Click to listen to Arabesque 1 by Claude Debussy."The French impressionist composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918) linked the romantic era with the twentieth century. From the early age of ten until he was twenty-two he studied at the Paris Conservatory, where his teachers regarded him as a talented rebel. In 1884 he won the prestigious Prix de Rome, which subsidized three years of study in Rome; but he left after two years because he lacked musical inspiration away from his beloved Paris.
"Influences on Debussy's work included several visits to Russia, where he worked as a pianist for Tchaikovsky's patroness, Nedezhda von Meck, and formed a lifelong interest in Russian music. He was also influenced by the Asian music performed at the Paris International Exposition of 1889, and by the ideas and music of Richard Wagner, which were having a profound effect in France and both attracted and repelled him.
"For years, Debussy led an unsettled life, earning a small income by teaching piano. His friends were mostly writers, like Stephanie Mallarme whose literary gatherings he attended regularly. He was little known to the musical public and not completely sure of himself, though he composed important works including his String Quartet (1893) and the tone poem Prelude to "The Afternoon of a Faun" (1894). But his opera Pelleas and Melisande (1902) marked a turning point in his career: although the critics were sharply divided over it, it soon caught on, and he was recognized as the most important living French composer.
"Debussy led a personal life filled with financial and emotional crises, constantly borrowing money ( he had a craving for luxury) and having tempestuous love affairs. He was not gifted as a conductor and hated appearing in public, but to maintain his high standard of living he undertook concert tours and presented his music throughout Europe. He died in Paris in 1918.
DEBUSSY'S MUSIC
"Like the French impressionist painters and symbolists poets, Debussy evoked fleeting moods and misty atmosphere, as the titles of his works suggest: Reflets dans l'eau ((Reflections in the Water, Nuages (Clouds), and Les Sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir (Sounds and Perfumes Swirl in the Evening Air). He was often inspired by literary and pictorial ideas, and his music sounds free and spontaneous, almost improvised. His stress on tone color, atmosphere, and fluidity is characteristic of impressionism in music.
"Tone color truly gets unprecedented attention in his works; they have a sensuous, beautiful sound and subtle but crucial changes of timbre. The entire orchestra seldom plays together to produce massive sound; instead there are brief but frequent solos. Woodwinds are prominent; strings and brasses are often muted. In his music for piano --which includes some of the finest piano works of the twentieth century-- he creates hazy sonorities and uses a rich variety of bell and gong like sounds.
"Debussy's treatment of harmony was a revolutionary aspect of music impressionism. He tends to use a chord more for its special color and sensuous quality than for its function in a standard harmonic progression. He uses successions of dissonant chords that do not resolve. (When young, Debussy was asked which harmonic rules he followed; he replied, simply, 'My pleasure.') He freely shifts a dissonant chord up or down the scale; the resulting chords characterize his style.
"Debussy's harmonic vocabulary is large. Along with traditional three- and four-note chords, he uses five-note chords with a lush, rich sound. Chord progressions that were highly unorthodox when Debussy wrote them soon came to seem mild and natural.
" 'One must drown the sense of tonality,' he wrote. Although he never actually abandoned tonality, he weakened it by avoiding progressions that strongly affirm the key and by using scales in which the main tone is not emphasized. He turned to the medieval church modes and the pentatonic scales heard in Javanese music. A pentatonic scale is a five-tone scale, such as that produced by the five black keys of the piano in succession: F#-G#-A#-C#-D#.
"Debussy's most unusual and tonally vague scale is the whole-tone scale, made up of six different notes each a whole step away form the next. Unlike major and minor, the whole-tone scale has no special pull from ti to do, since its tones are all the same distance apart. And because no single tone stands out, the scale creates a blurred, indistinct effect.
"The pulse in his music is sometimes as vague as the tonality. This rhythmic flexibility reflects the fluid, unaccented quality of the French language, and in fact he set French to music very sensitively. He composed fifty-nine art songs, many of which are set to symbolist poems.
"Although not large, Debussy's output is remarkably varied; in addition to his opera and art songs it includes works piano, orchestra, and chamber ensembles. Echoes of his music can be heard in the works of many composers of the years 1900-1920; but no other musician can so fairly by described as an impressionist. Even the composer most similar to him, his younger French contemporary Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), wrote music with greater clarity of form. Debussy's style was both a final both a final expression of romanticism and the beginning of a new era."
The above is from Music an Appreciation by Roger Kamien, Brief Edition, McGraw Hill Companies, Inc. Pages 241-244.
