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 Claude Debussy's Gamelan

Claude Debussy's Gamelan

Sylvia Parker (/index.php/52/itemlist/user/193-sylviaparker) Published online: 27 August 2012

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18177/sym.2012.52.sr.22
PDF: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26564874

#Debussy (/index.php/52/itemlist/tag/Debussy) #gamelan (/index.php/52/itemlist/tag/gamelan) #Volume 52
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Introduction
The year 1889 marked the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution and the nation celebrated with the Paris
Exposition Universelle, an extraordinary World's Fair. The importance of the event was emphasized by the
construction of the Eiffel Tower, built for the occasion. Twenty-seven year old Claude Debussy frequented the
many exhibits from all over the world and was enthralled by the gamelan music and the dancing it accompanied
that he witnessed in the Javanese pavilion. The experience inspired him later to capture the sounds of the
gamelan in his 1903 piano composition Pagodes. This article examines how he did so and also places Pagodes'
composition within the contexts of contemporary documentation of the Exposition, his other works, and recent
scholarship about exoticism. Four principal elements of gamelan music—timbre, tuning, polyphonic layering,
and rhythmic structure—are examined through the eyes of twentieth century ethnomusicologists. The same
four elements are analyzed in Pagodes. Elements of Western musical composition complement the analysis.
What emerges is not a vague impression but, rather, a remarkably successful rendition of the Eastern gamelan
on the Western piano.

1889 Paris Exposition Universelle
Edward Said, in his classic study entitled Orientalism, writes of the Orient's special place in European Western
experience:
The Orient is . . . the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations
and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. 1

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