He challenged the rigid teaching of the Academy, favoring instead dissonances and intervals that were frowned upon. Like Georges Bizet, he was a brilliant pianist and an outstanding sight reader, who could have had a professional career had he so wished. During the summers of , , and , Debussy accompanied Nadezhda von Meck, the wealthy patroness of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, as she travelled with her family in Europe.
Not a single idea is expressed fully, the form is terribly shriveled, and it lacks unity. She and her husband, Parisian civil servant Henri, gave Debussy emotional and professional support. Henri Vasnier introduced him to the writings of influential French writers of the time, which gave rise to his first songs, settings of poems by Paul Verlaine the son-in-law of his former teacher Mme. Figure 2. Debussy at the Villa Medici in Rome, , at centre in the white jacket.
Debussy was often depressed and unable to compose, but he was inspired by Franz Liszt, whose command of the keyboard he found admirable. By age 10 or 11, he had entered the Paris Conservatory, where his instructors and fellow students recognized his talent but often found his attempts at musical innovation strange. In , Nadezhda von Meck, who had previously supported Russian composer Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, hired Debussy to teach piano to her children.
With her and her children, Debussy traveled Europe and began accumulating musical and cultural experiences in Russia that he would soon turn toward his compositions, most notably gaining exposure to Russian composers who would greatly influence his work. In , when he was just 22 years old, Debussy entered his cantata L'Enfant prodigue The Prodigal Child in the Prix de Rome, a competition for composers.
He took home the top prize, which allowed him to study for three years in the Italian capital, though he returned to Paris after two years.
Debussy returned to Paris in and attended the Paris World Exposition two years later. There he heard a Javanese gamelan—a musical ensemble composed of a variety of bells, gongs, metallophones and xylophones, sometimes accompanied by vocals—and the subsequent years found Debussy incorporating the elements of the gamelan into his existing style to produce a wholly new kind of sound. During this period Debussy wrote much for the piano.
The set of pieces entitled Pour le piano uses rich harmonies and textures which would later prove important in jazz music. The evocative Estampes for piano give impressions of exotic locations. Debussy came into contact with Javanese gamelan music during the Paris Exposition Universelle.
Pagodes is the directly inspired result, aiming for an evocation of the pentatonic structures employed by the Javanese music. The Preludes are frequently compared to those of Chopin. Debussy wanted people to respond intuitively to these pieces so he placed the titles at the end of each one in the hope that listeners would not make stereotype images as they listened.
A lush and dramatic work, written in only two months, it is remarkable in sustaining a late antique modal atmosphere that otherwise was touched only in relatively short piano pieces. He was also an occasional music critic to supplement his conducting fees and piano lessons. Unlike in his earlier work, he no longer hides discords in lush harmonies.
The forms are far more irregular and fragmented. With the sonatas of —, there is a sudden shift in the style. Despite the thinner textures of the Violin Sonata there remains an undeniable richness in the chords themselves.
Debussy planned a set of six sonatas, but this plan was cut short by his death in so that he only completed three cello, flute-viola-harp and violin sonatas. He uses scales such as the whole tone scale, musical modes, and the octatonic scale in his preludes that exaggerate this tonal ambiguity, making the key of each prelude almost indistinguishable at times.
Further plans, such as an American tour, more ballet scores, and revisions of Chopin and Bach works for re-publication, were all cut short by the outbreak of World War I and his poor health. Some people have claimed that Debussy structured parts of his music mathematically. Debussy had a wide range of influences. Among the Russian composers of his time, the most prominent influences were Tchaikovsky, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Mussorgsky.
He was drawn to unorthodox approaches to composition that non-Western music used. Specifically, he was drawn to a Javanese Gamelan, which was a musical ensemble from the island of Java that played an array of unique instrumentation including gongs and metallophones. He first heard the gamelan at the Paris Exposition.
Debussy was not as interested in directly citing his non-Western influence in his music, but instead used his non-Western influence to shape his unique musical style in more of a general way. Debussy was just as influenced by other art forms as he was by music, if not more so. He took a strong interest in literature and visual art and used these mediums to help shape his unique musical style.
Debussy was heavily influenced by the French symbolist movement, an art movement from the s that influenced art forms such as poetry, visual art, and theatre.
Like the symbolists in respect to their own art forms, Debussy aimed to reject common techniques and approaches to composition and attempted to evoke more of a sensorial experience for the listener with his works.
Since his time at the Paris Conservatoire, Debussy believed he had much more to learn from artists than from musicians who were primarily interested in their musical careers. I have made mysterious Nature my religion.
Debussy wrote successfully in most every genre, adapting his distinctive compositional language to the demands of each. It is this attention to tone color -- his layering of sound upon sound so that they blend to form a greater, evocative whole -- that linked Debussy in the public mind to the Impressionist painters.
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