Homenaje a Debussy

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.

Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918)

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 music during 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 is La 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...

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Debussy Danced (Sort of...)

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.

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