Modern Music essays

Modern Music essays Claude Debussy composed his music with an emphasis on sound, sensuous, and sumptuous sound. His music turned away from German-Romanticism and German music with its chromatic harmonies and melodic formulas. Debussy uses color as his basic building block and in doing so has constructed a style of music to represent him and his proud nation of France. This paper is going highlight his extrordinary style of composition and the techniques he used to develop Impressionism. Between 1893 and 1895 Debussy worked on an opera based on Maurice Maeterlincks play Pellas et Mlisande. According to Grayson, this project always encompassed Debussy. The discovery of Pellas in 1893 was indeed a major turning point in Debussys career, and, as his remarks imply, it was the production of this opera in 1902 that brought him international celebrity. From that point on, everybody did indeed know what he had done. Debussy was taking great chances when writing opera, it was a good way to have everyone laugh at you and your work and put you on a shelf like a book you couldnt get through. His music stresses mood and nuances over patterns with pure melodies. It is impressive the way he created time standing still, by creating animated harmonic stasis. Richard Osborne describes Debussys work, Pellas et Mlisande is a drama of the inner, the really real world, a drama of implication, of psychological conflicts too secret to concentrate into the obvious attitudes of life, exhibitory and active... Arkel is old age poignantly particularized. The music by which Debussy gives him grief and wisdom is bowed in its sombre-moving phrases and harmonies, so pathetically in contrast to the golden throated lyricism of Pelleas: the innocent youngness but older in herself than she knows of Melinsande, the simple manliness of Gouland, that unfortunate horseman.1 Debussy b...