties. According to the partisans of this “only true Science of the Human Mind,” one could thus explain any aspect of human activity and life. Franz Joseph Gall's followers applied these theories to music and musicians, which constituted one of their privileged fields of observation, still largely unexplored by historians and philosophers of science. The singer united the qualities of the musician and actor, and stimulated abundant illustrative material—biographical and anecdotal, portraits, busts, and prints. Phrenologists thus fueled specific discursive models of observation and enunciation among early-nineteenth-century operatic audiences, which reflected and nourished the media doxa. A series of French and English texts highlight the phrenological and physiological “conditions” necessary to become an opera singer, and the combinations suited to a particular type of music. These sources contributed to the processes of operatic creation and reception, and to the forging of new interpretations of singers' public images, as both exceptional artists and socially normalized individuals.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The development and rapid spread of the electric telegraph in the mid-nineteenth century were profoundly entangled with music in ways that are seldom if ever acknowledged. Particular emphasis is often placed on sound recording as enacting what Attali describes as “the moment when everything suddenly changed.” In fact, the telegraph anticipated several key premises of recording by decades. Its language is heard, on the one hand, in the direct imitation of Strauss Jr.'s Telegraphische Depeschen, and on the other, in François Sudre's development of a “universal musical language” to communicate across distance. Works by Berlioz and Georges Kastner reveal how the telegraph fed into conceptions of musical transcendence via Spiritualists and the Aeolian harp. The attendant emphasis on mind over body was extended through the employment by conductors of telegraph technology to control musicians across ever-greater distances. This apparent disembodiment of the telegraph carried threatening implications for those social or ethnic groups aligned with the body, including performers. However, as Marshall McLuhan suggests, electricity was also primarily a “tactile” medium, and sensitivity to the telegraphic signals in art music therefore also entailed a new appreciation of the powerful role of embodied performers. Listening for the sounds of the telegraph in music of the mid-nineteenth century thus both enriches our appreciation of the historicity of these works and offers new perspectives on the negotiations between embodiment and transcendence that continue to underpin this repertoire.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The Cyclorama opened in London in 1848 with a representation of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that reportedly terrified audiences with its realistic aural and visual effects. During the first half of the century Londoners had been confronted with a rapid succession of revolutions in scientific thought, which needed to be assimilated into the emotional as well as the intellectual structures of public life. The geologist Charles Lyell had recently explained earthquakes and volcanic activity in a manner that fundamentally changed public understanding of the history of the earth, and in so doing challenged the religious narratives that had formerly underpinned it. The Cyclorama invited the spectator to confront such destruction in this new light: the frighteningly immersive visual and aural effects and the comforting narratives offered by accompanying musical excerpts (from works by Auber, Beethoven, and Rossini) were crucial to the shaping of the experience, and can be understood in the context of other artistic and poetic responses to Lyell's proposals. The music helped to articulate something of the competing perspectives on the crisis of faith that was exercising the intelligentsia at mid-century and offered a conduit for both emotional and intellectual responses.</jats:p>