Laloy

Abstract Louis Laloy, a close friend of Debussy and, along with Jean Marnold, one of his most prolific defenders in the Parisian press, drew from a wide range of intellectual influences in his writing on Debussy, intertwining his account of Debussy’s innovations with interests in musical archaism and exoticism. Like that of Marnold, Laloy’s writing engaged with recent ideas from the human sciences involving acoustics, sensory physiology, psychology, and affective experience; like Marnold, Laloy continually wrestled with questions of historical and cultural difference in his account of Debussy’s music. However, Laloy approached these questions very differently, shrouding Debussy’s music in a mystical haze that served as a rebuke to reductive scientific theorizing—even as Laloy’s account of Debussy had been uniquely enabled by the scientific discourse that was ostensibly under critique.