Debussy seems like a good composer to start with, because he stands at the forefront of the impressionistic movement in music. In a good number of his works, he tries to capture the emotional impressions that nature made on him. He gave his works titles like La Mer (the Sea), Gardens in the Rain, Reflections in Water, and today's piece, Pagodes. Debussy wrote Pagodes after having heard Indonesian gamelan music performed at the International Exposition of 1899 and 1900. The gamelan is an orchestra consisting of gongs, bowed and woodwind instruments, drums, rattles, and metal marimbas struck with hammers. Some gamelan music seems to unfold without a conventional time signature and therefore has a mystical, trance-like feel to it. The music of the gamelan is based on the pentatonic scale, which we instantly recognize as typical of oriental music. It is fitting then that he called this piece Pagodas.

Pagodes is the first of the three pieces in Estampes. In these three pieces, Debussy tried to capture the feeling of three excursions to Asia, Spain, and France. The interesting thing is that these were purely imaginary voyages, taken in the composers frontal lobes, which in portraits of Debussy, appear abnormally large. Pagodes starts out with the piano tinkling away in a way that immediately makes me think of a stroll in a garden during or right after a Spring shower. The fauna is lush and dark green and we turn the corner and see a pagoda across a small pond. As we do, the piano grows louder imitating the crash of the gamelan gongs and the metallic keys of the marimbas. It turns peaceful again as we continue our stroll until we glimpse another pagoda, and then returns to the rain motif until it dies out in at the end.

This is almost anti-melodic music. It is a dialog between the pianist and the piano. It is perfect for sitting by the window on a rainy, late winter day.

Tonight, I looked up the quote above used in the Thurber cartoon. I discovered it came from a poem by Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon. Here are a few more lines from it:

For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom my blossom the spring begins.

I hope that you will soon start to feel the renewing energy of spring.

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