MAPPING MUSIC

Tag: Claude Debussy

  • 12. Zweite Wiener Schule

    Vienna, 1992 —

    The so-called “Second Viennese School” consisted of influential master composer Arnold Schoenberg and his protegés, Alban Berg and Anton Webern in early 20th-century Vienna. They pioneered a compositional approach described succinctly by Wikipedia as “totally chromatic expressionism without a firm tonal centre, often referred to as atonality; and later, Schoenberg’s serial twelve-tone technique.”

    When I began studying composition at Michigan in 1968, I quickly became immersed in exploration of pitch structure and broader tonality freed from the long-traditional restrictive limits of tonality: diatonic major and minor keys and their chromatic extensions, triadic sonorities and tonal centers. The complexity of this new musical realm is not truly “atonal” but rather an opening to a universe of fascinating, colorful possibility.

    Three pieces of the early 20th century, which I studied deeply in the 1970s and later used extensively in my teaching of modern music, were each masterful explorations of musical sound color.

    • Claude Debussy’s La Mer (1905), an iconic tone poem of Impressionistic musical painting, was discussed in Journal 1. Musique Française.
    • Anton Webern’s Symphony, Op. 21 (1928) is maybe the briefest piece ever titled as a symphony, a succinct, two-movement work whose first movement is a delicate gem of pointillistic color and complex 12-tone harmony.
    • Arnold Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16 (1909); the third piece is a gentle study of orchestral sound color titled “Sommermorgen an einem See (Farben)” — (Summer Morning by a Lake: Colors”.

    After fifty years, these works are embedded more deeply than ever in my musical consciousness.

    It was only in 1992, on a side trip by bus from Brno, that I visited Vienna, the great musical city of Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart in his last years. Mozart’s grave, not in the main cemetery but on the edge of the city, was hard to find but emotionally powerful to visit.

    Farben

    “Farben” is an early Schoenberg piece that is all about instrumental sound color and exotic harmonic color. The chords are not triads but rather atonally “dissonant” sonorities that place the instrumental colors in close, glowing pitch-interval proximity.

    LISTEN ›

    Five Pieces for Orch – III (Farben)

    Chicago Symphony on YouTube

    My recent piece, Farben, pays special homage to Schoenberg’s masterpiece, layering kaleidoscopic wind-instrument colors to build massive, morphing constellations, echoing Webern’s hidden chord-color symmetry.

    FARBEN

    Clark 2025 (TC-149)

    I have long admired and been influenced by the music of Anton Webern. Known historically as a member of the Second Viennese School with Alban Berg and mentor Arnold Schoenberg, the three were pioneers of so-called atonal music and 12-tone-row serial harmonic organization. I find the term “atonal” misleading and negative, as their 12-tone processes achieved new “12-tone tonalities” — not simply a rejection of traditional tonal harmony but also striving to create new and more complex tonalities.

    What I admire about Webern’s mostly-quiet instrumental miniatures (his Symphonie Op. 21 has only two sparsely-scored movements) is the delicate, crystalline quality of his pitch constellations; and their gently lyric, precious setting into transparent, pointillistic textures, pearl-strings of separate, delicate instrumental colors (called Klangfarbenmelodie). The first movement is built on one enormous, static, 13-pitch chord containing all 12 pitch classes of the chromatic universe in a symmetrical interval pattern, a palindrome interval pattern, the same top to bottom as bottom to top.

    Todesfall in Mittersill

    Webern’s mentor, Schoenberg, as a Jew was compelled to emigrate to the U.S. in 1933 before it was too late. Webern, not Jewish, stayed in Vienna, where he was born, suffered through and survived World War II, only to be fatally shot by a U.S. Army soldier during the Allied occupation of Austria in 1945. My homage to this beautiful musical mind tries to capture his music’s “lyrical, poetic concision” (Wikipedia).

    WEBERN ELEGY

    Clark 2024 (TC-115)

    Neue Tonalität

    My compositional excursions in 12-tone tonality traverse many of my compositions. One that sums it up well, if not succinctly, is VIENNESE SKETCHES. A set of “Twelve Miniatures in Twelve Tones,” parts I through IV are adapted from Webern Elegy , and V through XII from MapLab7 – For Little Arnold from my book, Mapping the Music Universe.

    Not intended to portray the historical European city, VIENNESE SKETCHES instead explores various textures and tonalities using the musical techniques of the Second Viennese School. My goal was to create a complex counterpoint of sound constellations that is less dissonant and more sonorous — my sense of a new tonality.

    VIENNESE SKETCHES

    Clark 2023 (TC-131)

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  • 2. Musique Française

    Ann Arbor, 1968 —

    Having begun composing in 1963, I started formal composition study in 1968 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. American composer Eugene Kurtz, based in Paris but filling in that semester at Michigan, was assigned to teach the new freshman. A proponent of modern French music, his compositional models included Debussy and Ravel.

    Sonatine

    Kurtz assigned me to immerse myself in deep study of their music, in particular Ravel’s Sonatine (1905).

    Ravel: Sonatine

    Judith Valerie Engel on YouTube

    Fifty years later in my career as a more experimental composer, my compositional style began to mellow toward a gentler Impressionistic approach and a lush, bright harmonic language reminiscent of Debussy and Ravel.

    Homage to Ravel, my new Sonatine is spun from a single harmonic progression, seven chords each stacking a Perfect Fifth interval high above another.

    This material (what Schoenberg would call a Grundgestalt) generates melodic lines and many arpeggiation patterns, in successive variations of changing register, intensity, and rhythmic pace.

    Sonatine

    Clark 2025 (TC-155)

    Nocturnes

    In 1907, French composer Claude Debussy wrote, “I am more and more convinced that music, by its very nature, is something that cannot be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms”. Color, light, and texture were also the hallmarks of a new style of painting developed by French artists — Impressionism.

    At the threshold of the 20th century on 15 December 1899, Debussy completed the first of his Impressionist masterpieces for orchestra, Trois Nocturnes. He avoided labeling it “symphony” or “tone poem” by calling the movements “three symphonic sketches”. The first sketch of Nocturnes is subtitled “Nuages,” premiered on 9 December 1900 in Paris.

    Debussy’s biography describes the genesis of the piece while crossing the Pont de la Concorde in Paris in stormy weather. The composer’s notes say, “‘Nuages’ renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white.”

    Debussy: Trois Nocturnes

    Vienna Philharmonic on Youtube

    Adopting the French language and musical style recognizes the early French explorers of the Great Lakes region of North America. The first decades of my life began there in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula (the “mitten”). It has its own smaller Leelanau Peninsula in the northwest corner (the mitten’s “little finger”) near Interlochen’s National Music Camp, where I spent many summers. Nearby Grand Traverse Bay has its own even smaller Old Mission peninsula, where I loved to visit its lighthouse. The Leelanau has a grand lighthouse at its northern tip and a scenic drive, state highway M21, winding for 64 miles all the way around the peninsula’s shoreline, through forests and past the Great Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes.

    In 1984 my piece titled PENINSULA for piano and sound synthesis was a more experimental work that traced a map of the Leelanau and its landmarks to determine by their spatial coordinates the timing and pitches of sound constellations.

    Moving forward from that mapping phase of my compositions, my Impressionistic phase produced the sound sculpture Leelanau Sketches in 2022. Some of its musical material reappears now in five symphonic sketches, Belle Péninsule. Here is the fourth movement, which quotes Debussy’s “Nuages.”

    Belle Péninsule

    IV. “Nuages blanc“

    Clark 2024 (TC-147)

    La Mer

    Debussy’s completed his second composition of three symphonic sketches for orchestra, La Mer, in 1905. It is a monumental work of Impressionist sound-painted textures and a textbook model of lush, beautiful orchestration. The three sketches are titled:

    “De l’aube à midi sur la mer”

    “From dawn to midday on the sea”

    Jeux de vagues”

    “Play of the Waves”

    “Dialogue du vent et de la mer”

    “Dialogue of the wind and the sea”

    Debussy: La Mer

    Orchestre national de France

    My homage to La Mer, Sea Sketches, sound-paints waves, deep currents, wind, and sun-sparkling surfaces, employing swelling sound colors and post-modern cyclic techniques in a pan-diatonic tonal setting. The end briefly quotes the opening arpeggio of Debussy’s “La fille aux cheveux de lin” (“The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”) from Book I of his Préludes for piano (1909-1910).

    Sea Sketches

    Clark 2023 (TC-132)

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