An inscrutable man, born in a working-class family and yet aristocratic in his tastes and values; a self-defining composer who both built on and went beyond the techniques and aesthetics of the times; and an emblem of France, at home and abroad, since his death in 1918--Claude Debussy (b. 1862) and his music have continued to fascinate and elude us. Remaining mysterious, after all, was a personal as well as musical ideal. Did he not once tell a critic, "When will people respect our mystery. even to ourselves?" (1) More than a hundred dissertations have been written, starting with Archibald T. Davison's "The Harmonic Contributions of Claude Debussy" (Harvard, 1908). Recently, new histories have shed light on what French identity meant to Debussy and Debussystes; monographs, largely analytical, have focused on individual works, genres, and theoretical approaches; and three short books have been written for the general public. (2) But since Francois Lesure's "critical biography" of 1994, (3) there has been no new full-scale scholarly examination of the composer and his oeuvre.

The project to understand Debussy and his music--largely collective--began with Numero special consacre a la memoire de Claude Debussy, ed. Andre Suares, Revue musicale 2 (1920). Then came the 1962 centenary, with the founding of the Debussy Museum in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, an exhibition at the Bibliotheque nationale de France, another special issue of Revue musicale, an international symposium, and performances in Paris and abroad.4 Research on Debussy grew more international after an American, Margaret G. Cobb, founded the Centre de documentation Claude Debussy in Paris in 1972, (5) Lesure created the Cahiers Debussy in 1974, publishing its articles in English and French, and American Musicological Society (AMS) sessions on the composer in 1982 and 1985 gave rise to a sense of community among Anglophone Debussy scholars. Since 1985, they have produced seven of the sixteen volumes of the new Debussy Oeuvres completes, and edited seven multiauthored books on the composer (6)--fitting as the composer was quite the Anglophile.(7) Moreover, Debussy has increasingly been a subject of discussion at American Musicological Society/Society for Music Theory meetings since 2004, where special sessions were devoted to him in 2010 and 2012.

So it should not be surprising that, 150 years after Debussy's birth, celebrations have also been collective, communal, and international: four conferences (their proceedings forthcoming), all accompanied by performances, as well as a major exhibition in Paris traveling to Tokyo. (8) Colleagues from around the world have delivered over 150 papers (with few duplications). In the Paris colloque, dedicated to the memory of Lesure (hereinafter, Paris 2012), topics ranged from literary affinities, analysis, and historical performances, to politics, reception, and historiography; in Brussels (hereinafter, Brussels 2011) speakers focused on artistic and literary contexts; in Montreal (hereinafter, Montreal 2012) on Debussy's language and legacy; and in London (hereinafter, London 2012) on music and text. In addition, the 2011 meeting of the Congres Europeen d'Analyse Musicale (Rome) featured a Debussy session (hereinafter, Rome 2011).

This article reviews research over the past decade. Besides...