Claude Debussy's Musical Style

Background

Debussy provided the first real alternative to the music and style of the German Romantic Wagnerians.  He established France as a musical power and opened up Western music to non-Western influences.  He drew from many sources, including:

• French opera composers such as Gounod
• Mussorgsky (Coronation scene in "Boris Godunov" and "Pictures at an Exhibition")
• Gregorian chant
• Renaissance polyphony
• ragtime
• Eastern sources

He is the last composer to decisively change the whole world of music.  His musical career can be divided into three basic periods.

First Style Period

This period is marked by his move away from salon music to a more serious/artistic approach.  Two examples are:

• Suite Bergamesque (1893) - not Impressionistic
• String Quartet (1893)
• clear melodies
• long lyrical lines
• harmony fairly tonal
• modality creeping in

Second Style Period (Impressionistic)

The work that ushers Debussy into his second (Impressionistic) period is "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" (1894).  It is probably his best known work.  Many Impressionistic techniques can be seen in "Prelude."  They are:

• Orchestration
• Impressionistic use of tone color
• new orchestral combinations
• lyrical wind writing
• preference for muted string sounds and "nonheroic" brass
• delicate percussive sounds
• extensive use of harp
• soloistic writing
• Melody and Harmony
• importance of melody over harmonic progression and rhythm
• harmony as a dimension of melody instead of as accompaniment
• use of modes and scales such as the whole-tone and pentatonic
• free chromaticism
• ambiguous harmonies and tonal centers
• mixture of functional and non-functional progressions
• rich chords
• nonfunctional use of 7th and 9th chords
• chord planing
• fragmentary melodies
• Rhythm
• complex and non-metrical rhythms
• Texture
• subtle polyphony
• chord planing
• harmony as a dimension of melody instead of as accompaniment
• General
• allusion and understatement
• overall concern for private communication

Other exemplary works in this period are:

• the opera "Pelleas et Melisande" (1893-1902)
• ranks as one of the finest operas of the 20th century
• filled with gloom and internal action
• voices engage in recitative-like singing style that is conversational and fragmentary and well suited to the French language
• the orchestral work "La Mer"
• filled with advanced and colorful orchestration techniques
• Impressionistic piano works include:
• "Estampes" (1903)
• 2 books of "Images" (1905)
• "Children's Corner" (1908) - includes "Golliwog's Cake Walk," which incorporates a satirical quotation from Wagner's "Tristan"
• 2 books of "Preludes" (1909, 1913)

Third Style Period

Debussy's third period begins around 1912-13.  He shows a move away from Impressionism and toward a more textural and formal economy.  Poetic titles of the middle period disappear in favor of the classical titles he used as a youth.

• ballet "Jeux" (1912)
• Sonatas for
• cello and piano
• violin and piano
• flute, viola and harp (uses polyrhythms and bitonality)
• 12 "Etudes" for piano
• influenced by Chopin
• each explores a different technical problem
• "Study for Chords" (uses the piano as a percussion instrument, similar to Bartok and others)

Overview of Compositional Style

Debussy's innovations were based to some extent on:

• the special and subtle inflections of the French language and poetry;
• on the character and length of sound (as opposed to strong metrical and rhythmic accent);
• on the fluid and asymmetrical organization of French meter, rhythm, accent, and phrase.

He extended this kind of rhythmical and phrase organization into every aspect of music:  thus melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral concepts are organized around qualities of sound patterns and relationships.

• Debussy's vocabulary of sound is chosen for its sensual qualities,
• and the motion from one sound pattern to the next is built on intervallic relationships and on parallelisms of structure.

It has often been suggested that the whole-tone scale, and its ambiguities, forms the basis of Debussy's music.  However, whole-tone relationships are used by him in conjunction with, or as part of, a much more complex group of melodic and harmonic usages -- interlocking pentatonic structures, for example, based on a fundamental principle of symmetry.

Characteristics of his style are

• chains of thirds, of seventh, ninth, or eleventh chords,
• or of related structures built on fourths or major seconds,
• arranged in pentatonic, whole-tone, diatonic, or chromatic patterns.
• Rhythmic and phrase structure are also built on parallelism and symmetry.

Debussy was the first to use an alternative musical concept

• based on symmetrical patterns and structures
• with a highly weakened directional motion
• and thus a very ambiguous sense of tonal organization.
• He often consciously exploits this ambiguity, setting it by contrast against clear tonal, cadential statements.

Rhythm, phrase, dynamics, accent, and tone color are largely freed from direct dependence on tonal motion because of Debussy's ambiguities.  Thus, they tend to gain an importance in the musical process almost equal to that of melody and harmony.  One may find individual sound patterns and even isolated sounds which seem to create their own context.

An analogy might be drawn from one of Debussy's own musical "subjects", the sea.  Like his music, the waves of the sea form a powerful surge of undulating motion in varying crests and troughs without necessarily any real movement underneath.

(hear Arabesque No. 1)