By Simon Trezise, Jonathan Cross
Usually thought of the daddy of twentieth-century track, Debussy used to be a visionary whose impact continues to be felt. This significant other bargains new insights into Debussy's personality, his surroundings and his track, together with not easy perspectives of the jobs of nature and eroticism in his lifestyles and track. whereas works in all genres are mentioned, they're thought of in the course of the topics of sonority, rhythm, tonality and shape, with last chapters contemplating the functionality and reception of his song within the first years of the recent century.
"For those that were enchanted and intrigued by means of Debussy's track, this ebook will simply deepen their fascination along with his work." song Educators magazine, Doug Martin
Read or Download The Cambridge Companion to Debussy PDF
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Extra info for The Cambridge Companion to Debussy
Sixteen in terms of distinction, Werner Danckert approached Debussy’s tonality from the point of view of harmonic functionality after Hugo Riemann’s influential rules at the final reducibility of all chords to a couple kind of tonic-, dominant-, or subdominant-functioned expression. 17 Danckert’s analyses are much less illuminating than these of Salzer and Katz, now not as a result of any scarcity of sensible feel within the tune itself, yet fairly because of his literalistic, inflexible employment of the Riemannian equipment in beside the point chromatic contexts. Altogether extra winning is Rudolph R´eti’s wide-ranging motivic examine of ‘La cath´edrale engloutie’, an creative analytical travel de strength within the Schoenbergian culture of thematic/motivic ‘musical logic’. 18 extra lately there were a number of makes an attempt at a scientific explanatory synthesis of the music’s dualistic foundation in triadic tonality at the one hand and symmetrical collections at the different. Arnold Whittall, for instance, explores ways that Debussy elevated his legacy of Wagnerian tonality via absorption of a structural function for the whole-tone scale. 19 Katz, having tested a cogent post-Wagnerian tonal perform at paintings in a few items, then turns to others (principally the Pr´eludes ‘Voiles’ 163 Debussy’s tonality: a proper point of view and ‘Les tierces altern´ees’) purely to find a ‘structural vagueness’ immune to her well-defined tonal standards. 20 She concludes that Debussy, having first increased the technical and expressive percentages inherent within the outdated tonal approach, ended up going past its common limits. As for that difficult ‘structural vagueness’, it's going to require not anything below a (new) ‘form of study to deal with the issues to which the recent platforms provide rise’. 21 One such ‘new kind of research’ was once finally supplied by means of pitchclass set thought, initially meant for track extra evidently ‘atonal’ than Debussy’s. 22 the main extraordinary exponent of such an process has been Richard S. Parks, who adapts the concept that to Debussy’s triadically dependent language through refracting it via 4 ‘genera’: diatonic, chromatic, whole-tone and octatonic. 23 the consequent analyses seize good certainly one of Debussy’s such a lot salient compositional characteristics, specifically his penchant for kaleidoscopic contrasts of definite forms of diatonic and chromatic pitch assets in block-like juxtaposition. yet whereas the set-theoretical method can not often be criticised for failing to deal with concerns that lie past its scope, it has to be stated that its drastic negation of tonality leads to a slightly one-dimensional photograph. Large-scale shape in Debussy’s instrumental track many of the copious literature in this topic has been extra keen on Debussy’s meant formal radicalism than with uncovering any underlying connections to previous traditions. certainly, to claim their life to any significant measure implies a considerable revisionism of a lot winning serious knowledge. The view of Debussy as a proto-avant-gardist owes a lot to the Darmstadt serialists of the post-war interval, who on reflection appear to have been rationale on reinventing Debussy after their very own snapshot, with such recommendations as ‘statistical shape’ (Stockhausen) and ‘vegetative movement of the shape’ (Herbert Eimert).