Debussy's Late Style


Book Description

Debussy's Late Style explores Claude Debussy's musical responses to World War I. This period of composition encompasses the duration of the war and the last four years of Debussy's life. The works that emerged during this time reflect both wartime events and the composer's self-conscious desire to define his own musical legacy as he felt his life nearing its end. Debussy's complete wartime compositions comprise a small but significant body of works, some little known and some now acknowledged to be among the masterpieces of his career. These include the Berceuse héroïque, En Blanc et noir, the Douze Études, the "Noël des enfants qui n'ont plus de maisons," and the three instrumental sonatas (the Cello Sonata; the Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp; and the Violin Sonata). Through music analysis, musicology, and cultural history, this study offers interpretive readings of Debussy's late works, focusing in particular on how they reflect the unique cultural milieu of wartime Paris.




Debussy's Resonance


Book Description

Some of Debussy's most beloved pieces, as well as lesser-known ones from his early years, set in a rich cultural context by leading experts from the English- and French-speaking worlds. The music of Claude Debussy has always been widely beloved by listeners and performers alike, more perhaps than that of any of the other pioneers of musical modernism. However rich in itself, his creative output also participated, and continues to participate, in a network of cultural connections, the scope and meaning of which can only be gleaned through multiple interpretive frameworks. Debussy's Resonance offers twenty new studies by some of themost active and respected English- and French-language scholars of French music. The book treats a large swath of the composer's music, from previously unexplored mélodies of his early years to late pieces such as the ballet Jeux and the Douze Études, and takes into consideration the numerous contexts that helped shape the works and the different ways that musicologists and critics have explained them. CONTRIBUTORS: Katherine Bergeron, Matthew Brown, David J. Code, Mark DeVoto, Michel Duchesneau, David Grayson, Denis Herlin, Jocelyn Ho, Roy Howat, Steven Huebner, Julian Johnson, Barbara L. Kelly, Richard Langham Smith, Mark McFarland, François de Médicis, Robert Orledge, Boyd Pomeroy. Caroline Rae, Marie Rolf, August Sheehy FRANÇOIS DE MÉDICIS is Professor of Music at the Université de Montréal. STEVEN HUEBNER is Professor of Music at McGill University.




Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini's Late Style


Book Description

Giacomo Puccini is one of the most frequently performed and best loved of all operatic composers. In Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini's Late Style, Andrew Davis takes on the subject of Puccini's last two works to better understand how the composer creates meaning through the juxtaposition of the conventional and the unfamiliar -- situating Puccini in past operatic traditions and modern European musical theater. Davis asserts that hearing Puccini's late works within the context of la solita forma allows listeners to interpret the composer's expressive strategies. He examines Puccini's compositional language, with insightful analyses of melody, orchestration, harmony, voice-leading, and rhythm and meter.




Analyses of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Music, 1940-2000


Book Description

This new volume incorporates all entries from the previous editions by Arthur Wenk, expanding to cover writings drawn from periodicals, theses, dissertations, books, and Festschriften from 1940 to 2000. Over 9,000 references to analyses of works by over 1,000 composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are included.




Debussy


Book Description

One of the most revered composers of the twentieth century, Claude Debussy (1862–1918) achieved the unheard of: he reinvented the language of music without alienating the majority of music lovers. Debussy drove French music into entirely new regions of beauty and excitement at a time when old traditions threatened to stifle it. Yet despite his profound influence on French culture, Debussy’s own life was complicated and often troubled by struggles over money, women, and ill health. Here, Stephen Walsh, acclaimed author of Stravinsky, chronicles both the composer himself and the unique moment in European history that bore him. Walsh’s engagingly original approach is to enrich a lively biography with analyses of Debussy’s music: from his first daring breaks with the rules as a Conservatoire student to his achievements as the greatest French composer of his time.




Douze Études


Book Description

Claude Debussy's 12 Études were composed in 1915, in memory of Frederic Chopin. He admits that these are extremely difficult to play, and describes them as "a warning to pianists not to take up the musical profession unless they have remarkable hands." Includes: * Étude 1 (5 fingers, "after Monsieur Czerny") * Étude 2 (thirds) * Étude 3 (fourths) * Étude 4 (sixths) * Étude 5 (octaves) * Étude 6 (eight fingers) * Étude 7 (chromatic degrees) * Étude 8 (ornaments) * Étude 9 (repeated notes) * Étude 10 (opposing sonorities) * Étude 11 (composite arpeggios) * Étude 12 (chords)




Debussy Redux


Book Description

"In a study that is both scholarly and highly entertaining, Matthew Brown explores pop culture's appropriations of Debussy's music in everything from '30s swing tunes, '40s movie scores, '50s lounge/exotica, '70s rock and animation, '80s action films, and Muzak. The book, however, is far more than a compendium of fascinating borrowings. The author uses these musical transfers to tackle some of the most fundamental aesthetic issues relevant to the music of all composers, not just Debussy." David Grayson -- Book jacket.




Debussy


Book Description

(Unlocking the Masters). Victor Lederer explores the sophistication, refinement and inspirations of Debussy's music, pointing out subtleties that otherwise could take years of careful listening to fully appreciate. Includes a full-length CD of the maestro's masterworks.




The Cambridge Companion to Debussy


Book Description

Often considered the father of twentieth-century music, Debussy was a visionary whose influence is still felt. This book offers a wide-ranging series of essays on Debussy the man, the musician and composer. It contains insights into his character, his relationship to his Parisian environment and his musical works across all genres, with challenging views on the roles of nature and eroticism in his life and music. His music is considered through the characteristic themes of sonority, rhythm, tonality and form, with closing chapters considering the performance and reception of his music in the first years of the new century and our view of Debussy today as a major force in Western culture. This comprehensive view of Debussy is written by a team of specialists for students and informed music lovers.




Claude Debussy and Twentieth-century Music


Book Description

"The thesis of this book may be simply stated: Debussy's importance lies in his contribution to the central issues of twentieth-century music. Debussy's influence was not limited to a few new idioms which lesser composers could imitate. Rather, Debussy's music offered a new way of thinking about music in general. His greatest influence has been not on his immediate contemporaries but on composers since 1945, when a revolution in thinking about musical time permitted a truer evaluation of Debussy's achievement and a new exploration of his tonal resources. The liberation of the musical moment, the new emphasis on timbre, and the concept of rhythm as duration rather than relation, all depend on Debussy's work, as contemporary composers have demonstrated both in their remarks about music and in their interest in reanalyzing Debussy's late music in light of contemporary techniques. Our picture of Debussy has come full circle. Perceived as a radical composer in the 1890s, as a charming, but minor, figure in the decades following his death, Debussy now emerges as a true revolutionary whose subtle overturning of musical conventions has had as great an effect on the music of our time as the more celebrated revolutions of Stravinsky and Schoenberg." --Preface.