The music of Claude Debussy (1862–1918) is often described as “Impressionist,” borrowing a term from late nineteenth-century French painting. But Debussy also lived in a time of radical change in understandings of human psychology—an era of intense interest in the unconscious mind and in the physiological bases of perception and feeling. The radical nature of Debussy’s modernist music was a response to this fully embodied, material self as imagined by modern psychology.
Portrait of Debussy. Donald Sheridan, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons