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Score Indications in Debussyste Compositions Jane E. Harrison

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Score Indications in Debussyste Compositions Jane E. Harrison As Though Heard from Afar: Score Indications in Debussyste Compositions Jane E. Harrison Since their advent in musical scores during the sixteenth century, composers have used dynamic markings (symbols based on Italian words that conveyed relative volume levels such as the abbreviation p for piano, or soft) and performance indications (more lengthy descriptions of the desired speed, style, or timbre of sound) with increasing frequency and precision. Around 1900 a musical revolution was well underway in France, as controversial composer Claude Debussy had becoming the unwitting leader of a group of composers who imitated and expanded upon his style in their own compositions.1 These composers, known as the debussystes, continued the trend of increasing use and finer nuance of directions in musical scores, but in a unique way. They strongly favored the soft side of the dynamic spectrum and performance indications calling for delicate sounds: a majority of the debussyste pieces that I have uncovered in my research maintain dynamic levels that rarely rise above mezzo-piano (moderately soft) and contain indications as soft as pppp. Debussyste scores are also full of poetic indications that ask for soft sounds and deceleration, particularly at the ends of formal sections and in the final measures: lointain (far off), perdendo (dying out), très doux (very soft), le plus p possible (as quiet as possible), and à peine (barely audible). Certainly the debussystes were not the first composers to write tender music that reveled in exquisite shading. Their shared musical style grew out of French salon culture, which due to the intimate nature of its performance venue encouraged composers to cultivate an intimate and delicate sound. It was also common nineteenth-century practice to designate the middle 1 The traits of this style include certain harmonic signifiers, unorthodox voice-leading, widely spaced sonorities that mitigate dissonance, beginnings in which the material gradually coalesces and incomplete endings in which it gradually moves away from the listener, streaming or arabesque textures, non-schematic melodies. Other strategies concerning rhythm and indications will be discussed in this paper. 1 movement as soft and slow in multi-movement instrumental pieces. What distinguishes the dynamics and performance indications of the debussystes is the sheer frequency with which these composers preferred a soft and subdued sound and the extreme degree to which this was taken in their scores. Further, such a consistent linking of a certain compositional style and a specific sensibility suggests that the composers practicing the style were inspired by a set of highly specific aesthetic goals. My aim in this paper is to characterize directions written into debussyste scores as a shared stylistic practice and to suggest the aesthetic origins of this practice as part of a larger project about what the debussyste style was intended to communicate or represent. Score indications offer us that rare and relished glimpse into the composer’s mind as he or she crafted a composition. This is especially the case in compositions from early twentieth-century France, when the first modernist composers were seeking to transmit increasingly specific information to their listeners and to exert more control over performers via directions in the score, therefore ensuring the faithful transmission of their ideas. For the sake of concision I will limit the scope of this study to solo piano music, which was a favored genre among the debussystes and tended to be where they created their most innovative works; and focus on the scores of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, the most visible and influential composers who wrote debussyste piano music. As I will show later, they were in direct contact with the other artistic and scholarly movements that inspired debussysme while young, and therefore provided the earliest and most intentional (and in a way the purest) exemplars of the translation of these influences into a musical idiom. 2 Example 1. Debussy, “La soirée dans Grenade” from Estampes, mm. 1-18 Debussy wrote “La soirée dans Grenade” in 1903 as part of the piano triptych Estampes. The work was premiered for an audience of composers at a Société nationale de musique concert in Paris in 1904 and was frequently programmed on concerts of Parisian composers’ societies and other high-profile concerts into the 1920s. The boisterous dance music that one might expect in a composition that evokes a night in an exotic Spanish town sounds at only one point, during a brief climax in activity that Debussy intriguingly placed early in the composition, rather than 3 towards the end.2 Dynamics and tempo stay firmly at low levels for the remainder of the piece, so that the persisting dance rhythms sound as though heard through a dream. After what came to be known as the debussyste style emerged in Debussy’s piano compositions in 1890, sixty-eight of the seventy-three compositions that made up the remainder of his output for piano spend the vast majority of their time at the level of piano or quieter.3 (In his earlier piano works the composer followed the nineteenth-century convention of treating mezzo-forte as the most common level.) More specifically, in these compositions piano or pianissimo is the normative dynamic level: the beginning and ending of the entire work as well as the beginning of individual sections within it tend to reside at this level. It is as though the musical material naturally resides at a lower energy level, and only with significant effort can it be pushed into a state of greater excitement. Once achieved, the higher level of energy is temporary and the music will soon fall back to its typical state of low energy. Debussy often emphasized his desire for faint music with descriptors: doux occurs at least once in thirty of the piano compositions, léger at least once in twenty-nine, and délicat once in four. He also frequently attempted to provide the listener with the experience of hearing sounds as faint due to perceptual difficulty, principally conceptualized as sound that is perceived from afar with the indication lointain (twenty-one compositions), and also as a sound source that is moving away from the listener with indications including s’éloignant and several Italian terms that signify dying away (estinto, perdendo, morendo, smorzando). In a few instances Debussy conceives soft sounds as sensations perceived weakly by other senses, such as effacé (erased) and effleuré (brushed against), which refer to sight and touch, respectively. 2 That this composition was written by a Frenchman during the early twentieth century makes this kind of picturesque dance music even more expected, given the exoticized perception the French held of neighboring Spain at the time. See Richard Langham Smith, “Ravel’s operatic spectacles,” The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, Deborah Mawer, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 2000): 190-191. 3 This total treats each movement of each composition as a separate piece. 4 Maurice Ravel composed relatively few solo piano works in the debussyste style as compared to Debussy, due to his small compositional output in general and his move away from debussysme in 1913. Despite their small number, Ravel’s debussyste creations for the piano were highly innovative and proved to be influential as the composer’s stature among composers and prominence on concert programs grew in France after the turn-of-the-century.4 All of Ravel’s fourteen debussyste piano compositions spend the majority of their time at piano or softer, and several of them reside there for nearly every measure. Ravel treats soft dynamics unconventionally: textures at once murmuring and spiky in which short crescendos frequently ripple through it and convey latent energy, lengthy passages at ppp, and unconventionally large amounts of time spent decrescendoing (see in particular “Un barque sur l’océan”). One also often finds poetic indications calling for doux (delicate) and occasionally for sombre (somber) sounds. While Ravel utilized poetic indications far less than Debussy and was not as interested in soft sounds as weakly perceived – we only have the occurrence of lointain in three scores and perdendo in one – he did write in indications calling for emotionally subdued sounds and attached them in particular to quiet sections, including calme, sans nuances and sans expression.5 Ravel took the notion of delicate music to an extreme in “Oiseaux tristes” from Miroirs, shown in Example 2. The composition was so novel that several fellow debussystes received it coolly when Ravel first played it for them at a meeting of the Apaches in 1904, likely because even these elite listeners found its tediously soft and slow sound disconcerting upon a first 4 Especially his taking on of students in composition around this time, his stature among the Apaches which was formed in 1902, and his role as the principal creator of the Société musicale indépendante in 1909 alongside several other debussystes. 5 These indications were part of a refusal of excessive expression of the Romantics and especially Wagner, a reaction that was shared among debussystes and the new avant-garde writing in the style dépouillé after World War I, which Ravel also associated with briefly. Such markings asking for restraint, including Ravel’s many requests to not slow down at the ends of phrases, reflect Western composers’ greater desire to exert more control over the sound their scores prescribed in the early twentieth century. 5 hearing.6 Thirty-three of its forty-four total measures are designated piano or softer. The dynamic level falls to as low as ppp and the piece contains just one crescendo that rises to the level of forte during a swell of activity that Ravel, like Debussy in “La soirée dans Grenade”, places in the first half of the composition.
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