DEBUSSY Prelude a l'apres midi d'un faune Project Pack Key Stage 3 Introduction This pack is designed to help you use Debussy’s Prelude a l’apres midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun) in the classroom as a creative tool via LSO Play. Written in 1894 and inspired by the symbolist poem of the same name, Debussy’s piece was immediately hailed as a new direction in music. Later, composers such as Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez pinpointed its premiere as the exact moment that modern music began. Watching the performance of this piece on LSO Play will give your class the opportunity to see this sublime piece played up-close in a wonderfully rich performance filmed at the Barbican Centre in April 2017, under the baton of Francois-Xavier Roth. We’ve included below a full guide to Debussy’s unique musical world, a detalied analysis of his prelude which cross-references to the performance and a step-by-step creative project will help your students to re-create some of the famous moments from the score using Debussy’s ideas as a starting point Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918) Claude Debussy grew up in Paris. He was born in 1862 to humble, ordinary non-musical parents. His father was a shopkeeper and his mother a seamstress. At just 10 years old he entered the Paris Conservatoire studying piano and composition. At that time, he was their youngest student and he remained there for 11 years. Debussy’s time at the conservatoire wasn’t always a happy one however. He was impatient and temperamental. He often confessed to being bored in his composition lessons and he rebelled against the rules of both the college and of harmony and counterpoint. By 1885 he had decided to ‘go his own way’ regardless of what his teachers thought and his music began to grow more dissonant (clashy) and extreme as he struggle to find a new sound. Finally, in 1889 he visited the Paris exhibition and it was here that he found the inspiration and the unique soundworld that changed his music forever. The rules of harmony move aside for ‘Impressionism’ Since the days of Haydn and Mozart in the 1700s all composers, regardless of how revolutionary they were, stuck closely to the rules of classical harmony. Music was written in a key and the 1 harmonic journey it took was all about establishing this key, moving away from it and then cleverly back again. The keynote was all important and the notes of the scale had a hierarchy applied to them which enabled composers to slip in and out of related tonal areas. Debussy simply couldn’t see why this had to be the case and so he started to experiment with diferent scales and modes as his starting point rarely thinking about being in a key at all. He used scales from Javanese Gamelan and tried to make his instruments mimic their percussive sounds. He also became briefly fascinated by Japan and started to write exclusively on the pentatonic scale, a 5-note scale created from the black notes of the piano. By writing without a key he didn’t have to follow the rules dictated by that key and rather than move from one expected chord to the next finishing with a perfect cadence, he could slip sideways blurring this ever-present feeling of an all-important ‘home’ note. Add to this Debussy’s use of instruments; in this prelude, the strings are required to use a variety of techniques including mutes, playing over the fingerboard, pizzicato and tremolando, his blurred rhythms, he often uses many diferent divisions of the beat at once, and the extra-musical inspiration behind many of his pieces and you do have a completely new take on music. The critics called it Impressionism. Debussy, ever the rebel, called the critics ‘imbeciles’ Prelude a l’apres midi d’un faune (1894) In 1894 Debussy was out of education and trying to make a living as a composer. He regularly attended a meeting of intellectuals called the Tuesday Club and had made friends with a poet there called Stephane Mallarme. Mallarme was a major voice in the French symbolist movement but he spent most of his life in near poverty, teaching English and attending soirees with likeminded artistic intellectuals in the heart of Paris. His poem ‘L’apres midi d’un faune’ was published in 1876 and it quickly became a landmark in French literature and regarded as one of the greatest poems of its type. It describes the lazy, dream-like visions of a faun who has just woken up and is watching a group of nymphs from afar. His dreams are unrequited. Maybe the whole thing is imagined? At the close he wishes the nymphs farewell and slowly drifts back to sleep. When Mallarme heard of his friend’s plan to set the poem to music, he was unimpressed. He felt that the whole point of poetry was to create music with words. But Debussy’s aim in setting these words was to create a very free illustration; it is a musical response rather than a complete re- telling. To quote Debussy himself, ‘It is an evocation of the feelings of the poem as a whole’. It isn’t a tone poem; it is a slow, meditative melody and a layered orchestration that aims to reflect the feelings described within Mallarme’s work 2 After the first performance, Mallarme was completely won over and declared the work a ‘marvel’. Debussy had created his first true masterpiece and had changed the course of music history forever. 3 Analysis Here’s a simple analysis of the work, alongside links to the performance on LSO Play. Bars 1 - 54 Section A Bar 1 Main theme (a): flute solo This opening swoop downwards stretches a tritone. It is completely unaccompanied and therefore its key is ambiguous. Bar 4 Theme (a) is harmonised at the very end by a Bb7 chord. This is a very unstable dominant seventh chord which doesn’t resolve of form a perfect cadence as it would’ve done in Mozart’s day Bar 6 Debussy places a bar of silence here to give his ideas space. After this the Bb7 chord repeats and the little horn dialogue raises up to introduce… Bar 11 …Theme (a) for the second time now with D major harmony and parallel chords from the strings Bar 15 The theme fragments to a little 3 note motif (b) that creates the first mini climax of the piece Bar 20 Solo clarinet remains and raises up to introduce… Bar 21 …Theme (a) for the 3rd time, finally harmonised in the ‘home key’ of E major but now with extended 1st note and new 2nd theme 4 Bar 24 4th version of Theme (a), harmonised in E (with added 9th). This time, the theme fragments to create another mini climax Bars 31 - 33 Music becomes more agitated, clarinet has a variation of Theme (a) which includes whole tone scale Bars 34 – 36 Bars 31-33 transposed Bar 37 New Idea (c) based on the shape of Theme (a) played by oboe Bar 40 Idea (c) is developed and imitated on violin Bars 44 - 54 Idea (c) fragments and develops, with ideas reminiscent of Theme (a) to create a climax and a fade which includes a 4-bar pedal note of Ab at bar 51 Bars 55 - 78 Section B Bar 55 New Theme (d) on woodwind with syncopated (blurred) accompaniment from the strings. Bassline alternates between Db and G – a tritone. Bar 63 Strings take Theme (d). The accompaniment here features many diferent rhythms so that the sense of pulse is ‘blurred’. The end of Theme (d) this time is borrowed from (c) and (a) combined Bar 72 These ideas fragment down to solos for horn, clarinet, oboe and violin. The violin raises up to introduce…. Bars 79 - 105 Section A Bar 79 …Theme (a) again on flute and the return to Section A. The theme is now in 4/4, it is much slower, the downward swoop stretches just a 4th rather than a tritone and it is accompanied by E major chords from the harp and gorgeous bass notes outside of what is expected Bar 83 Oboe theme based on the shape of (a) agitatedly interrupts the mood Bar 85 A cascade down throughout the orchestra, with string ‘shiver’ 5 Bars 86 – 93 A loose repeat of 79 – 85 with new orchestration; oboe has Theme (a), interrupted by cor anglais Bar 94 Theme (a) on flute for 6th time again in E major in duet with solo violin playing the end of Idea (c) Percussionists add B and E (V – I) on antique cymbals for most conventional harmony so far. Ideas swell and then fragment and flutes raise up to introduce… Bar 100 … Theme (a) for final (7th) time. Bar 103 Oboe finishes the theme and harmony moves to B7 which resolves to… Bars 106 - 110 Coda Bar 106 … E major via a perfect cadence! Debussy adds chromatic movement in the harps, a clever harmonisation of the beginning of (a) and A# to spice up the final chord Bar 108 Final flute entry ends with C# falling to G# - a final reference to Theme (a) 6 Classroom Project Debussy’s piece features one iconic theme that is used in many diferent ways and one classic shape – Ternary Form. The project below explains how to create a similar tune which can then be manipulated using some of Debussy’s techniques.