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Debussy: Pieces
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Like the man himself, Debussy's 'preludes' are not a prelude to anything, but self contained pieces. Nearly all evoking extremes of mood, from sunlight on water, to wind and snow. As in the pure love for his daughter, and the anger that sometimes seemed to consume him.
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The only evidence that Howat introduces to support his claim appears in changes Debussy made between finished manuscripts and the printed edition, with the changes invariably creating a Golden Mean proportion where previously none existed. Perhaps the starkest example of this comes with La cathédrale engloutie. Published editions lack the instruction to play bars 7-12 and 22-83 at twice the speed of the remainder, exactly as Debussy himself did on a piano-roll recording. When analysed with this alteration, the piece follows Golden Section proportions. At the same time, Howat admits that in many of Debussy's works, he has been unable to find evidence of the Golden Section (notably in the late works) and that no extant manuscripts or sketches contain any evidence of calculations related to it.
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Feux d'artifice, the tightrope act with which Debussy concludes his two volumes of Preludes, is remarkable not so much for its pyrotechnic innovations as for its anticipation of the composition styles of the future. Feux d'artifice ranks as a completely atonal composition, because its harmonic structure lacks any consistent point of reference. The impression of novelty is further enhanced by the extremely fragmented and amorphous nature of its form and thematic material. This is not to say... that the piece does not evoke specific images: The slumbering smoke of Bengal candles emitting single sparks, the crackling of rockets, the gradual parabolic descent of stars, the whirring of Catherine wheels, the blinding radiance of brightly-coloured bouquets, everything that sparkles and shines in the night, the entire magic of light is contained in this music (Alfred Cortot).
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"Pagodas" is, of all Debussy's music, the piece most clearly imitative of gamelan music. So it is no surprise that it makes the most thoroughgoing use of pentatonic materials of any of Debussy's piano music. In "Pagodas," several different versions of the pentatonic scale appear.
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[T]he ballet Jeux (1913) contains some of Debussy's strangest harmony and texture in a form that moves freely. Other late stage works, including the ballets Khamma (1912) and La boite a joujoux (1913) and the mystery play Le martyre de St Sebastien (1911), were not completely orchestrated by Debussy, though St Sebastien is remarkable in sustaining an antique modal atmosphere that otherwise was touched only in relatively short piano pieces such as La cathedrale engloutie.
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