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Salut, Claude!
2012 is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Claude-Achille Debussy (22 August 1862–25 March 1918), and, all being well, there will be plenty of performances of his fabulous music to celebrate the occasion.
2011 was of course Franz Liszt’s year, but despite many fine performances to mark the occasion (a couple of which I was fortunate enough to attend – reviews here and here), I suspect the case for Liszt still needs pleading (not something Debussy need worry about, given the perennial popularity of his music). Much of Liszt’s music remains obscure or impenetrable, or simply totally ‘over the top’ to many listeners and performers, and a common misconception remains that much of his music is unplayable, except by top flight virtuosi.
Not so the music of Debussy, which is accessible and generally easy on the ear, and which can be enjoyed by the proficient amateur as well as the professional musician. I can’t remember how old I was when I first heard Debussy’s music: I suspect it may have been a recording of La Mer, a richly evocative piece completed in 1905, after the composer enjoyed a stay at the English seaside resort of Eastbourne. The first piano piece by Debussy I learnt was a simplified version of the languorous Prélude ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’ (‘the girl with the flaxen hair’); my father and I also played a clarinet and piano version of this, and later I learnt the original piano version. In my teens, I learnt another of the Préludes, ‘La cathédrale engloutie’ (‘the submerged cathedral’), in which the composer evokes the ancient Breton legend of the cathedral of Ys, which was said to rise from the waves, with its bells tolling, priests chanting, and the organ playing. Subsequently, I’ve dabbled with other Préludes, some of Children’s Corner, and the first two movements of the suite Pour le Piano. This year I’ll be learning more, probably the Hommage à Rameau, more Préludes, and the Valse Romantique.
Together with Maurice Ravel, Debussy is considered to be one of the most prominent figures in the “impressionistic” movement, though he himself disliked the term intensely when applied to his compositions. It is too sweeping a term, making a strong connection with Impressionist painters such as Claude Monet (the Dover editions of Debussy’s piano music have reproductions of paintings by Monet on their covers), and suggesting that Debussy’s music is all about blurred edges and misty harmonies. In a letter from 1908, Debussy described his music as being “an effect of reality”. His musical influences and style are far wider, and his early music demonstrates his interest in the Symbolist movement of art and literature with its dreamy, often morbid romanticism. Already, he was experimenting with harmonic colour, the use of whole-tone scales, and a move away from strictly classical forms of musical construction towards music with a single, continuous theme.
At times, he seems the natural heir to Chopin, with his sensitive approach to melody, filigree passagework and articulation, and fioriture, and his music bridges the gap between the Romantic period and the twentieth-century. In other works, he looks back to ancient music such as Gregorian chant, or East to Javanese gamelan music. In Pour le Piano, he makes direct reference to his French Baroque antecedents in both the organisation and style of the material. His two books of Préludes are related to Bach’s and Chopin’s, but they are impressionistic tone poems, their titles suggesting literary or artistic stimuli. Each is complete within its itself, but by including the title at the end of the piece, Debussy implied a “story” within the music. Meanwhile, his Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune is a revolutionary work, both in style and execution, perhaps the first piece of truly ‘modern’ music, and demonstrating the key features of his music: uncertain or parallel harmonies, unprepared modulations which lack a harmonic ‘bridge’, the use of harmony and chord progressions for colour and timbre, and the use of whole-tone and pentatonic scales.
Debussy is regarded as one of the most influential composers of the twentieth century. His use of harmony had a direct influence on composers such as Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartok, Messiaen, Boulez, as well as the minimalist composers Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Toru Takemitsu, and jazz musicians including George Gershwin, Bill Evans and George Shearing.
Today, in performance, his piano music in particular seems to “suffer” occasionally from too impressionistic a reading: there is a misconception that all his music is dreamy, fluid and gentle. It was, compared to the style prevailing at the time of its composition, but we have almost gone too far now. In any event, I am sure we can look forward to plenty of varied performances this year.
I expect everyone has their favourite works by Debussy. I list a handful of my own here:
La plus que Lente (literally “as slow as can be”). A decadent, tender and languorous cocktail waltz, full of subtle ambiguities and sly ironies.
Pascal Rogé – La Plus Que Lente
‘Voiles’ (from Préludes Book 1). More eroticism in a piece employing whole-tone and pentatonic scales to great effect, suggesting both veils and sails
Maurizio Pollini – Debussy: Préludes – Book 1 – 2. Voiles
‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’
Nelson Freire – Debussy: Préludes – Book 1 – 8. La fille aux cheveux de lin
‘La cathedréle engloutie’
Maurizio Pollini – Debussy: Préludes – Book 1 – 10. La cathédrale engloutie
Pour le Piano – there is a pleasing stridency and uprightness in Gilels’ performance, even in the ‘Sarabande’
Hommage à Rameau – another work which harks back to the Baroque, but which shares some of the decadent languor of La plus que lente
Pierre-Laurent Aimard – Debussy : Images Set 1 : II Hommage a Rameau
Syrinx
Sonata for Violin and Piano in G minor
Janine Jansen – Debussy: Sonata for Violin and Piano in G minor – 1. Allegro vivo
Further reading/resources:
Images: the Piano Music of Claude Debussy – Paul Roberts (Amadeus Press)
The Piano Works of Claude Debussy – E. Robert Schmitz (Dover Publications)
Debussy at the Piano – interesting website with accounts describing Debussy as a pianist. Some useful insights into his playing style and how he wanted his piano music to be played.
Playing Debussy’s Piano Works – website by an amateur pianist with playing notes and analysis of many of Debussy’s piano music.
Notes from a Pianist – pianist and blogger Christine Stevenson will be writing about Debussy this year, following on from her journey through the music of Franz Liszt in 2011
Unveiling Debussy – an earlier blog post
Top 10 Posts of 2011
Here are the ten posts which received the most traffic on this blog in 2011. Enjoy – and Happy New Year!
Describing music – in words and sound
Guest post: FLOW – Transforming Your Practice
Playing the Beethoven Piano Sonatas
Should You be Practising Right Now?
Music Apps for iPhone and iPad
Maurizio Pollini plays Beethoven’s Last Sonatas
The Top 10 Classical Music Composers
Review: Mahan Esfahani Plays the Goldberg Variations
I’d love more guests posts in 2012. If you are interested in contributing to this blog, please contact me via the comments box on this post, or Facebook or Twitter (@crosseyedpiano).
Many thanks to all my readers.
Writing about piano music
In a blog post linked to his book The Musician’s Way, author Gerald Klickstein says that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” – that it is very difficult to express in words the essence of music, though it is possible to discuss music in theoretical or academic terms, or to describe the skills and activities involved in making music.
Those of us who have had any formal music training will be familiar with the vocabulary, technical terms and explanatory words used when writing about music in an academic way:
Exposition
Recapitulation
Rondo form
Caesura
Hemiola
Picardy third
Plagal cadence
Dominant seventh
Just a handful, and probably entirely familiar to all of us who studied music at least to A-level (high school) standard. These are all technical terms which tell us about the way music is constructed, and are standard terms when analysing music and describing it in an analytical way. But they don’t tell us much about the essence of the music.
When researching a book some years ago, I became fascinated by the ‘feel’ of piano music under the fingers and hands: what are the physical sensations of playing, say, the opening movement of Schubert’s last sonata or Debussy’s La Cathedrale engloutie? And what emotions are aroused in the performer as he/she plays such pieces? We should never play ‘cold’: even in practice we are – or should be – processing information all the time. How did that passage feel under the fingers? Was it awkward or comfortable? Did I like the sound I made there? What can I do to improve it? Sometimes, you know when you’ve nailed a particularly finger-twisting section when it suddenly flows with a wondrous synergy.
How do we describe that feeling to non-musicians, to the lay reader who simply wants an idea of a concert experience or performance in a review, or to the student who needs a simplified explanation of how to tackle a certain aspect of technique?
I encourage my students to think of descriptive words for the music they are studying. I was inspired to do this largely by the delightful and ever-expanding Musical Adjectives Project. Many students were quite inventive, proving that they had spent some time actually thinking about their music, and a lot of them felt the exercise had been very worthwhile. I fed the words into wordle.net to create a word cloud – you can see the results here: I now regularly use this exercise in my teaching, and also when learning music myself.
In my music reviews, I’ve learnt to be both concise and descriptive, while avoiding unnecessary analysis or off-putting technical terminology. Most readers want a sense of what it was like to be there, the excitement of a concert experience that will encourage them to book tickets to see a particular performer. As a pianist myself, I know how a professional pianist has achieved a certain effect (ultra-light staccato, pristine passage work, sonorous chords) but I don’t think the average reader wants exhaustive explanations of arm weight! However, one technical term, ‘jeu perlé’, often used in relation to semi-quaver passages in Mozart, is perfect as it is also visual: imagine a pearl necklace, each pearl bead separated by a tiny knot. Well-executed jeu perle playing has a tiny ‘silence’ or ‘knot’ between each note and thus each sound is clearly defined.
I find myself using architectural or artistic words to describe the music I’ve heard in concert: arabesques, curlicues, filigree, arching, soaring, sweeping. Or more physical terms: bouncing, jogging, stamping, limping, dancing, throbbing, breathing, sobbing, hand-filling. Or weather: showering, thunderous, misty, dripping, rumbling, splashing.
We talk about ‘colour’ in music, often in relation to dynamics, from the most delicately nuanced pianissimo to bold fortissimos – and all the subtle shadings in between. Then there is light and dark – ‘chiaroscuro’ – bright, hazy, shimmering, veiled harmonies, tenebrous chords….
Sometimes we might describe a piece of music in relation to another: a passage of Debussy played with “a Mozartian clarity” (back to jeu perlé), Bachian arabesques, Schubertian melodies, Debussyan harmonies. Or we can use the sound of other instruments: brassy, fluting, string or woodwind articulation.
So, taken all together we have a rather fine vocabulary with which to write about music. Of course words can never recreate the exact sounds of a piece, and each listener’s and concert goer’s experience is highly personal and subjective, but if a review or description of a work excites you, moves you or gives the sensation of actually being there, then the writer has done a good job.
More on the Musical Adjectives Project here
Imagery. Emotion and Imagination – blog post by 3-D Piano
***GUEST POSTS INVITED***
I’d love some more guest articles on this blog – on any aspect of pianism, piano teaching, performing or general musical musings. Please contact me if you would like to contribute.
The Cross-Eyed Pianist 