This chapter picks up on the idea of the mainstream, introduced in the previous chapter, and also the concept of ‘music worlds’, briefly discussed earlier in the book. It elaborates further upon both, developing a concept of a musical universe comprising both a mainstream and multiple alternative music worlds. The chapter concludes with an empirical demonstration of some of these ideas.

Continuing and further developing the theme of meaning from the previous chapter, this chapter explores how music is used by listeners, particularly in the context of their identity work, and how this affects their tastes. It is argued that our stronger musical preferences are often for pieces, artists or genres who have in some way become bound up with our identities and the ongoing work of maintaining them.

This chapter picks up and further develops the idea of ‘networks’, which has been introduced in earlier chapters. Drawing upon formal social network analysis and the body of literature associated with it, it explains how we might think about networks in relation to music, how and why they develop and why they are important. There is an extended discussion of social capital and its relevance to music.

The barline is a ubiquitous feature of musical notation. It appears throughout Debussy’s music, just as it does in the music of Mozart and Stravinsky. The barline has myriad functions and can produce diverse responses. It may be an audible component of musical notation or rather the trigger for an audible event or performers may go out of their way to render it inaudible. Debussy’s arabesque-like melodic lines and flowing parallel chords seem to invite the interpreter to overlook the barline and seek cues for agogic stress or accent elsewhere in the notation. However, a tendency on the part of some performers to delay the arrival of the first beat after a barline produces its own form of stress, which may not be supported by duration or accent. This chapter explores changing performance styles, drawing evidence from the earliest recordings of Debussy to the most recent.

Reading was one of Debussy’s favourite occupations, without doubt one of the activities that nourished and sustained him the most. Still, any attempt to uncover greater detail about the kind of reader Debussy actually was, remains a complicated, almost archaeological task. Although the sale of scores, manuscripts and several books sent to Debussy offers some leads, it does not make it possible to reconstruct their precise importance or to show their full diversity. In order to understand Debussy’s literary inclinations as fully as possible, it is thus necessary to examine other sources, such as letters, books sent to him, testimonies of friends, as well as the diaries and notebooks that have been miraculously preserved – notably those in which he noted references to works likely to interest him and even specific sentences that he particularly liked. By cross-checking these various elements, I sketch a portrait of a composer through one of his most essential passions.

With Debussy’s adoption of a markedly nationalist position at the onset of World War I, in appending the epithet ‘musicien français’ to his name, it was by no means evident during the years immediately following his death that he would, in time, become one of the most influential figures for later twentieth- and early twenty-first-century composers in France and elsewhere. While his music endured in the interwar years, his musical and aesthetic concerns were largely rejected or eclipsed. In 1956 Boulez identified Debussy as forming part of a peculiarly French axis of aesthetic modernists – Debussy-Cézanne-Mallarmé, ‘a solitary church spire’ and ‘an excellent ancestor’. This chapter investigates ways in which Debussy’s music and ideas implicated themselves within the work of composers active after 1945 from Messiaen, Jolivet, Dutilleux and Ohana through the work of Boulez and Barraqué to his continued influence on various branches of contemporary French composition, not least the Spectralists.