Aesthetic Reverberations across the Arts

Aesthetic Reverberations across the Arts: Exploring the Life and Music of Claude Debussy
Presented by Marie Rolf, the leading Debussy scholar of our time
Saturday, October 11, 2025, 3:30 PM

About the Lecture:
Claude Debussy once told an American journalist, “I am called a revolutionary, but I haven’t invented anything. (…) There is nothing new in art.” Professor Marie Rolf, pianist and the leading Debussy scholar of our time, will trace the artistic growth of Debussy from early compositions to his mature works. Encounter some of the most important friends and patrons, fellow composers, writers, visual artists, and aesthetic ideas that shaped Debussy throughout his life. Professor Rolf will play excerpts from the following works by Debussy:
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
Nocturnes (“Nuages” and “Fêtes”)
“Pagodes” (from the Estampes)
“Golliwog’s Cakewalk” (from Children’s Corner)
“En sourdine”
“Chanson espagnole”
Sonata for Violin and Piano

About Marie Rolf
Scholar, pianist, educator, and administrator, Marie Rolf is Professor Emerita of Music Theory and recently retired Senior Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at the Eastman School of Music. She is best known for her scholarship on French composer Claude Debussy, but her research interests range from the relationship between musical analysis and performance, keyboard skills, and the music and manuscripts of Debussy and Mozart, to the pedagogy of music theory. Rolf has translated and revised François Lesure’s seminal Claude Debussy: A Critical Biography (University of Rochester Press, 2019), and she is the sole American member of the editorial board for the critical edition of Claude Debussy’s works, the Œuvres complètes de Claude Debussy (40 volumes), published by Durand in Paris.
Rolf’s articles and reviews appear in the Cahiers Debussy, Intégral, the Mozart Jahrbuch, Music Theory Spectrum, The Musical Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Music, and MLA Notes, among other journals, and she has authored chapters in books such as Debussy’s Resonance, Regards sur Debussy, Rethinking Debussy, Berlioz and Debussy: Sources, Contexts and Legacies, Debussy and His World, Debussy Studies, and Haydn Studies. She is the editor of Debussy’s orchestral masterpiece La Mer, and a volume of early songs by the same composer. In 2004, Professor Rolf authenticated a completely “unknown” song by Claude Debussy, “Les Papillons,” publishing a transcription, facsimile, and monograph on the work (New York Public Library). She brought to light yet another unknown early song, “Séguidille,” releasing a critical edition of it in 2014 (Durand). She is also the editor-arranger of Mozart’s Rondo for Horn in E-flat, KV 371 (Bärenreiter), which is the first published edition of the work that incorporates sixty new bars of music that she discovered in 1991. This past summer, Bärenreiter released her critical edition and facsimile of an unknown work by Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn), the Ostersonate (Easter Sonata) for piano, a composition modeled in many ways on the Beethoven sonatas.
Professor Rolf has lectured in London, Paris, Tours, Geneva, Melbourne, Montreal, and throughout the United States. She has received research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, and she regularly serves as a reviewer of articles and grant applications for the NEH and various journals. In addition, she has concertized as a pianist, collaborating with musicians such as Marcia Baldwin, Charles Castleman, Jan DeGaetani, Brooks de Wetter-Smith, W. Peter Kurau, Robert Spillman, Millard Taylor, and Francis Tursi.
Under Rolf’s leadership as graduate dean at Eastman, new graduate degrees and diploma and certificate programs were developed in Jazz and Contemporary Media, Early Music, Opera Stage Direction, Conducting (Contemporary), Ethnomusicology, and Pedagogy. She chaired the interdepartmental committees that oversaw all graduate curricula and policies at Eastman, and she granted approximately 350 graduate awards and scholarships annually. In honor of her 27 years of innovative leadership and dedicated service to the Eastman School of Music, the graduate deanship has been endowed in perpetuity and named the Marie Rolf Dean of Graduate Studies.

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