The Cambridge Companion to Debussy
Simon Trezise, Jonathan Cross
Language: English
Pages: 348
ISBN: 2:00211372
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Often considered the father of twentieth-century music, Debussy was a visionary whose influence is still felt. This Companion offers new insights into Debussy's character, his environment and his music, including challenging views of the roles of nature and eroticism in his life and music. While works in all genres are discussed, they are considered through the themes of sonority, rhythm, tonality and form, with closing chapters considering the performance and reception of his music in the first years of the new century.
"For those who have been enchanted and intrigued by Debussy's music, this book will only deepen their fascination with his work." Music Educators Journal, Doug Martin
Of appearing attached to money . . . that if a man holds to one idea in the face of everyone, he is necessarily in the right, given the fallibility which is the defining element of the human spirit – from which it follows that the more people agree about something, the more chance it has of being wrong.47 In fact, one of the best descriptions of Debussy’s character came from a perceptive acquaintance rather than a close friend. His fellow composer Alfredo Casella remembered him as being 18.
Turn to Wagner, but I don’t need to tell you how ridiculous it would be even to try. The only thing of his I would want to copy is the running of one scene into another. Also I want to keep the tone lyrical without it being absorbed by the orchestra. In contrast to what he had composed for Zuleima, he aspired to write music ‘that is supple and concentrated enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of the soul and the whims of reverie’.44 Clearly, he was intent on breaking away from.
Regard. The remarkable art of the early conductors lay in balancing the aesthetic tendencies of nuance and of structural linearity in Debussy’s music.5 The last sentence is especially worrying. If the sound conjured up in Debussy’s name by conductors (and with them singers, pianists and other instrumentalists too) is as far removed from the spirit of the letter as Briscoe suggests, many concerns surrounding his reception now have to be confronted: analysis is only part of a broader cultural.
Debussy’s time and music is rooted in the tension between these endpoints. The seductive power of Debussy’s music Linda Nochlin argues that all erotic art of the nineteenth century involved images of women and was created only for the enjoyment of men.27 But the eroticism floating around the works of Debussy seems to resist this assertion. The very notion of erotic music presumes a relationship between a human being and some aspect of that music. In the case of Debussy, every possible.
Melodic vocabulary The tonic–dominant relation One of the least traditional aspects of Debussy’s tonal practice concerns his treatment of this fundamental harmonic relation, its radical transformation in some pieces and (real or apparent) conspicuous absence from others. For some analysts (most notably Richard S. Parks), this departure from earlier tonal norms effectively disqualifies Debussy’s music from consideration as genuinely tonal.4 While the point is well taken it is at least arguable.