Gendered Harmony and Unsung Collections: Two Debussy Rabbit Holes

ABSTRACT This review article on Mark McFarland's The Musical Relationship between Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky (2024) offers a critical reading of this recent text and treats its content as a springboard for the exploration of two issues untapped in existing musicological discourse. First, the essay considers the affiliations between gender and harmony in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, formulating a distinction between ‘structural‐extrinsic’ and ‘representational‐intrinsic’ modes of harmonic thought. Second, it introduces and considers the theoretical implications of a neglected but common pitch collection: the hyper‐hexatonic set class 9–12. It is argued that hyper‐hexatonicism may offer a valuable interpretative heuristic, allowing analysts to refine their understanding of polytonality and chromatic saturation in Debussy's music.