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Symbolism: Debussy
With materials from: Watkins, Glenn, Soundings: Music in the Twen2eth Century
(New York: Schirmer, 1995) & Whi>all, Arnold, Musical Composi2on in the Twen2eth Century
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
NB To understand the slides herein, you must play though all the sound examples to hear the principles in acMon. The sound of the music will make sense of the rules.
‘I wanted from music a freedom which it possesses perhaps to a greater degree than any other art, not being Med to a more or less exact reproducMon of Nature but to the mysterious correspondences between nature and ImaginaMon.’
(Claude Debussy, April 1902 at the Mme of the Premiere of his opera, Pelléas et Mélisande).
‘Freedom’ • Debussy celebrated not because he puritanically turned his back on late romanMc ‘decadence’
• But because he promoted music of understatement and delicacy
• QuesMoning of Germanic tradiMon
• Advocacy of spontaneity in preference to calculaMon
• Openness to a wide range of influences, the progressiveness of Russian music and Javanese gamelan (which he heard at the 1889 Paris ExhibiMon), for example
• All this appealed to later composers, especially the post-‐1945 avant-‐garde ‘what interested me in Debussy was not his vocabulary itself but its flexibility, a certain immediacy of invenMon, and precisely the local indicipline in relaMon to the overall discipline’ (Pierre Boulez in Conversa2ons with Céles2n Deliège (London, 1976), 96).
How did Debussy use his musical ‘vocabulary’ (which was, essenMally, that of tradiMonal harmony and counterpoint)? • He maintained accepted principles of voice-‐leading • He maintained principles of formal organisaMon • He preserved the disMncMon between consonance and dissonance and the presence of keys and modes
‘he subordinates the customary role of conMnuity as a means of grouping like events into coherent enMMes to that of disconMnuity, as a means of separaMng disparate events: disconMnuity defines formal units from without, but determining their boundaries’ (Richard Parks in The Music of Claude Debussy (New Haven, 1989), 204).
1885-‐88 • Explores alternaMves to Wagnerian chromaMcism
• Modality
• Gliding parallel chords decoraMng and prolonging a dominant 9th chord (lee)
• Comparing Debussy’s emerging style with SaMe’s early piano style
• Quaver chordal anMcipaMon of the cadence
• Debussy’s series of tenuto markings seem to reflect SaMe’s placement of the quaver downbeat
Forwarding sta2c parallelisms as an ideal – ‘considered avant-‐garde as much for their nihilism as for their newness’ (Wartkins 1995, p.71).
Prélude à “L’aprés-‐midi d’un faune” (1892-‐1894)
• Opening flute solo resounds throughout the work and provides the source material for the enMre piece • (the number of lines in Mallarmé’s poem is the same as the number of bars in Debussy’s piece) • Instability of the opening melodic tritone (C-‐sharp – G) • The E major harmonies of bar 3 are compromised in bar 4 and juxtaposed against another tritone relaMonship (B-‐flat) in bar 5
• (these methods said to be analogous to the ambiguity of Mallarmé’s poeMc style).
• Ambiguity, momentary resoluMon, followed by ambiguity in a conMnuing stream that periodically endorses symmetry and finally offers resoluMon (the piece ends in E major). • Reinforced by the rhythm and phrasing -‐and undulaMng pulse replaces the tyranny of the barline
• E.g., in bars 56-‐7, the movement sounds not so much like syncopaMon as a momentary fluctuaMon away from the triple simple into duple compound meter, supported by an underlying wave moMon
Nocturnes (1897-‐99) and La Mer (1903-‐05)
• Open fiehs • Pentatonic ideas • Dorain and phrygian moMfs • Pure triads • 9th chords • Polyrhythms • ArMficial scales (sharp 4 and flat 7)* (see next slide for example) • Augmented triads • French 6ths • Both of which form a natural alliance with whole-‐tone scales
*recently idenMfied as one of the South Indian modes, Vacaspa2
Préludes (1910-‐13) • ‘Voiles’: the outer secMons of the work are exclusively fashioned from whole-‐tone material (first example) and funcMon as a frame to a brief internal episode which is completely pentatonic (second example)
• ‘La cathédrale englouMe’: opening pentatonicism and use of harmonic fourths and fiehs reflects symbolist interest in bells; emphasises through its diatonic parallelisms the French infatuaMon with linear modality from the Mme of SaMe’s early piano works (see earlier) and D’Indy’s research into Gregorian chant.
• ‘Feux d’arMfice’: illustrates the colourisMc possibiliMes of sonoriMes no more complex than the major triad (note the nonfuncMonal, tritonally related harmonies in the next example, C -‐ F-‐sharp. E – B-‐flat)
• Bitonal clashes in the opening measures:
• Buzzing quasi-‐atonal prefiguraMons that prefigure Bartók (furious crushed seconds of this example):