April 4, 2014: Debussy and the Aesthetics of Depersonalization

Guest Speaker
 Dr.  Benjamin Steege

Assistant Professor of Music,
Columbia University

Location: Humanities 2441

When José Ortega y Gasset diagnosed the new art of the post-World War I generation as an art of “dehumanization,” he celebrated Claude Debussy as a formative musical exemplar. But what would a “depersonalized” music sound like? And, more difficult, what attitude would one have been asked to adopt toward a compositional poetics that, ostensibly, defined itself in opposition to lived human experience? In the mid-1920’s, caught up in the heyday of early phenomenological method, Ortega and the philosopher Günther Stern-Anders sought to describe a new kind of musical attentiveness that, they supposed, would be adequate to the depersonalization of aesthetic experience. For both, unknown to one another but inspired by the same philosophical tradition, it was Debussy who had provided the ideal musical object on which to practice this mode of attention. Ortega’s notion of “outward concentration” (concentración hacia afuera) merits comparison with Stern’s sketch of an attitude of “letting oneself go” (sich gehen lassen) as salutary dispositions to adopt toward the emergent aesthetics.