CHAPTER III 

Making Imagery concrete 

Claude Debussy is the architect of one of the most influential musical revolutions of the early 20th century. Considered the head of musical Impressionism, Debussy notably expanded the harmonic and rhythmic palette of his time, blurring boundaries between tonality and atonality, between pulse and free rhythm. We could see Debussy’s compositional approach as “sound-painting”, with the use of features in music that might not have been so used or thoughtabout before himsuch as timbre, colour and harmony over the melody, in a way that evokes images and ambiances that don’t necessarily belong to the musical world. As was common with Impressionistic artists, his music has a very strong link with the wider artistic world of his time. His works are highly descriptive, typically depicting a mood, atmosphere, or scene. This is brilliantlyrealised by the creation of musical images through different compositional techniques, such as the use of ambiguous harmonies with large unresolved chords and extreme chromaticism, exotic scales, creative use of timbre and resonance, a refined a detailed use of the piano pedals, and other features.  

Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut  

(And the Moon sets over the temple that was)  

from the second book of Images 

Debussy’s second volume of Images represents the epitome of the usage of imagery in his music. As the title suggests, in Images, Debussy encourages listeners to picture images through sound. The first piece of this volume, Cloches à travers les feuilles(translated as “Bells through the leaves”), has a title that blurs the limit between sound and the visual world, as we usually associate leaves with the flickering light that can be seen through them, or some other visual aspect, but never sound flowing through the leaves. In Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut(And the Moon sets over the temple that was) Debussy explores the sounds (like gamelan), stillness and stasis of Eastern influences. Debussy dedicated this movement to his good friend and biographer Louis Laloy, an authority on Eastern and ancient Greek music. It is clear in this movement that Debussy refers to artists of the Symbolist movement (poets, painters, etc.) for the inexpressible, made possible by the poetic wording of the title, the fragmentary melodic structure, the harmonic ambiguity and a free-floating nature of sonorities. 

This passage, for example. Starting from the second bar, we see clearly three musical identities coexisting. You have a voice holding long chords and dictating the harmonic rhythm, a melody in a higher register that is meant to be clear and brilliant, and a short response of a bass line on the second and fourth beats. After this sectionwe arrive at two bars that serve both as climax to the texture of the first two bars and as a bridge to next short phrase.  This “bridge” needs already a completely different sonority that was depicted in the first two bars. It is large in register, much wider in movement, and is marked by the movement of the two extreme lines moving in contrary motion. It also interesting to notice that the bass line (starting from pianissimo) is going up in register, but Debussy writes a decrescendo, which is something that goes against our natural performative instinct. Then we get to, again, a new colour, in a passage that is more restrained in register but also more contrapuntal, with 4 individual voices moving together. 

These were the kinds of issues I encountered in performing the piece and that I tried to solve while composing the arrangement: how to drastically and rapidly change colours, how to give each voice I play individual importance, how to clearly present and conduct layers that are happening at the same time, and many others. These questions were answered by the use of imagery and the consequent spread of musical layers throughout the percussion instruments.