The Velvet Revolution of Claude Debussy | Hacker News Reader

The Velvet Revolution of Claude Debussy

newyorker.com

48 pointstintinnabula22 comments

I know it's usually frowned upon in such froo-froo articles to examine an artist's most popular works in the current day, but I really do wish the author had examined what Debussy is most known for nowadays, Clair de Lune.

It's painfully beautiful, and the piece that made me fall in love with his work as a whole.

Still, I enjoyed the article. I feel they portrayed him in the correct light. The only thing I think they may have left out, and the main reason I think Debussy's music is so good, is just the amount of room for expression of the individual pianist there is in his music. The space between his notes and chords can be wielded with cold rigidity, or suggested with a warm, soft touch, something I think is lost in more classically structured piano music.

Speaking as someone who studied music academically for a while, I imagine they left it out because it's pretty unremarkable despite it's popularity. Debussy was actually reticent to publish Suite Bergamasque (which contains Clair de Lune) as it was from is "immature period" (his words not mine.) The suite was published 15 years after its initial composition.

In terms of its importance to the literature as a whole, despite being beautiful music (I'm really not trying to discount that the music is beautiful) Suite Bergamasque still represents an extension of the Romantic style. It's not nearly as groundbreaking as the Preludes/Images/Estampes which are a serious departure from all of the music that came before. Art was never the same after Picasso tore down the establishment. Ditto music and Debussy.

Thank you for your more informed analysis, and fair point. Admittedly, the rest of the suite doesn't tickle my fancy like that one movement does. I suppose I'm a sucker for his earlier, more contemporarily popular (but less profound) works, as my other favorite piece from him is Deux Arabesques No. 1.

This piece is to Debussy what Liebestraume No. 3 is to Franz Liszt: it's simultaneously the cloying, overplayed hit that distracts from the rest of the oeuvre, while also being the masterpiece that serious music people love to pooh-pooh.

I agree with the "painfully beautiful" characterization. I must avert my ears. I'd rather listen to any other Debussy piece – I never tire of Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum for some reason – but only because I can't bear its perfection.

I'd never claim it's not a masterpiece. Both it and the 3rd Liebestraume are in my repertoire. But since it's more in line with the Romantic idiom, Clair De Lune and Suite Bergamasque in general gets compared against the masterpieces of Chopin/Liszt/Brahms/Schumann, and against that bar I'm not sure it necessarily measures up. Debussy was obviously a/the pioneer of impressionism, and in that idiom, his work is unmatched. I haven't seen a serious argument that he could out-compose any of the composers that are the pillars of romanticism in that idiom though, and since Clair de Lune is in that style, that's what it gets measured against.

Isao Tomita's debut analog synthesizer renditions of Debussy, Snowflakes are Dancing, is one of my all time favorite recordings. Debussy translates very well into electronic forms.

Yeah he interpreted it quite tastefully.

As a child in the 1980's my uncle would bring me out to his garage, put a welding mask on my head and have me sit on his tractor in the dark, while he played a tape with Tomita's rendition of Snowflakes are Dancing, and pretended that we were travelling to a far off planet, which was called Oxena. This has sparked a life long fascination with Debussy's music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWlSenLsXCI&list=PLGltXnm_5I...

I've read in several places that Debussy owed Satie more than he acknowledged in assisting him on his path to radicalization. Satie himself always felt inferior to Ravel and Debussy as he lacked a formal musical education (which may itself have been a major contributing fact to his uniqueness)

Art of Noise put out an okay album "The Seduction of Claude Debussy" exploring this revolution a bit ... https://youtu.be/8hLLL6gyUvg .

Kind of like Daft Punk's disco homage album, doesn't capture the essence of the original.

I think it's great. The soprano I could do without, but getting John Hurt to narrate was just brilliant. It's no coincidence that the best tracks are Il Pleure and The Holy Egoism of Genius. They're are not as great when Paul Morley performed on the live "Reconstructed". He's annoying, even if probably he wrote most of those words.

As for sound, I think the modern inspiration was The Prodigy, whose Firestarter had made AoN quite a bit of money. :-)

> “There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.”

Except Debussy had a musical education that included theory from the best teachers in France and clearly understood the material. Plus first hand experience sight reading Wagner's operas and probably anything else he could get his hands on.

Someone with that level of education and pianism can claim to forget about theory. Then they will go on write Reflets dans l'eau.

Meanwhile, someone who has never studied music theory at all and learns to play the electric guitar will go on to write something like Purple Haze.

They both start with a prominent tritone. But Hendrix didn't have enough schooling to take it in the harmonic direction that Debussy did. And Debussy had too much education to forgo sophisticated harmonic juxtapositions and constrain himself to timbre/melody.

Edit: Actually I'm thinking of Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune where the flute line moves up and down within a tritone. Either way, sophisticated harmony and form that has obvious connections with much of the music Debussy analyzed in theory classes.

Debussy won the Prix de Rome but became restless with the musical theory and composition training he received.

>Claude Debussy died a century ago, but his music has not grown old

Well, for some measures of "not grown old". It's not like the Top-10 has much Debussy, or that the number of well-off patrons of concert halls that play the likes of Debussy are the same in number as in Debussy's times...

Sure, but his music seems to invoke fewer images of stuffy orchestral halls stuffed with powdered wigs and Victorian sensibilities. At least for me. It's pretty timeless.

Well, consider Bach then...

Well, Bach to me DOES represent that setting in time, but does it impeccably well. Much more rigid in keeping to form and harmony, more indicative of his era. Not a bad thing. His music is equally brilliant, but much of it screams "I'm Baroque!"

Off topic, but this is hilarious:

> Physical recordings are no longer a fashionable way of listening to music, but you will probably get closer to Debussy if you shut down the Internet and give yourself wholly to his world.

So now listening to a CD is the real and authentic way to listen to classical music.

Well, at least real-er and more authentic than listening to it from Spotify while web surfing and skipping tracks every few minutes.

The emphasis wasn't on "physical recordings", but on "shutting down the Internet and giving yourself wholly to his world". One could even achieve that with a YouTube video recording -- just less easily and with distraction closer at hand.

This is how people talk about reading physical media vs e-books these days - there's a measurable difference in comprehension between reading text with hyperlinks and reading a physical book - so this doesn't strike me as crazy, if a bit precious.

> there's a measurable difference in comprehension between reading text with hyperlinks and reading a physical book

Have any links to studies?

I feel like services like Primephonic and Idago feel more like I’m offline in a classical music library, no flashy graphics and random pop songs with similar names don’t get returned in search results.

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