Introduction

We love Debussy's music intimately and yet detailed knowledge of it often seems remote and elusive. Doubtless Debussy would have been delighted, for the realisation that he had denied analysts and theorists their quarry and encouraged some writers to assert, metaphorically at least, the unknowable intangibility of his music would have suited him very well, as we know from his dismissive comments about harmonic analysis and so on. One can imagine his pleasure growing at the recognition that one of the most successful pieces of Debussy scholarship – in the analysis of his music – to come in the post-war years is Roy Howat's Debussy in Proportion, a brilliant study that, in revealing a crucial aspect of Debussy's compositional process, raises an inescapable question of what it means for our perception of the music: he takes us into a mysterious domain. Debussy in Proportion proves beyond doubt that Debussy used Golden Section and other ancient proportional devices in his music, for the examples Howat adduces, and others that have come to light since, are too compelling to be coincidence or the result of dark, subcutaneous forces. For example, in ‘Reflets dans l'eau’ the music reaches its loudest level in bar 58; bar 58 out of 94 bars is 0.62 of the piece, which is very close to Golden Section (the golden proportion is 1 : 1.618). Having established this, however, we then have to ask, as Howat and many others have done, how we listen to proportion in music.