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15 - Debussy's Absolute Pitch: Motivic Harmony and Choice of Keys
- from Part Four - Theoretical Issues
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- By Mark DeVoto, Tufts University.
- Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
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- Book:
- Debussy's Resonance
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 27 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2018, pp 419-434
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Summary
In tonal music, the formal importance of a particular key is often signaled by an indication in the title, e.g., Symphony no. 5 in C minor, op. 67. Beethoven's Fifth is designated “in C minor” even though its second movement is in A-flat major and its finale in an empyrean C major. Primacy of a particular key is of course a structural consideration; but within the individual movement, whether the composer has said so or not, the priority of a single key is usually announced by tonal closure, by ending in the same key as the movement began. But typically there is another announcer as well: the key signature. In the first movement of Beethoven's Third Symphony, the Sinfonia eroica, op. 55, nearly seven hundred measures long and lasting twenty minutes, the key signature never changes, though one may identify as many as twenty-seven actual modulations just between the first measure of the exposition and the beginning of the recapitulation; by contrast, merely as an exercise, one may compare Beethoven's Prelude, op. 39, no. 2, seventy-six measures long, in which there are twenty-four changes of key signature, including twelve just between measures 51 and 62, but this is obviously a special case.
In a work as large as an opera, tonal closure can be demonstrated in the abstract by the first and last tonalities heard in the opera, regardless of division into acts with intermissions in between. Mozart's Magic Flute is one example, with an E-flat-major overture and finale of act 2, and the dreimalige Akkord in the middle (which in any case is a dominant, as it is in the overture), and everyone knows about the Masonic symbolism of three flats in this work. Similarly, Weber's Freischütz and Verdi's Falstaff are, so to speak, C-major operas, as was Beethoven's Fidelio in its first Leonore version. Wagner's Meistersinger certainly has C major as a symbolic unifying tonality with closure, but it also emblematizes the central role of the Master Singers, for C major is their key. Even the Ring of the Nibelungs can be said to have D-flat major as an overarching “Valhalla tonality,” if the first scene of Das Rheingold, beginning in E-flat major and freely modulating, is regarded as a prologue to everything that follows.
10 - The Debussy sound: colour, texture, gesture
- from Part III - Musical techniques
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- By Mark DeVoto
- Edited by Simon Trezise, Trinity College, Dublin
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Debussy
- Published online:
- 28 September 2011
- Print publication:
- 19 June 2003, pp 179-196
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Summary
Everyone who knows Debussy's music recognises a distinctive ‘Debussy sound’ that is not a single quality but many; the sound of Debussy's style in most of his works is harmony, instrumentation, texture, timbre, all to a greater or lesser extent.
Even such wide-ranging elements as melody, rhythm, and microform affect Debussy's quality of sound. The composer Jean Barraqué, an astute analyst, spoke of Debussy's habit of repeating phrases and phrase fragments in immediate succession as ‘the sole weakness that one might find in Debussy's scores’, without suggesting that this kind of repetition is a fundamental aspect of Debussy's sense of form; paired repetition, like breathing (which as a marker of time it somewhat resembles), is a trait of many composers from Vivaldi to Mozart to Rossini to Debussy; but in combination with others that we think of as characteristically sonorous, it is a trait that makes Debussy's style instantly recognisable even on first hearing.
Here we will discuss the sonorous rather than the temporal aspects of Debussy's music, focusing particularly on orchestral and piano style, texture, and colour, recognising that these aspects often penetrate each other as much as they are components of overall form.
Debussy's earliest instrumental style
Debussy's earliest piano pieces and songs include a variety of different piano styles and textures, but nothing that is markedly different from those of his French contemporaries or from his Parisian predecessor Chopin, for whose music he always had a special understanding and regard. Accompanimental textures in Debussy's songs of his Conservatoire years are more economical than in Fauré's of the same time, and for that reason they are often more effective. The Piano Trio of 1880, which Debussy did not publish, is the first of his works in which we can glimpse an instrumental style in addition to that already developing for the piano, but even though the ensemble always works well, again there is no notably original pianism.
5 - Harmony in the chamber music
- from Part II - Musical explorations
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- By Mark DeVoto
- Edited by Deborah Mawer, Lancaster University
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Ravel
- Published online:
- 28 September 2011
- Print publication:
- 24 August 2000, pp 97-117
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Summary
Ravel's popular, if somewhat misleading, identification as an ‘impressionist’ composer depends on three categories of his achievement: orchestral music, piano music and vocal music, including operas as well as songs. His chamber music is of another stripe, revealing another all-important side of his musical persona: it is classically based absolute music, without ties to texts, literary references or descriptive titles. In this regard as in so many others, he is like Debussy, but, while Debussy's chamber music frames his career at beginning and end, Ravel's chamber music follows his career throughout, providing significant landmarks at different stages.
Ravel's chamber music, like his piano music, inclines to formal variety, yet always as concisely and precisely as the classical masters whom he so much admired. One never finds the formal adventurousness and only seldom the textural experimentation that characterise the musical ‘impressionism’ of his most radical piano works like Gaspard de la nuit. Yet the essential wholeness of Ravel's personal style is never in doubt; the highly individual melodic idiom and the integrity of his harmonic language are unified between the chamber music and all the other works, in continuous evolution from the beginning of his maturity to the end of his career.
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