Masters Thesis

Experiencing Debussy's sound: a phenomenological approach

This paper applies phenomenological concepts regarding music to concrete musical examples, namely the first movement of Debussy's La mer. It explores the compositional techniques inherent in his composition that govern how they present themselves to the consciousness of the listener, thereby affecting his or her perception. This phenomenological approach recognizes the experiential features of music and broadens the historically informed methods of analysis in adherence to the definition of music as an experience. The author of this paper adopts the views of the founding father of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, and the renowned researcher in the field, F. Joseph Smith. Of primary importance are the structures of time-consciousness that unify a musical work as a single phenomenon (called akoumenon by Smith), as the listener perceives music sounding in time. The philosophical discussion that constitutes the first half of this paper will be followed by the phenomenological analysis of Debussy's "De l'aube a midi sur la mer," using the procedure introduced in the musicologist Lawrence Ferrara's research.

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