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ABOUT THE PROGRAM PETER HALSTEAD CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862–1918)
Another system used by Puccini, Debussy, Monet, and Manet was Orientalism, or chinoiserie, introducing Asian design, color, and tonalities into their work. You can hear this in Debussy’s “Sunken Cathedral.” Fourths and
fifths used as constant intervals bring a Mikado-like atmosphere to the music of the era, most obvious in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado and Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and Turandot. Puccini has his Turkish janissary chord, heard before moments of great beauty in La bohème and Tosca, where a cymbal and a triangle and a special chord announce a musical or thematic revelation.
So this is a schizophrenic sonata, with the left part, or bass, played by the piano, being the Germans or Russians, and the right part, the treble of the violin, being the French. Debussy further divides the two sides into the circle of fourths and the circle of thirds, whereby chords or keys move up the scale in intervals of four and down the scale in threes. The fourths convey a Russian, Kazak, Tatar, Moorish harmony, as one would find in Glinka or Rachmaninoff, and the thirds are more Mozartean, or Austrian. Debussy is evenly split in his influences between the German-Austrian-French system and Rusian-Asian-Moorish harmonies.
So when you play either voice, it makes perfect harmonic sense and is melodic and lovely. But when you put them together, they contradict each other in every way. The violin plays thirds; the piano plays fourths. When the piano plays in C, the violin plays in D. Such close keys make for cacophony.
These contrary motion and contradictory time frames were used much later by Elliott Carter and by Charles Ives in many pieces, such as Ives’s Three Places in New England, where two marching bands playing different music create an amusing confusion. This idea was used later by the French director Philippe de Broca in his wonderful anti-war film, King of Hearts, where a French band is marching out of town when a German band marches in. The last French musician
Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Minor
This is a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Debussy has invented his own serialism.
In the case of Schoenberg, serialism was a system of composition which involved using a tone row, the 12 notes which make up an octave, in a pre-chosen order, which persists throughout the piece, similar to the way Bach would invent a melody and then base a fugue on varying it.
So Debussy invented his own serialism. Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire (1912) and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913) had thrown down the gauntlet to old-fashioned harmony, and demanded a new formula be applied to composition. The resulting methodology didn’t necessarily produce particularly compelling music, but it was espoused by German academics who, when they fled Hitler, brought it to America, and it is still a major part of many composers’ vocabularies.
Systems of creation usually substitute for a lack of inspiration, an inability to create a traditional melody, a resignation that all the good melodies had already been used, or even that there was only one melody, and everything else was just a re-arranging of it.
Yeats used as his poetic systems the 28 phases of the moon, the tinctures of gradation on the moon from dark to light, and the double helix of geometric gyres. John Donne had alchemy. James Merrill imitated Dante’s Divine Comedy while consulting the Ouija board (which Yeats had done before him). Shaw infused his plays with socialism. Shakespeare spent half his life rewriting Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives. Braque, Gris, and Picasso spent some twelve years on synthetic cubism, breaking down three-dimensional objects into flattened and fragmented collages.
102 The Music at Tippet Rise