Claude Debussy (1862-1918) is a French composer most prominently associated with "impressionist" music, a movement closely linked to trends taking place in the art world in the final decades of the 19th century.

By exploring new devices in rhythm and tonality he exerted an influence over nearly every major composer of the 20th century. Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartok, and even Gershwin took up his departures, and he also influenced many important figures in jazz (including Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and Thelonius Monk). Even today, contemporary screen composers like John Williams cite Debussy's evocative style as the one that translates most easily into emotional language for motion pictures.

How did Debussy do it? What were his departures?

One was rhythmical. He used complex time signatures and overlapping meters. What does that mean? Well, music is organized around a steady beat, and those beats are usually organized into groups of 2, 3, or 4. That's why, when you hear young music students counting aloud, they're usually counting "one-two-three" or "one-two-three-four." Most music, in fact, is grouped into multiples of 2 or 3. But Debussy introduced music organized into groups of 5, 7, or even 9, which is far more complicated, and to make things even more complex, he would have one voice making music in groups of 2, while the other voice is working in groups of 3. It still works out mathematically (later composers would experiment with no groupings, or free-form) but the music is far more difficult to put together (and more interesting to the listener).

Another was tonal. Until Debussy, most western music was organized around the basic scale, the one that Maria von Trapp made famous in the Sound of Music when she sang "Do, a deer, a female deer ... " To be scientific, that Do-Re-Mi scale is based on the sound frequencies between 440 Hz and 880 Hz being organized into 12 ascending tones that are equal in their incrementation; it is also based on using every other tone except for the tones between the 3rd and 7th steps (don't worry -- we'll demonstrate this from the stage at the informance).

Well, Debussy was interested in other kinds of scales other than Do-Re-Mi. He though Asian tonalities were lovely and introduced their pentatonic scale (which only uses 5 tones) to Western music. He also used the whole-tone scale, such as you might hear in the Middle East.

We'll try to show how and where these are applied at the informance. To do it, we'll be drawing on music from Debussy's early and later periods:

Here is a very technical discussion of tonality.

Here is a similarly technical discussion of rhythm and metric structure.

An excellent and accessible biography on Debussy is Victor Lederer's 2007 Debussy: The Quiet Revolutionary.

To get a sense of Debussy using these tools to write music that is mysterious and evocative, we hope you'll listen to his "Sunken Cathedral." This is a particularly nice recording by French pianist Francois-Joel Thiollier.

Since we won't be able to render any of Debussy's large-ensemble music, we highly recommend you listen to something like his orchestral sketches about the sea, La Mer. This is a nice recording by the Philharmonia Orchestra and conductor Carlo Maria Giulini

If you simply cannot hold out and must listen to the chamber music we will perform, then our favorite recording of Debussy's Trio in G Major is the one made immediately upon its discovery (1987) at the University of Michigan. It was recorded by the Michigan Chamber Players.

There's also a very nice recording by the Florestan Trio on YouTube.

Our own rendition of the first movement of the work is available on our Debut album, which is available on Amazon and iTunes.