Marnold

Abstract One of the most vociferous of Debussy’s early defenders, Jean Marnold, the critic for the Mercure de France, bolstered his account of Debussy’s music with appeals to the acoustic discoveries of Hermann von Helmholtz. Debussy’s unconventional uses of seventh and ninth chords, Marnold claimed, represented the “artistic confirmation” of Helmholtz’s theories. Widely influential in early Debussy criticism, Marnold became a conduit through which recent developments in German acoustics and music theory were disseminated into Parisian musical culture. The technical nature of his arguments also instigated controversies within Debussy criticism, most notably with the homme de lettres Camille Mauclair. Marnold’s responses to these controversies demonstrate a sustained, and distinctively debussyste, engagement with a problem that had wide salience in musical discourse around the turn of the twentieth century: how to conceptualize the nebulous space between physiology and culture in which musical listening happens.