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Debussy
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The Debussy Trio is an outstanding artistic addition for subscription series, interactive Musical Adventures for children, and visiting Artist-in-Residencies for universities. The Trio's charismatic programming includes musical styles from French Impressionism through American jazz-fusion, and from famed film composers and various ethnic inspirations.
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The music of Debussy's fully mature style was the forerunner of much modern music and made him one of the most important late 19th- and early 20th-century composers. His innovations were chiefly harmonic. Although he did not devise the whole-tone scale, he was the first composer to exploit it successfully. His treatment of chords was radical in its time; he arranged chord progressions in such a way as to weaken, rather than support, the illusion of any specified key. The lack of fixed tonality produced a vague, dreamy character that some contemporary critics termed musical impressionism, after the resemblance they saw between it and the pictorial effect achieved by painters of the impressionist school; the term is still used in describing his music. Debussy himself did not create a new school of composition, but he liberated music from the limitations of traditional harmony; ... the high quality of his own works proved to subsequent composers the validity of experimenting with new ideas and techniques.
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Debussy had two marriages and many love affairs. On his first wedding, in 1899, he had to give a piano lesson to pay for the reception. His second wife was wealthy, and at 46 years old, he was achieving financial security. Unfortunately, his health began to deteriorate a year later. He died of cancer in 1918, at 56.
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At the height of his enthusiasm for Wagner, Debussy had an experience as important for his later development as Wagner had been for his beginnings: the revelation of the Javanese gamelan at the Paris World Exposition of 1889. This exotic orchestra, with its variety of bells, xylophones, and gongs, produced a succession of softly percussive effects and cross rhythms that Debussy was later to describe as a "counterpoint by comparison with which that of Palestrina is child's play." What has come to be regarded as the typical impressionist texture - an atmosphere of melodic and harmonic shapes in which dissonant tones are placed so as to reduce their "shock" value to a minimum and heighten their "overtone" value to a maximum - was a logical conclusion to the explorations in sonority of 19th-century European composers. Yet without the specific influence of the gamelan Debussy might never have realized this texture in all its complexity.
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During the 1890's, all of Debussy's acquired knowledge and experiences culminated into the most musically productive period of Debussy's life. Although Debussy very much liked Wagner, Debussy's style of composition had taken its - for lack of a better term - impressionistic course. In 1894, Debussy finished his first important orchestral work Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun). Largely composed from 1893-1895, Debussy's only opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, wasn't finished until 1902. Its modern, ethereal harmonies were met with harsh criticism and great joy.
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The pieces by Bach, Mozart and Debussy all produced a relatively steep graph, suggesting a strong relationship between rank and frequency, and therefore a high level of meaningful context. In other words, if you have heard part of the piece, it is relatively easy to predict what kind of thing will come next. Zanette adds that jazz pieces he tested showed a similar pattern. But the Schoenberg piece, one of the first truly atonal works, had a much flatter graph. This means that the piece does not have a set vocabulary of commonly used words that keep appearing. Instead, the size of the vocabulary increases at about the same rate as the length of the piece; new "words" are constantly introduced, while earlier ones are seldom repeated.
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Debussy