Diagonal: An Ibero-American Music Review

Considering fin-de-siècle symbolism and its ideological landscape as a reaction against naturalism in the arts and against positivism in philosophy, this article seeks to examine the technical and conceptual features present in two pieces of contemporary vocal chamber music by Ruy Coelho (1889-1986). The examined works, 6 Kacides Mauresques — a cycle, apparently inspired by 10^th-century Iberian Arabic poetry translated into French by Franz Toussaint and published in Mercure de France in 1909 — and Sur la jetée d’Alexandrie — a piece composed after an excerpt from Aphrodite, a novel by Pierre Louÿs published in 1896 — were probably composed in the early 1910s. Given this historical context, the influence of Claude-Achille Debussy (specifically his Trois chansons de Bilitis) will be evaluated — particularly in the relation between the text and music, and in its erotic dimension.