This is another in my series of posts of transcriptions I have made for violin and guitar. The inspiration for these was the desire to have something to play with my violinist friend. We found the usual repertoire of Giuliani et al to pall rather quickly and she begged me not to make her learn the Paganini sonatas (though we have played a lovely little piece by Paganini that is not so technically difficult). So I started transcribing what I thought might work on violin and guitar. The two Shostakovich preludes I put up recently certainly qualify as does the piece I am putting up today, one of my favourite Debussy preludes "Des pas sur la neige" which translates as "Footsteps in the snow." this is from his first book of preludes for piano. Here is the transcription. Again, there is no fingering for either instrument. I have made as few changes as possible from the original. The guitarist will have to work out the fingerings for some passages as the harmonies get rather complex!
The score poses a couple of interesting philosophical questions as well. I am largely of the school of thought that instrumental music does not express garden variety emotions as such, but rather moods and atmosphere. But Debussy certainly challenges that with this piece. An integral part of the score are the textual expressive indications, one of which we run into at the very beginning. The tempo indication is not too bad: "triste et lent" which means "sad and slow" but what are we to make of the instruction for the accompaniment: "Ce rhythme doit avoir la valeur sonore d'un fond de paysage triste et glace"? "This rhythm needs to have the sonic value of a deep countryside sad and frozen"? Uh, ok, how does that effect how you are going to play this rather subtle rhythm? Whatever I am going to do with that rhythm likely can't be put into words, so how do the words Debussy wrote influence how we play? Good philosophical question which I do not have the slightest intention of answering in this post. The "sad" part can be expressed with a dragging or lethargic treatment, but the frozen? There is also a challenging instruction for the violin on page two where it says a melody should be played "Comme un tendre et triste regret." Again, the sad should be possible, but the tender regret? What I suspect performers do is to read the instruction and try the melody in different ways until it feels a bit like the text suggests.
In any case, this is an absolutely lovely piece and it works very well indeed on violin and guitar. Try it out and let me know what you think! Here is a performance on piano.
Let's have another look at Tom Service's comments on Debussy that we quoted yesterday:
The centenary is being well marked by BBC Radio 3, launched with a typically provocative edition of The Listening Service from Tom Service, hailing Debussy for his “visceral violence” as a “creator of nightmares” who was “more radical than Stravinsky”, while over recent days Donald Macleod has explored him in Composer of the Week (all available as podcasts and on iPlayer).
What is interesting here is the journalistic need to insist that in order for us to fully appreciate Debussy he has to be reconfigured as a "creator of nightmares" using "visceral violence." Tom is using a certain paradigm of progressive composition as a base assumption: progressive music must be avant-garde, it must be radical, violent and nightmarish. Now this certainly describes a number of 20th century composers such as Edgar Varèse, some of Stravinsky, perhaps even some Messiaen and certainly some Schoenberg and Berg. But Debussy? Good grief!
I think the best way to characterize Debussy is that he was astonishingly innovative in a lot of areas such as extensive use of pedals in all voices, parallel harmonies that are more chordal melodies, use of the whole-tone scale, bitonality, echoes of archaic musical techniques such as parallel fifths and plagal cadences, unprepared modulations and so on. But this is all cloaked in an extreme sensitivity to timbre and texture so that what strikes most listeners, even in the early reception of Debussy's music, is the great beauty of the music. You really have to deny your own ears to claim it is nightmarish or violent!
Here is one comment on the premiere of La Mer:
The piece was initially not well received. Pierre Lalo, critic of Le Temps, wrote: "I see no sea, I hear no sea, I feel no sea." The reason for negative reception was partly because of inadequate rehearsal and partly because of Parisian outrage over Debussy's having recently left his first wife for the singer Emma Bardac. But it soon became one of Debussy's most admired and frequently performed orchestral works, and became more so in the ensuing century.
Indeed, what separates Debussy from a lot of early 20th century composers is that he was welcomed by audiences almost from the beginning. Even though his diaphanous colors and textures took some getting used to, audiences responded with enjoyment.
So why does Tom Service struggle to make Debussy into some kind of fire-breathing radical? Because that is the only model for a great composer in the 20th century that he has. When we eliminated aesthetic judgement and therefore aesthetic quality from our critical vocabulary, we also eliminated anything other than sociology from our evaluations. If a composer outrages nice bourgeois audiences, then he must be good.
Let's listen to a fairly early piece by Debussy. This is his Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune which dates from 1894 so it isn't even 20th century yet. The performers are L'Orchestre symphonique de Montréal conducted by Charles Dutoit:
This kind of title is, of course, unashamed clickbaitery. The Internet loves lists, narcissism and polls and this combines at least two of those. I was on my way to a party yesterday and just about when it was due to begin, it started raining and the Debussy title just popped into my head: "Jardins sous la pluie" (Gardens in the Rain), because where I was going had a big garden. As a matter of fact, that piece is not a prelude, but the last movement of the suite Estampes. But then the thought "which Debussy prelude are you?" just popped into my head. When I lived in Montreal it would have been "Des pas sur la neige" of course.
Here are the complete titles of the Debussy preludes, two books, so twenty-four in all. Due to some ambiguity in the titles, there are even more possibilities. Think of it as being like the astrological signs or the Jungian personality types except more whimsical and musical (and just about as meaningful). So, which Debussy prelude are you? You might choose a title and then listen to the music to see if the music suits you. In the original edition, Debussy prints the score to each piece and at the end, puts the title, which I kind of like. So, go ahead, make your choice and let me know in the comments below. We have to do it this way because I don't know how to set up an online poll. But leaving a comment will be more interesting anyway.
If you chose the antepenultimate one in Book 2 I am going to be worried, though. A canopic jar was what the ancient Egyptians used to store the viscera of a mummy. Has to be the weirdest title ever for a piano prelude...
Book 1:
Danseuses de Delphes: Lent et grave (Dancers of Delphi)
Voiles: Modéré (Veils / sails)
Le vent dans la plaine: Animé (The Wind in the Plain)
Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir»: Modéré
("The sounds and fragrances swirl through the evening air")
Les collines d'Anacapri: Très modéré (The Hills of Anacapri)
Des pas sur la neige: Triste et lent (Footsteps in the Snow)
Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest: Animé et tumultueux (What the West Wind has seen)
La fille aux cheveux de lin: Très calme et doucement expressif (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair)
La sérénade interrompue: Modérément animé (Interrupted Serenade)
La cathédrale engloutie: Profondément calme (The Submerged Cathedral)
La danse de Puck: Capricieux et léger (Puck's Dance)
Minstrels: Modéré
Book 2:
Brouillards: Modéré (Mists)
Feuilles mortes: Lent et mélancolique (Dead Leaves)
La puerta del Vino: Mouvement de Habanera
Les fées sont d'exquises danseuses»: Rapide et léger ("Fairies are exquisite dancers")
Bruyères: Calme (Heather / town in Eastern France)
Général Lavine - eccentric: Dans le style et le mouvement d'un Cakewalk
La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune: Lent (The Terrace of Moonlit Audiences)
Ondine: Scherzando
Hommage à S. Pickwick Esq. P.P.M.P.C.: Grave (Homage to S. Pickwick)
Canope: Très calme et doucement triste (Canopic jar)
Les tierces alternées: Modérément animé (Alternating Thirds)
Feux d'artifice: Modérément animé (Fireworks)
Here is a clip with all of the preludes played by Krystian Zimerman:
Now wasn't that a clever way to trick you into listening to the Debussy preludes?
As a bonus, here is "Jardins sous la pluie" from Estampes. The performer is Sviatoslav Richter:
I'm most of the way through listening to this box of the music of Debussy.
It's not complete, but it has all the stuff you need to hear. I just finished CD 10, which is chamber music. All the remaining discs, except for one bonus disc of oddments, are vocal music: seven CDs of songs, the opera Pelléas et Mélisande and some choral music. I might have something to say about this surprisingly large quantity of vocal music afterwards, but for now, let me just say a couple of things about the first ten discs that contain most of the music that is well-known.
When I was a young listener I instinctively sought out the most esoteric kinds of music--as soon as I realized there was such a thing. I would read books on music that mentioned the wilder fringes of the avant-garde, or eccentrics like Gesualdo or Harry Partch and I would seek out their music. I suppose this aesthetic principle, which was never expressed consciously at the time, might be worded as "the greater aesthetic truth lies in the music that is the most out of the ordinary." There is a grain of truth there, of course, as the most common denominator music is probably not the highest quality.
But years later I ran into the writings of Donald Francis Tovey, the great English musicologist, who talked about the idea of "normality" in music. He used this idea to talk about the elemental nature of some of the music of Beethoven. And I also started to get an idea about the Classical style and how it gives us a kind of aesthetic standard. So slowly it dawned on me that probably the most important music, aesthetically, was not out there on the fringe somewhere, but central to music history. The quartets and symphonies of Haydn, the concertos and operas of Mozart, the piano sonatas, quartets and symphonies of Beethoven: this is where the real meat is.
Getting back to Debussy and setting aside the vocal music for the present, the "meat" of Debussy seems to lie with the piano music as that is where a lot of his energy was focused. Of the ten CDs of instrumental music six are devoted to the piano. The remaining four discs consist of three discs of orchestral music and one (1) disc of chamber music! This, combined with the fact that the box contains four discs of songs for voice and piano, points to the realization that Debussy is a composer who comes out of and is based in the salon. Here is a photo of Debussy in 1893, at the piano:
The songs for voice and piano and the solo and duo piano music were the bulk of his work as a composer. Added together they come to ten out of the eighteen discs. The surprising thing is that only ONE disc is devoted to what we usually think of as chamber music. This disc contains the early string quartet, the sonatas for violin and piano and cello and piano, the trio for flute viola and piano and the flute solo Syrinx. That's it, that's all the chamber music he wrote excluding the music for piano and voice and piano. I suspect that Haydn or Mozart might have written more chamber music than this in the course of a single weekend! One string quartet? My box of Haydn string quartets has 21 discs. Obviously the string quartet was either really unimportant in turn of the century France, or Debussy was a very bad string quartet composer. I have to say that it is not a particularly impressive piece. But it remains an interesting fact that Debussy wrote many, many songs, but almost no chamber music.
The classical song seems to have become important in Vienna in the late 18th century. There are hosts of lieder (German for "songs") by many composers and superlative examples by Schubert and later Schumann. This tradition continued in Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But it seems to have fallen on hard times lately. None of the chamber music series I am personally familiar with hires singers to do song recitals. But they hire a lot of string quartets. Of course the music world generally is dominated by popular song and a very large part of the classical musical world revolves around opera, but the classical song recital is just not very popular these days. I wonder if we could see a revival sometime soon?
Hauling this discussion back to what it is supposed to be about, the "normal" for Debussy in instrumental music is the music for solo piano and this repertoire is full of fascinating pieces both innovative and charming. Second to this are the equally colorful pieces for orchestra. The chamber music is, for Debussy, a fringe medium, so don't expect too much. Perhaps the most central of the central work of Debussy are the preludes for piano in two books of twelve pieces each. Let's have a listen. Here is Krystian Zimerman with all 24:
A while ago I put up a post that included a sentence something like this: "One of the first composers I fell in love with was Debussy." That is the kind of thing I've been used to saying for many years. But suddenly it struck me that the expression is a bit odd. Maybe it is because attitudes toward love (and sex) have changed in the last forty years. We seem to regard love in rather a more literal way these days. If you love someone you must be in a sexual relationship with them! So let me hasten to say that I have never had the slightest desire for Debussy in that way. But I love his music.
(I am thinking about writing a post about music and sex, but that is a different topic.)
I think that "love" in the sense I use the word above, implies a number of things. It assumes a certain amount of familiarity. You are not in love with a composer (or his music) that you don't know at all. Here are the piano duo ofMarina Porchkhidze & Vladimir Shinov playing Debussy's Six Épigraphes Antiques:
Another thing that is implied by being "in love" with a certain composer or certain pieces of music ("I love the piano music of Debussy, but I'm not so crazy about his orchestral music...") is a certain investment in the music. You are involved with it. I think this explains another phenomenon that I have noticed.
Occasionally I go to this restaurant that has a television that can access various music channels. I'm not familiar with the details as I cancelled my cable contract about ten years ago. But as I recall there are five or six different channels, each devoted to a different style or genre. For example, there is "classic rock", "lite classical" (yes, spelled like that), and "tranquillity" which is New Age noodling. This latter channel, which they often choose, I find a bit annoying. Not as annoying as a lot of other possibilities, mind you, but still annoying. Why? After all, this is music that is carefully crafted to be as innocuous as possible. Let me set it aside another similar phenomenon. I once was hospitalized for a few days with a kidney infection. For some reason, along with other medication, the doctors were giving me tranquilizers. I only realized this when I noticed that I had been aimlessly staring at the wall for half an hour, thinking of nothing. This is not something I am normally capable of doing. I realized that I had been given something and this made me uneasy and edgy. Yes, tranquilizers make me edgy! It's because they alter my normal mental state. I don't like being turned into a semi-vegetable!
The experience of New Age music or "tranquillity" is something similar for me. The music never goes anywhere. The harmonies have no real function, just washes of pastel color. There are no incisive rhythms or melodic ideas, just an aimless burbling. This I find annoying because harmonies should go somewhere. Imagine listening to someone give a speech who just wanders aimlessly, changing subject randomly. That is the feeling I get listening to New Age music. "For God's sake" I want to say, "do something, go somewhere, don't just sit there drooling to yourself!"
What is missing is an investment on the part of the composer/performer in some of the essential fundamentals of music: structure, continuity, direction and coherence. My stance towards music is to invest myself in it. When it refuses that possibility, I find it annoying.
Sometimes I ask people what kind of music they like and a typical response is "oh, I like all kinds of music." I am mature enough that I no longer bite their heads off: "whaddayamean? You can't possibly like all kinds of music!" Now I assume that what they mean is they like (some) music of all kinds of genres, which I do myself. But often what is really meant is that they are largely indifferent to music. This seems to me to be different from the situation thirty or forty years ago when I seem to recall that people were a little more invested in music, cared more about it. Perhaps those decades of merciless commercialization have had an effect.
I also wonder if the relentless dissemination of music over radio, television, iPod, laptop and home stereo also has an effect. I don't think you feel quite the same about music if it is constantly blasting at you from every corner. For many people today, I suspect that music is a kind of acoustic wallpaper, not something they notice the details of.
In November 1705 Johann Sebastian Bach, at the time only twenty years old, walked from his home in Arnstadt to Lübeck, a distance of some 250 miles. He was determined to meet and learn from Dietrich Buxtehude, the skilled composer and organist of Lübeck's Marienkirche. Walked! Now that is a serious investment in music. A friend of mine who is a guitarist and composer spends a good deal of his spare time reading through, on seven-string guitar, Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. As that was written for keyboard, this is not so easy.
Now, for the benefit of people that I might run into on future social occasions who are in dread that I might ask them "what kind of music do you like?" here are some useful responses:
Oh, I don't like music. I much prefer knitting.
Music? What is music?
I really like the later oeuvre of Guillaume Machaut.
Britney Spears' early works, before she went all commercial.
I like music with a backbeat.
Oh, man, I'm like totally into death metal!
Have you ever heard Blue Oyster Cult? Now that's music!
I just listen to whatever's playing.
Oh God, you're not going to make me listen to more Bach, are you?
Up until now I have just been filling in the background and context prior to actually saying something about Debussy and Ravel from the point of view of aesthetic quality. We tend to have a horror of aesthetic judgment in general and looking at the kinds of judgments that are often made, I can see why. So often a discussion starts with some outrageous claim and continues with more outrageous claims without ever trying to justify any of them. This is, I'm afraid, typical. It is a kind of "take no prisoners" journalism. Serious discussions, on the other hand, have the tendency to get lost in the details and avoid coming to any conclusions about quality. One of the main reasons I do this blog is to try and bridge the gap between professional understanding of music and popular perceptions.
We have been looking at and listening to several pieces by Debussy and Ravel. Are you starting to have opinions about them? If so this is good--aesthetic judgments should be neither too final nor too premature and they should emphatically come from exposure to the music and not from an ideological stance. Much of the problems with music and the arts in the last one hundred years come from rigid ideology. Just to get started, I was talking to an old friend of mine a few months back. She is an excellent established harpist. I just threw out the question of Debussy and Ravel to see what she would say. I proposed that while Ravel's music was charming and beautifully put together it was fairly superficial compared to that of Debussy. Her answer? "Yes, of course." She stated it as a foregone conclusion; as if anyone who had spent much of their life playing music by both Debussy and Ravel would come to much the same conclusion.
I agree with her. Let me see if I can find some examples that might demonstrate this. Ravel's music is brilliant and virtuosic, but the ideas are less compelling and less original than those of Debussy. You might go back and listen to all the pieces I have already put up here and here and here. I have previously put up a couple of posts on Debussy preludes, one on "Voiles" that I linked to before and another on "...des pas sur la neige". While there are a lot of similarities between Debussy and Ravel, I think that the closer you look at a piece like "...des pas sur la neige", the more different it will seem compared to music by Ravel. Let's have a listen:
Without getting too analytical, what distinguishes a piece like this from nearly any piece by Ravel is the presence of contrasting levels. There is the haunting little accompanying figure that begins the piece and occurs throughout, but over this Debussy has quite different levels: melodies, streams of harmonies that are rhythmically quite distinct. Ravel's music tends to be more homogeneous. The aesthetic effect is more basic and simple. With Debussy the layers and contrasts make for a more ambiguous and complex aesthetic effect. Many listeners might prefer Ravel for precisely these reasons, of course. And I don't want to suggest that complexity is always better than simplicity. It often is not. Now let's listen to a piece by Ravel for comparison. Here is "Ondine" from Gaspard de la Nuit:
Yes, there are different levels here as well--that is a particular technical strength of the piano, but what I hear is that the levels are well integrated and there is no real contrast of mood or aesthetic content between the levels. The piece is more one-dimensional than the Debussy. This seems to me to be a general difference between them. Ravel can be ravishing, but ravishing in pretty much one way. Debussy has more shades of contrasting effects and ideas.
I'm not setting out an aesthetic ideology here, by the way. I would not make these kinds of comments about, say, J. S. Bach. You can get contrasts sometimes with Bach, but where he reigns is in the effect of sublime inevitability: the music just had to be that way! This was impossible for both Ravel and Debussy because of where they came in music history. Bach inherited a harmonic structure that he could simply use and perfect. Ravel and Debussy came at a moment when harmony in general was becoming very difficult. This is why they sought ways of using harmony that were new such as the whole tone and octatonic scales. But both of these devices are cruder than 'common practice' harmony in that they offer less harmonic direction and variety. I think Debussy succeeds more profoundly (and had therefore much more influence) because his approach was subtle and complex. Debussy explored more new possibilities where Ravel tended to continue a lot of the basic rhythmic and harmonic textures that he inherited.
I could go on, looking for more examples and analyzing them, but I don't think it is necessary. I don't want to 'prove' too much! I would rather you explored a bit on your own. You may come to similar conclusions or you may not. In either case, why don't you tell me about it?
I've been laying out some of the context and background to these two composers. In the last post on the topic I talked about the aesthetic context for Debussy's music. Time to get back to Ravel. There is a significant connection between Ravel and Russian music. Rimsky-Korsakov, inspired partly by Liszt, started experimenting with symmetrical interval relations. One of these is the dominant ninth chord which forms a palindrome of intervals: M3 m3 m3 M3 or, in C major, G B D F A. Another was the octatonic scale that Rimsky-Korsakov started using to create fantastic or 'magical' musical effects. The octatonic scale, used by Rimsky-Korsakov, Ravel and others has a couple of points of overlap with the whole tone scale used by Debussy. As you can see, the two notes in common are E and B flat. In the example below, the upper scale is the whole tone scale and the lower one, the octatonic scale:
From looking at "Voiles" we learned that the only chords that the whole tone scale can generate are augmented ones, which is probably why Debussy moved to a pentatonic scale for the middle section. But the octatonic scale has a lot more possibilities. As it contains four minor thirds, diminished seventh chords are frequent. But you also have minor chords and major chords. Ravel tends to expand the orchestral and tonal resources of Rimsky-Korsakov as we can see in his use of "polychords" built on multiple roots in his Rapsodie espagnole of 1908. Listen especially to the double clarinet cadenzas around the 2:50 mark:
Unfortunately I have to stop here, so I will continue next time. In the meantime, have a listen to this lovely piano piece by Ravel written in memory of friends lost in the First World War. Here is the Tombeau de Couperin:
There are two main streams of modernism in Western European music: the German and the French. Debussy and Ravel, while not the originators, are certainly the first really important generation of modern French composers. It may help to understand what they were up to, to consider the thoughts of one of the theorists of the avant-garde, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883 - 1955). He attempted to describe a "new artistic sensibility" in these seven points:
to dehumanize art
to avoid living forms
to see to it that the work of art is nothing but a work of art
to consider art as play and nothing else
to be essentially ironical
to beware of sham and hence to aspire to scrupulous realization
to regard art as a thing of no transcending consequence
This is modernism opposed to the Teutonic transcendence of Wagner, Mahler and their successors. Ortega y Gasset was writing these points in the 1920s, but, as always, "the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk", Hegel's phrase describing the nature of philosophy: it only describes those things that have already come to pass. Modernism was born long before it was described. By phrases like "avoid living forms" and "dehumanize art" Ortega y Gasset meant that art should be artificial, not sweatily realistic.
The important predecessor to Debussy and Ravel was their compatriot, Erik Satie (1866 - 1925), who, as early as the 1880s was writing eccentric, cryptic pieces for piano that perfectly fulfilled the "new artistic sensibility" as Ortega y Gasset was going to describe it. Here is one example, the Gymnopédie No. 1:
Notice the attenuation of tonality: the two chords that seem to function as 'tonic' and 'dominant' both contain major sevenths. The mood is detached, scarcely human. The melody is remote, far from expressing any romantic ferment. These little piano pieces were scarcely known outside the immediate circle of the composer's friends until one of those friends, in 1896, published orchestrations of them. That friend was Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918). Here is his orchestration of that first Gymnopédie:
One piece by Debussy that shows the influence of Satie (and probably some Russians as well who had been exploring the outer fringes of harmony for quite some time) was the Sarabande from the suite Pour le piano of 1894:
If you wanted to demonstrate the anti-Wagnerian new aesthetic, this would do very well. Somewhat dissonant harmonies, like the half-diminished chord that begins the piece, are not resolved as they should be, but simply moved around. The erotic torment of Wagnerian harmony is that there must be the leading tone, whose inevitable resolution to the tonic is delayed as much as possible. Debussy throws all this aside and simply writes charming sounding chords with no need of resolution--or leading tones, either! The work of art is nothing but a work of art and it is play and nothing else. For a more advanced example of where Debussy's harmonic explorations would take him, see my previous post on the 1909 prelude "Voiles" here.
I notice that my post on Bach vs Beethoven keeps attracting readers so that now it is one of the top ten posts. I should do my own list of my top ten posts--hey, that sounds like a good idea for a post...
But since I'm wondering why people are seeking out that post on Bach and Beethoven, I'm going to pick another pair of composers. These two, Debussy and Ravel, are always paired, like Laurel and Hardy or Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Now why is that? Just because they are French and lived at roughly the same time? Because they were the leading French composers of their day? Because they both wrote brilliant music for piano? Because they are both known, for better or worse as "impressionists"? Here is one writer pointing out the differences between them:
Ravel has been described as a Swiss watchmaker, such is the precision of
his notation, the clear intent of every dot, every line, every slur.
Debussy could never be mistaken as a time-keeper. Many of his pieces
could lose their barlines or time-signatures without losing their way.
You always see the individual drops of rain in Ravel's mists, whereas
Debussy invites us to look at the garden beyond, blurred by the
moisture.
This is one of those examples of clever journalism that seems to tell us so much, but actually tells us almost nothing. The problem is metaphor. And by the way, there is no difference between the 'precision' of Ravel's notation and that of Debussy. They are both precise in exactly the way required for the music. The sentence "Debussy could never be mistaken as a time-keeper" makes little sense. All music is about time.
Several years ago an old and dear friend of mine pointed out that a piece of writing I had sent him was littered with metaphors, which he thought greatly detracted. I was very surprised because I had the vague idea that metaphors were a Good Thing. Why, just look at the metaphors in Homer! But in Homer, and much poetry, metaphors are used rather differently than in tossed-off prose such as above. "Swiss watchmaker"? "Individual drops of rain"? "The garden beyond"? The great appeal of metaphor in journalism is that it allows the writer to suggest meaning without actually using any technical terms which might not be understood by everyone. In other words, it makes one seem literary without actually telling us anything.
I want to do a few posts on Debussy and Ravel because as soon as I started researching them I realized that it was going to take a bit more space than I first thought. Debussy and Ravel lie at the beginnings of 20th century modernism, but, unlike many of the other figures in that movement, they are French, not German and so have a different approach to musical aesthetics and construction. Not for them is the Germanic urge to systematization that we see in Schoenberg and Webern. Instead, there is more of a transformation of traditional harmonic practice through the use of whole tone and octatonic scales, through the blurring of harmony and the clarity of orchestration. Let me start off with a couple of examples. First, an early piano piece by Ravel entitled Jeux d'eau which I think I would translate as "play of the water" rather than "water games". It is a brilliant piece of piano writing and next time I am going to dig into how it is put together. Surprisingly it is laid out in standard sonata form with exposition of first and second themes, development and recapitulation. Why it sounds so different from a classical sonata movement is due to the kinds of harmony used. There are virtually no cadences and the leading tone, D#, is used mostly as a decoration of the tonic! I suggest listening a few times to the music with the score to get the flavor of the sound in your ear.
Lovely, isn't it? The crystalline clarity of the arpeggios combines intriguingly with the piquancy of the harmonies. More tomorrow...
The Homenaje a Debussy is a piece for guitar by Manuel de Falla that is, of course, an hommage to Debussy. It was first published in the Revue Musicale along with a number of other pieces in a special issue devoted to Debussy, the greatest French composer since Couperin and Rameau. Here is the piece in a wonderfully sensitive performance by Oscar Ghiglia:
But this post is actually going to be not about the piece by Manuel de Falla, but itself another hommage to Debussy.
Early on, in 1880, Tchaikovsky commented on Debussy's Danse bohémienne that it was "a very pretty piece, but it is much too short. Not a single idea is expressed fully, the form is terribly shriveled, and it lacks unity." This is in a long line of unkind critical comments by one composer about another. From the point of view of Tchaikovsky, this is probably a good description of Debussy's music! Debussy was perhaps the key transitional figure from the 19th century to the 20th. His music may not seem revolutionary because it is indeed "pretty", meaning charming and colorful, but incrementally it is a huge departure from the structures of 19th century music. Let's hear an example. This is the first of Deux arabesques from 1888 to 1891.
The obvious main influence here is another resident of Paris,Frédéric Chopin, who died in 1849. Debussy studied with a pupil of his. The influence is in things like the grace and charm, the triplets against the regular eighth notes and the delicacy of the piano writing. A lot of the effect of Debussy is hard to capture with mere technical analysis. Once you have noted his use of whole tone scales, pentatonic scales, modes and so on, you have scarcely identified what makes Debussy unique and influential. As well as writing wonderfully for the piano, Debussy soon showed himself to be a master of orchestral color. His three Nocturnes of 1899 are an excellent example. The opening gesture of the first piece, Nuages (Clouds), captures the amorphous nature of clouds so well. This is just not the kind of thing a 19th century composer would have wanted to do and also the kind of thing that got Debussy branded an "impressionist" even though he hated the term. Here is a performance of Nuages:
I wrote a bit about the harmony of Nuages in this post. A few years later in 1903/05 Debussy wrote a "symphonic poem" entitled La Mer (The Sea), the closest he got to a symphony. Here is a complete performance of La Mer:
There are certainly precedents for this depiction of a natural land(sea)scape; we find them in Vivaldi's Seasons, Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, Berlioz in various places and Wagner in his depiction of the Rhine. But in Debussy it is a bit more detached, not part of a human narrative. It is also freer, less tied to a conventional musical structure. You might say that Debussy perfects the representation of nature in music. Another influence on Debussy was his hearing of Javanese gamelan musicduring the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. His piano piece Pagodes was one result:
A spectacular collection of piano pieces from 1910 was his first book of Preludes for piano. Again, the influence of Chopin is evident. But these are uniquely Debussyesque. A particularly charming example isLa fille aux cheveux de lin (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair) with its roaming about a minor/minor seventh chord--much too lovely to be a piece of 20th century music?
Debussy disliked too much analysis of music as he thought it tended to kill the magic. He said, "Let us at all costs preserve this magic peculiar to music, since of all the arts it is most susceptible to magic." I couldn't agree more. In his last works, such as the Cello Sonata of 1915, he began to write in a more austere, abstract style:
Debussy's music, with its ever-present sensibility and elegance, always seems to have a touch of that mystery and magic...
This being the end of the year the media feel they have to do some summing up. Here are three prominent music critics discussing their choices for best and worst classical music of the year. Interesting to read and it drew my attention to this performance, which Anne Midgette highly praised:
Yes, they really are performing the piece from memory which you almost never see orchestras do. There are good reasons why they don't. But I suspect that this was an experiment that everyone, including the audience, enjoyed. A university orchestra can do things that a professional orchestra cannot. They have certain freedoms that professional orchestras don't have. For example, student orchestras are not paid and do not have the demands of a heavily-scheduled concert season to meet. They can decide to spend a whole month, or a whole term focusing on one piece, memorizing it, learning a choreography and so on. A professional orchestra typically has to learn two hours of music every week. For them, the option of memorizing is simply not available, let alone learning choreography!
Here is a thought: could they do this with a more demanding piece, such as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring? I suspect not. First of all, musicians and dancers tend to think about and feel and express rhythms quite differently. Typically musicians are not good dancers and vice versa. The students in the video above are not professional dancers and the choreography was designed with this in mind. Apart from moving about, walking in stylized ways, lying down and doing a tiny bit of jumping, they really don't execute any difficult dance movements. The Rite of Spring would demand much more and much more aggressive dancing and the shortcomings of those who are primarily musicians would be obvious. Also, I doubt if the ensemble would hold together--the Rite is difficult enough when you have the score in front of you and a conductor beating time. Also, it is one thing to memorize twelve minutes of not very difficult music as opposed to forty minutes of very difficult music.
The reason that orchestras do not typically wander about on stage, playing from memory is that it is all too easy to err. With your part in front of you, sitting beside your fellow violinists or flutists, if you do err, it is easy to get back in sync with your colleagues. In a performance such as the one above, there is no room for error! This is, therefore, something of a tour de force--something you can bring off with a short piece of modest difficulty and unlimited rehearsal time. Imagine trying to do this with three rehearsals!
In a lot of pieces, precision of rhythm and tuning would be greatly hampered by, for example, the horns wandering around far away from one another. There is a reason the horns sit together!
So I suspect that, while interesting and entertaining, this is not the kind of thing that has any chance of catching on with orchestras. There is also an aesthetic problem: the creators of this describe the movement as bringing out the "meaning" of the piece (this is in another video clip of a rehearsal, also available on YouTube). Now of course, this just means that they have tried to find movements that are analogues to the musical ideas. You could do it in a thousand different ways. Music doesn't have 'meaning' in this sense. If we look at the example of pop music over the last twenty years, I think we can see that the more the visual aspect is highlighted, the less interesting the music becomes.
One of the first composers I fell in love with (now why does that sound strange?) was Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918). A friend's dad had a stack of old, scratchy LPs, one of which was La Mer, for orchestra. I still tend to hear those scratches when I listen to La Mer! The music sounds almost naked without them. Debussy hated his music to be called 'impressionist', though he and Ravel seem to be tagged with that term and linked inevitably to their painterly compatriots like Claude Monet. It is partly their own fault because if you call a piece for orchestra La Mer (The Sea) and title the first movement, for example, "From Dawn to Noon on the Sea" and if you write swirling, colorful music with a constantly shifting flow, then perhaps you have brought it on yourself!
But I can see what bothered Debussy. Calling his music 'impressionist' really doesn't tell you a thing about it. Debussy is a very subtle composer who falls exactly on the transition from 19th century romantic music to 20th century modern music--in fact, he had a lot do with with making that transition. Debussy is often described as the most influential composer on 20th century music. In 1909-10 from December to February he wrote a book of 12 preludes for piano and followed this with another book three years later. In this he is taking his place in a long tradition starting with Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (24 preludes and fugues in all the keys) and continuing with Chopin's 24 preludes, also in all the keys, but arranged differently from Bach. Debussy's preludes are not in all the keys. In some it is hard to be sure what key they are in. Also, Debussy gives descriptive titles to his preludes, but these titles appear at the ends of the pieces. So if you are a pianist playing through, first you play the piece, then you see the title.
Here is one of my favorite preludes:
That odd, halting figure that we hear first accompanies us throughout. The melody comes in short, breathless phrases. The harmony is complex, but however far it wanders, that halting figure, rising from D to F, never varies. Towards the end there is a stream of chords that seem entirely apart from the key, D minor. Then the piece closes with a plagal cadence: G to D. What a mysterious little piece! "Footsteps in the Snow".
