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.

By the early 1950s, Boulez became known for his controversial and outspoken statements, his notorious snipes at non-serial but otherwise progressive contemporaries, creating a rift that divided French composers into competing factions. Jolivet, Dutilleux and Ohana, as well as others represented not only at Darmstadt and Donaueschingen but also the Warsaw Autumn Festival as leading figures in French contemporary music, found themselves excluded from the Concerts du Domaine musical and subject to what has been called the Boulezian ‘aesthetic of refusal’. Contextualising these issues, this chapter considers Jolivet’s influence on the young Boulez, their subsequent rupture in the very public affaire de scandale that followed and Boulez’s later reconciliations. Compositional common denominators linking particular works of Ohana and Dutilleux with Boulez are also explored in relation to Debussy as well as non-serial dodecaphonic techniques and the style incantatoire to reveal closer aesthetic links than any may have wished to admit.