From "The Velvet Revolution of Claude Debussy/How a reclusive Frenchman created some of the most radical, beautiful music of the modern era" (The New Yorker).
October 29, 2018
"'He was a very, very strange man'... With his piercing eyes and jutting forehead, he could make a rough first impression—like 'a proud Calabrian bandit'..."
"... 'withdrawn, unsociable, taciturn, skittish, susceptible, distant, shy.' He was said to be 'catlike and solitary.' He 'lived in a kind of haughty misanthropy, behind a rampart of irony.' He had a tendency toward mendacity in his professional and personal relationships. He was conscious enough of his limitations: 'Those around me persist in not understanding that I have never been able to live in a real world of people and things.'... When confronted with the fundamentals of harmony and form, he asked why any systems were needed... Familiar chords appeared in unfamiliar sequences. Melodies followed the contours of ancient or exotic scales. Forms dissolved into textures and moods. An academic evaluation accused him of indulging in Impressionism—a label that stuck.... ... Debussy took up a second career, as a music critic, delivering a stream of prickly, contrarian opinions that seemed almost designed to increase his isolation. Beethoven wrote badly for the piano, he proclaimed: 'With a few exceptions, his works should have been allowed to rest.' Wagner was a literary genius but no musician. Gluck was pompous and artificial. There was a method to this crankiness: Debussy was attacking the tendency to worship the past at the expense of the present. In a later interview, he said that he actually admired Beethoven and Wagner, but refused to 'admire them uncritically, just because people have told me that they are masters.'"
From "The Velvet Revolution of Claude Debussy/How a reclusive Frenchman created some of the most radical, beautiful music of the modern era" (The New Yorker).
From "The Velvet Revolution of Claude Debussy/How a reclusive Frenchman created some of the most radical, beautiful music of the modern era" (The New Yorker).
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36 comments:
"Debussy took up a second career, as a music critic, delivering a stream of prickly, contrarian opinions that seemed almost designed to increase his isolation."
Lol
I have a book of his criticisms, very enjoyable. I wonder where I put it.
One line was that Wagner was a beautiful sunset confused with a beautiful sunrise.
The world needs now is more Debussy music playing and less Wagner music playing.
Just started reading the new book on him by Walsh (that I think prompted that article) and so far it's great - early on makes the point that Debussy really shifted the underpinnings of music, but unlike others who dd that, people liked what he came up with.
I like to collect art by serial composers.
Did you know - the two most common reasons given for composing are thrills and financial gain.
"German Influence on French Music" Mercure de France January 1903
German influence never had any ill effect on anyone except those people easily impressed, or, to put it another way, on those who take the word "influence" to mean "imitation."
Besides, it is always difficult to be precise about influences, whether it os of Goethe's second Fause or of Bach's B Minor Mass. These works will remain monuments of beauty, unique and incapable of repetition. Their "influence" is like that of the sea or ths sky, universal rather than especially German.
Closer to our time, is not Wagner perhaps an example of the subjugator? However, musicians should be grateful to him for having left us an admirable treatise on the uselessness of set forms -- that is, Parsival . . . a masterly contradiction of all that is in the Ring.
Wagner, if one may be permitted a little of the grandilogqquence that suits the man, was a beartiful sunset that has been mistaken for a sunrise....
Debussy on Music, Richard Langham Smith ed. and trans., Knopf 1977, p.83
to give an example of the readability he has.
It has been over 200 years and indeed Beethoven is still a master and will still be a master 200 years from now.
Faure beats Debussy on the setting of Clair de Lune. The latter Victor Borge refers to as clear the room.
Debussy criticized Erik Satie's music as lacking form. Satie responded by composing "Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear."
Trois morceaux en forme de poire
actually six pieces for piano 4 hands.
The book was in the piano music bookcase, under the Mulliner Book.
Classical music is hard because it has no words usually. You hear something beautiful but don't know what it is. So for 40 years I wondered what that tune was, boo boo boo day da da la la too complex to hum in tune actually.
Finally found out it was his Deux Arabesques.
That took way too long.
You hear something beautiful but don't know what it is.
Get The Dictionary of Musical Themes.
Transpose your bit into the key of C, look it up in the index as a series of letters, and flip to the page indicated for the score and identity.
Debussy had some sort of influence on bop musicians. I'm not sure what phase of his compositions...maybe someone here can enlighten me.
Rhardin the deux Arabesque theme was too complicated for me, I couldn't even get a handle in it. I'd hear it in passing every 10 years or so...but I'll try that next time thanks.
Pop music seems so boring and repetitive in comparison.
actually six pieces for piano 4 hands.
Drummer with 4 hands
@wild chicken - Joni Mitchell cites Debussy and Duke Ellington most often as influences on her music, without noting which pieces or phase that I know of - with Debussy I think part of it is his modulations for the feeling he wanted as opposed to the rules of the time - and that being free of a key center might be the connection to bop.
"He said that he actually admired Beethoven and Wagner, but refused to 'admire them uncritically, just because people have told me that they are masters.'"
Having a famous relative, I think this same way, and catch Hell for it all-the-time. Sorry, but they're human beings. Sheesh.
Shut up and compose.
Debussy was brilliant when he could do that.
Listening to La Mer right now. Thanks for linking to this very interesting article.
rhhardin said...
You hear something beautiful but don't know what it is.
Get The Dictionary of Musical Themes.
Transpose your bit into the key of C, look it up in the index as a series of letters, and flip to the page indicated for the score and identity.
10/29/18, 9:05 AM
They have Shazam now.
Popularity a-poppin' because of a violent video game?
He did also have a sense of humor, albeit very, very dry. His nom de plume was Monsieur Croche, a pun on a 'quarter note' + a 'crotchety old guy'. Writing under that name he interviewed himself, and at some point actually gave his own music a bad review.
Also, there is great irony to his criticisms of Wagner. He repeated them often . . . and then proceeded to write a 4 hr opera haunted by Tristan, complete with half-diminished chords, a meandering sense of structure and a seemingly interminably goopy death scene. And yes he was indeed one of the great re-formulator of musical rules and practices, but without his very rigorous classical training that would not have been as possible. So when you read his interview of himself and he says "why should these parallel chords not keep going up?" there is an unmentioned background of years and years of formal study that disallowed such practices.
An interesting comparison is that Debussy was in many ways a musical inspiration to Duke Ellington, whose own rigorous study helped him craft interesting and beautiful technical departures. Erik Satie was more of a philosophical re-formulator, and as such a sort of godfather to John Cage who was much less rigorously trained (and all the better for it).
[Interestingly, Satie felt a nagging technical inferiority and at one point when he was already famous went back to the Conservatory to study counterpoint. Cage never felt the need . . . .]
Anyway, apologies for the hijack and thanks, Ann, for your writing.
Our hostess has, yet again, taken us to a wonderful place I wouldn't have otherwise found. The writing was particularly excellent and the links to the YouTube clips were wonderful. We live in excellent times to have these resources at our finger tips.
I thought this was particularly terrific:
“Reflets” begins with eight bars confined to the key of D-flat major, or, more precisely, to the scale associated with that key. Chords drawn from those seven notes lounge indolently across the keyboard. In the ninth bar, though, the work goes gorgeously haywire. Extraneous notes invade the inner voices, even as a D-flattish upper line is maintained. Pinprick dissonances disrupt the sense of a tonal center, and the music collapses into harmonic limbo, in the form of a rolled chord of fourths. This is Debussyan atonality, which predates Schoenberg’s and is very different in spirit: not a lunge into the unknown but a walk on the wild side. We stroll back home with a descending string of chords that defy brief description: sevenths of various kinds, diminished sevenths, dominant sevenths, and what, in jazz, is called the minor major seventh. Michelangeli, who admired the jazz pianist Bill Evans and was admired by Evans in turn, plays this whole stretch of music as if he were hunched over a piano in a smoke-filled club, at one in the morning, sometime during the Eisenhower Administration. Two bars later, we are back in D-flat—an even more restricted version of it, on the ancient pentatonic scale. Some kind of bending of the musical space-time continuum has occurred, and we are only sixteen bars in.
- Krumhorn
Satie's Fugue Litanique got a "very good" grade from the teachers at the conservatory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1BnA1hKifo
If you like classical music here is an interesting discussion site http://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php
Many threads on Debussy.
Debussy always gave Satie vin ordinaire when Satie was his dinner guest.
Debussy's regard for Rimsky-Korsakov's music was not reciprocated. After hearing Estampes a decade later, Rimsky wrote in his diary, "Poor and skimpy to the nth degree; there is no technique; even less imagination. The impudent decadent – he ignores all music that has gone before him, and ... thinks he has discovered America.
A recurring argument among us as undergrads: who's better, Debussy or Ravel? When I grew up I realized the answer was Fauré.
I enjoy playing Debussy, although a lot of his work is very challenging.
A man who composes a ton of great solo piano pieces spends a lot of time alone at his work.
Debussy lost me when he described Grieg's music as 'pink sweets filled with snow' (I'm paraphrasing) - and with Golliwog's Cakewalk which I consider a poor and dismissive imitation of Scott Joplin's ragtime.
I get a big kick out of playing Golliwog's Cakewalk. Also playing most of Joplin's rags.
Maple Leaf Rag is my favorite. Methodists loved it when I played it for a postlude. I play it a lot slower and that really brings out the beauty of the melody and chord changes.
I think the tempo of Joplin's rendition is common to the ragtime era. Bright and cheerful, which is what the audience wanted.
Playing it slower makes it a little melancholy.
Nothing wrong with Debussy's string quartet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79ZcXt5BJYg
Always more of a Ravel fan myself, but Debussy can sneak things up on you.
The last thing he wrote was the Sonata for Violin & Piano. But, before he wrote the sonata, he edited a performance edition of the J.S. Bach Six Sonata for Harpsichord & Violin (for Editions Choudens, I believe).
There's a dollop of Bach in the sonata. It's hiding, but when you look at in on paper, it comes through.
BTW, who names their kid "Achilles"? Mom & Pop Debussy have some sort of Homeric thing going?
@ST 1:23 PM:
"Playing it slower makes it a little melancholy."
True of several of Joplin's rags. They are deeper than they sometimes seem at first hearing.
For some reason unaccountable to me, he seems to be less highly regarded by some than Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the less said about whom the better IMO.
Jack Horkheimer turned me on to Debussy.
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