today brings another track from the London Symphony Orchestra, 3 actually:
Claude Debussy - Nocturnes:
1. Nuages
2. Fetes
3. Sirenes
this one even gets a real writeup, since i did the program notes for the concert in which i played this particular piece
. just read the last paragraph if you're not interested in the composer, only in this particular movement. i didn't write about Sirenes since we didn't play that movement...
debussy – nocturnes
From the earliest stages of his musical career, Claude Debussy was recognized as a groundbreaker. His unusual harmonies and associated disregard for traditional rules of harmonization won him first chastisement, then laudation. While a teenage student of composition and piano at the Paris Conservatory, one of his unusual rule-breaking compositions prompted a professor to ask him which rules he did obey. The young and brash Debussy replied, “None – only my own pleasure!” Fortunately Debussy’s “pleasure,” unconventional as it was, was also the pleasure of the musical elite of the era, as his early compositions won second and first place in the Prix de Rome.
Debussy’s early works bore the imprint of Gabriel Fauré, Emmanuel Chabrier, and Richard Wagner. While the influence of Fauré and Chabrier should come as no surprise given the characteristically light and transparent orchestration employed by Debussy, the sway of Wagner is mildly startling. In 1888 and 1889 he visited the Bayreuth festival, where he heard Parisfal and Tristan and Isolde, for which he professed great admiration at the time. The works most influenced by Wagner’s harmonic technique are all from this era, prior to the Impressionist phase of his career, and are thus not familiar to modern audiences. His style soon evolved, running parallel to the development of impressionistic techniques in painting and poetry, and with this evolution came a denunciation of Wagner, specifically of Wagner’s “endless modulations.”
The debut of Prelude a L’Apres-midi d’un faune in 1894 marked the onset of Debussy’s Impressionist phase of composition. Such famous works as Nocturnes, Images and La Mer were composed in this period, which spanned nearly two decades. He considered himself a composer rather than a pianist, having renounced public performance on piano in 1887, and did not associate with other musicians, instead choosing to gather at Stéphane Mallarmé’s house with leading Impressionist poets and painters of the era. Despite his association with the literary avant-garde, Debussy loathed the application of the “Impressionist” moniker upon his compositional style, and indeed his pieces are hardly “splashes of color” or “mood-paintings” as might be gathered through analogy to Impressionist works in the visual arts. Indeed, they are meticulously crafted works whose harmonic and melodic complexity lies hidden beneath their subtlety. The complexity of his pieces is manifold, revealed to the performer by the exacting articulations that he specifies throughout, and revealed to the listener by the carefully controlled manner by which he slips from one chord to the next without apparent modulation.
Nocturnes, composed on December 15, 1899 at 3 AM according to an inscription on the manuscript, is characteristic of Debussy’s Impressionist oeuvre. Just as Prelude a L’Apres-midi d’un faune was begun in 1892, so was Nocturnes penned in its original form in that year as Trois Scènes au Crépuscule, an orchestral triptych after poems by Henri de Régnier. In 1894 the piece’s three movements were reworked as a violin concerto intended for Eugène Ysaÿe, but it is not until the 1899 orchestral realization of Nocturnes that we have an extant score. While working on the violin concerto incarnation of the piece, Debussy remarked that it was “a study in gray painting. First performed on October 27, 1901 in Paris, the orchestral version bears little evidence as to why Debussy would make such a comment, as the palette of instrumental tone colors employed ranges widely from the dark and plaintive corno anglais in Nuages to the distant yet martial heavily-muted trumpets in Fétes.
Nuages represents Debussy’s attempt to describe the “unchangeable aspect of the sky” and the slow, solemn motion of the moonlit clouds fading away in grey tones tinged with white. To this end, the dark sonorities of English horn, French horn, bassoon, and flute are used extensively over an undulating pedal point maintained by the strings. On the occasions when the brighter tone of solo violin and cello are used a constant rhythm is maintained and the texture is only marked by the cyclic rise and fall of the melodic line. In contrast to the steady motion of the strings, which seem to suggest the serene passage of clouds through a darkened sky, the English horn repeats its motif, intimating a glint of moonlight with a slightly ominous quality lent by the descending augmented fourths traced by the horns and echoed later by the woodwinds.
Debussy described Fétes as embodying the “vibrating, dancing rhythm of the atmosphere,” a festival not of earth but of spirits such as Prospero might have conjured up. Setting the celebratory atmosphere is the fantastic opening theme in which the woodwinds and violins soar playfully over a constant accompaniment of triplet figures, conjuring up images of dancing and merriment. Intriguingly, Ottorino Resphigi seems to have been inspired by Fétes when writing his symphonic poem I pini di Roma, as I pini di Villa Borghese is similar in orchestration and spirit, at least until the imposition of the second theme, “a fantastic vision which passes through the festive scene and becomes merged in it.” This second theme, almost martial in its strongly rhythmic nature, is first taken up by the muted trumpets, then by the woodwinds. Debussy’s subsequent integration of the two themes before the restrained ending of the festivities is perhaps the clearest example of his Impressionistic harmonic brilliance, as he uses the repeated motif of the first theme in the strings as a splash of color by transposing it into each key as the brass modulate through Ab minor, Bb major, B minor, and E major before returning to Ab.
oblig. links to previous days' tracks of the day:
classical TotD for april 26
classical TotD for april 27
Claude Debussy - Nocturnes:
1. Nuages
2. Fetes
3. Sirenes
this one even gets a real writeup, since i did the program notes for the concert in which i played this particular piece
. just read the last paragraph if you're not interested in the composer, only in this particular movement. i didn't write about Sirenes since we didn't play that movement...debussy – nocturnes
From the earliest stages of his musical career, Claude Debussy was recognized as a groundbreaker. His unusual harmonies and associated disregard for traditional rules of harmonization won him first chastisement, then laudation. While a teenage student of composition and piano at the Paris Conservatory, one of his unusual rule-breaking compositions prompted a professor to ask him which rules he did obey. The young and brash Debussy replied, “None – only my own pleasure!” Fortunately Debussy’s “pleasure,” unconventional as it was, was also the pleasure of the musical elite of the era, as his early compositions won second and first place in the Prix de Rome.
Debussy’s early works bore the imprint of Gabriel Fauré, Emmanuel Chabrier, and Richard Wagner. While the influence of Fauré and Chabrier should come as no surprise given the characteristically light and transparent orchestration employed by Debussy, the sway of Wagner is mildly startling. In 1888 and 1889 he visited the Bayreuth festival, where he heard Parisfal and Tristan and Isolde, for which he professed great admiration at the time. The works most influenced by Wagner’s harmonic technique are all from this era, prior to the Impressionist phase of his career, and are thus not familiar to modern audiences. His style soon evolved, running parallel to the development of impressionistic techniques in painting and poetry, and with this evolution came a denunciation of Wagner, specifically of Wagner’s “endless modulations.”
The debut of Prelude a L’Apres-midi d’un faune in 1894 marked the onset of Debussy’s Impressionist phase of composition. Such famous works as Nocturnes, Images and La Mer were composed in this period, which spanned nearly two decades. He considered himself a composer rather than a pianist, having renounced public performance on piano in 1887, and did not associate with other musicians, instead choosing to gather at Stéphane Mallarmé’s house with leading Impressionist poets and painters of the era. Despite his association with the literary avant-garde, Debussy loathed the application of the “Impressionist” moniker upon his compositional style, and indeed his pieces are hardly “splashes of color” or “mood-paintings” as might be gathered through analogy to Impressionist works in the visual arts. Indeed, they are meticulously crafted works whose harmonic and melodic complexity lies hidden beneath their subtlety. The complexity of his pieces is manifold, revealed to the performer by the exacting articulations that he specifies throughout, and revealed to the listener by the carefully controlled manner by which he slips from one chord to the next without apparent modulation.
Nocturnes, composed on December 15, 1899 at 3 AM according to an inscription on the manuscript, is characteristic of Debussy’s Impressionist oeuvre. Just as Prelude a L’Apres-midi d’un faune was begun in 1892, so was Nocturnes penned in its original form in that year as Trois Scènes au Crépuscule, an orchestral triptych after poems by Henri de Régnier. In 1894 the piece’s three movements were reworked as a violin concerto intended for Eugène Ysaÿe, but it is not until the 1899 orchestral realization of Nocturnes that we have an extant score. While working on the violin concerto incarnation of the piece, Debussy remarked that it was “a study in gray painting. First performed on October 27, 1901 in Paris, the orchestral version bears little evidence as to why Debussy would make such a comment, as the palette of instrumental tone colors employed ranges widely from the dark and plaintive corno anglais in Nuages to the distant yet martial heavily-muted trumpets in Fétes.
Nuages represents Debussy’s attempt to describe the “unchangeable aspect of the sky” and the slow, solemn motion of the moonlit clouds fading away in grey tones tinged with white. To this end, the dark sonorities of English horn, French horn, bassoon, and flute are used extensively over an undulating pedal point maintained by the strings. On the occasions when the brighter tone of solo violin and cello are used a constant rhythm is maintained and the texture is only marked by the cyclic rise and fall of the melodic line. In contrast to the steady motion of the strings, which seem to suggest the serene passage of clouds through a darkened sky, the English horn repeats its motif, intimating a glint of moonlight with a slightly ominous quality lent by the descending augmented fourths traced by the horns and echoed later by the woodwinds.
Debussy described Fétes as embodying the “vibrating, dancing rhythm of the atmosphere,” a festival not of earth but of spirits such as Prospero might have conjured up. Setting the celebratory atmosphere is the fantastic opening theme in which the woodwinds and violins soar playfully over a constant accompaniment of triplet figures, conjuring up images of dancing and merriment. Intriguingly, Ottorino Resphigi seems to have been inspired by Fétes when writing his symphonic poem I pini di Roma, as I pini di Villa Borghese is similar in orchestration and spirit, at least until the imposition of the second theme, “a fantastic vision which passes through the festive scene and becomes merged in it.” This second theme, almost martial in its strongly rhythmic nature, is first taken up by the muted trumpets, then by the woodwinds. Debussy’s subsequent integration of the two themes before the restrained ending of the festivities is perhaps the clearest example of his Impressionistic harmonic brilliance, as he uses the repeated motif of the first theme in the strings as a splash of color by transposing it into each key as the brass modulate through Ab minor, Bb major, B minor, and E major before returning to Ab.
oblig. links to previous days' tracks of the day:
classical TotD for april 26
classical TotD for april 27
Put a bit of enka in there one day to f*ck with their heads.