- by Art Sulit, www.MuSeeks.com/ArthurSulit
Music Timeline Author
Claude Debussy heralded the era of "liberation of the tones". Coming out of the late Romantic period where "sentimentalism" and "bombast" were rapidly falling out of favor, Debussy ushered in the wildly coloful age of Impressionism. Debussy achieved for the music world what his artist friends Claude Monet and Pierre Renoir achieved for the world of painting--vibrant splashes of color which take you around, but never really "arrive" at a destination. You just "are". The subject just "is"--and we should relish just in the joy of "being". One gets the sense of "floating" when looking at or hearing an Impressionistic piece.
Rather than adhere to the constrained, tempred forms of Bach or Mozart, Debussy perhaps preferred the free-wheeling lifestyle of Wagner, the tones coming from a very liberalized spiritual and sexual outlook, that of lingering bliss, satisfying for a moment, yet not yet so fully satisfying, so we need to float even further to seek more.
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Some of his music was popularized in the 1970's by the likes of 'Styx', the Chicago-born progressive rock group, and perhaps even Barry Manilow. His stunningly beautiful 'Claire de Lune' (or 'Clair of the Moon') is so utterly gentle, yet tantalizing that one imagines himself in bed, naked, next to his loved one, stimulating the sensitive spots with a feather, or swingining merrily, unclothed, by the park (see similar paintings by his peers). Indeed this very work was featured in the movie 'The Right Stuff' set to a Texan stripper doing a dance of feathers.
Sadly, Debussy never experienced any great financial gain from his labors, and often lived on the brink of poverty. He left his first wife for another, and shared a small apartment from which he composed. It is hard to imagine how he composed such stunning and highly complex orchestral works like 'La Demoiselle Elue' and 'La Mer' (a truly amazing and violently crashing portrait of The Sea). Yet, steadily, he labored, and we, selfish souls, are the ones who profit. One might ask, how many great composers are there today in the making, living under the same conditions for people to profit off of later? Who knows? But where the mind is liberated, perhaps the body and soul could go too, wherever which way--up or down. With Debussy, it does not matter. It just matters that you "be".