Draft:Sylveline Bourion

Sylveline Bourion is a Canadian writer and professor of musicology, renowned for her research on Debussy.

Biography Sylveline Bourion, originally from France, was born in Besançon. In 2003, her research on the duplication of musical phrases in the works of Claude Debussy caught the attention of Jean-Jacques Nattiez. The results of her study were published in 2011. Using a military metaphor of the phalanx, she found that 70% of Debussy's sonic material is duplicated, meaning Debussy systematically doubles each melodic phrase. Italian musicologist Frederico Lazarro, a specialist in the cultural history of music, viewed her work as a continuation and deepening of Nicolas Ruwett's 1962 studies on Debussy.

During her doctorate, Bourion also wrote academic articles for the journal Circuit: Musiques contemporaines on various composers, including the Canadian Yves Daoust, and published short stories and critiques in literary journals such as Contre-jour and the musical journal OICRM on musicology works.

After graduating, she began teaching music analysis at the Faculty of Music at the University of Montreal in 2014. She expanded her research to include other composers known for repetition and duplication techniques, such as Bach and Bartók, concrete music, and the relationships between music and literature.

Her essay "La Voie romaine" won the Governor General's Award for French-language non-fiction in 2022. This autobiographical essay brought her into the public eye, revealing that she could write before she could speak. In 2024, her essay on tonal language was shortlisted by her publisher for the France Musique Book Prize, although it did not make the final list.

Awards and Nominations 2022: Governor General's Literary Award for French-language non-fiction, for her autobiography "La Voie romaine," awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Publications Analyser le langage tonal, Librairie philosophique Vrin, "MusicologieS" series, 2023 (ISBN 978-2-7116-3047-9) La Voie romaine, Éditions du Boréal, 2022, 192 pages (ISBN 9782764626870) Le style de Claude Debussy: duplication, répétition et dualité dans les stratégies de composition, Vrin, "Musicologies" series, 2011 (ISBN 978-2-7116-2370-9)