HISTORY OF 20TH CENTURY

20th-century classical music describes orchestral works, chamber music, solo

instrumental works (including keyboard music), electronic music, choral music, songs,
operas, ballets, concertos, symphonies, and related forms, as well as fantasies,
rhapsodies, fugues, passacaglias and chaconnes, variations, oratorios, cantatas, suites,
improvisational and newly developed formal concepts such as variable and mobile
forms, that have been written and performed since 1900. This era was without a
dominant style and composers have created highly diverse kinds of
music. Modernism, impressionism, post-romanticism, neoclassicism, expressionism,
and, later, minimalism were all important movements. Atonality, serialism, musique
concrète and electronic music were all developed during this period. Jazz was an
important influence on many composers in this period.
the turn of the century, music was characteristically late Romantic in style. Composers
such as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Jean Sibelius were pushing the bounds
of Post-Romantic Symphonic writing. At the same time, the Impressionist movement,
spearheaded by Claude Debussy, was being developed in France. Debussy in fact
loathed the term Impressionism: "I am trying to do 'something different—in a way
realities—what the imbeciles call 'impressionism' is a term which is as poorly used as
possible, particularly by art critics" (Politoske and Martin 1988, 419). Maurice Ravel's
music, also often labelled as impressionist, explores music in many styles not always
related to it (see the discussion on Neoclassicism, below).
Many composers reacted to the Post-Romantic and Impressionist styles and moved
in quite different directions. The single most important moment in defining the course of
music throughout the century was the widespread break with traditional tonality,
effected in diverse ways by different composers in the first decade of the century. From
this sprang an unprecedented "linguistic plurality" of styles, techniques, and expression
(Morgan 1984, 458). In Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg developed atonality, out of
the expressionism that arose in the early part of the 20th century. He later developed
the twelve-tone technique which was developed further by his disciples Alban
Berg and Anton Webern; later composers (including Pierre Boulez) developed it further
still (Ross 2008, 194–96 and 363–64). Stravinsky (in his last works) explored twelve-
tone technique, too, as did many other composers; indeed, even Scott Bradley used the
technique in his scores for the Tom and Jerry cartoons (Ross 2008, 296).

Romantic style
 At the end of the 19th century (often called the Fin de siècle), the Romantic style
was starting to break apart, moving along various parallel courses, such
as Impressionism and Post-romanticism. In the 20th century, the different styles
 that emerged from the music of the previous century influenced composers to
follow new trends, sometimes as a reaction to that music, sometimes as an
extension of it, and both trends co-existed well into the 20th century.[citation
needed]
 The former trends, such as Expressionism are discussed later.
 In the early part of the 20th century, many composers wrote music which was an
extension of 19th-century Romantic music, and traditional instrumental
groupings such as the orchestra and string quartet remained the most typical.
Traditional forms such as the symphony and concerto remained in use. Gustav
Mahler and Jean Sibelius are examples of composers who took the traditional
symphonic forms and reworked them. (See Romantic music.)
 Some writers hold that the Schoenberg's work is squarely within the late-
Romantic tradition of Wagner and Brahms (Neighbour 2001, 582) and, more
generally, that "the composer who most directly and completely connects late
Wagner and the 20th century is Arnold Schoenberg" (Salzman 1988, 10).
Neoclassicism
 Neoclassicism was a style cultivated between the two world wars, which sought
to revive the balanced forms and clearly perceptible thematic processes of the
17th and 18th centuries, in a repudiation of what were seen as exaggerated
gestures and formlessness of late Romanticism. Because these composers
generally replaced the functional tonality of their models with extended tonality,
modality, or atonality, the term is often taken to imply parody or distortion of the
Baroque or Classical style (Whittall 2001). Famous examples
include Prokofiev's Classical Symphony and Stravinsky's Pulcinella. Paul
Hindemith (Symphony: Mathis der Maler) and Darius Milhaud also used this
style. Maurice Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin is often seen[weasel  words] as neo-
baroque (an architectural term), though the distinction between the terms is not
always made.

Impressionism

Claude Debussy (1908)

Main article: Impressionism in music
Impressionism started in France as a reaction, led by Claude Debussy, against the
emotional exuberance and epic themes of German Romanticism exemplified
by Wagner. In Debussy's view, art was a sensuous experience, rather than an
intellectual or ethical one. He urged his countrymen to rediscover the French masters of
the 18th century, for whom music was meant to charm, to entertain, and to serve as a
"fantasy of the senses" (Machlis 1979, 86–87).
Other composers associated with impressionism include Maurice Ravel, Albert
Roussel, Isaac Albéniz, Paul Dukas, Manuel de Falla, Charles Martin Loeffler, Charles
Griffes, Frederick Delius, Ottorino Respighi, Cyril Scott and Karol
Szymanowski (Machlis 1979, 115–18). Many French composers continued
impressionism's language through the 1920s and later, including Albert
Roussel, Charles Koechlin, André Caplet, and, later, Olivier Messiaen. Composers from
non-Western cultures, such as Tōru Takemitsu, and jazz musicians such as Duke
Ellington, Gil Evans, Art Tatum, and Cecil Taylor also have been strongly influenced by
the impressionist musical language (Pasler 2001a).
]

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Main article: Futurism (music)
At its conception, Futurism was an Italian artistic movement founded in 1909 by Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti; it was quickly embraced by the Russian avant garde. In 1913, the
painter Luigi Russolo published a manifesto, L'arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises),
calling for the incorporation of noises of every kind into music (Russolo 1913). In
addition to Russolo, composers directly associated with this movement include the
Italians Silvio Mix, Nuccio Fiorda, Franco Casavola, and Pannigi (whose 1922 Ballo
meccanico included two motorcycles), and the Russians Artur Lourié, Mikhail
Matyushin, and Nikolai Roslavets.
Though few of the futurist works of these composers are performed today, the influence
of futurism on the later development of 20th-century music was enormous. Sergei
Prokofiev, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Honegger, George Antheil, Leo
Ornstein, and Edgard Varèse are among the notable composers in the first half of the
century who were influenced by futurism. Characteristic features of later 20th-century
music with origins in futurism include the prepared piano, integral serialism, extended
vocal techniques, graphic notation, improvisation, and minimalism (Dennis and Powell
2001).
Free dissonance and experimentalism[edit]
In the early part of the 20th century, Charles Ives integrated American and European
traditions as well as vernacular and church styles, while using innovative techniques in
his rhythm, harmony, and form (Burkholder 2001). His technique included the use
of polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatoric elements, and quarter tones. Edgard
Varèse wrote highly dissonant pieces that utilized unusual sonorities and futuristic,
scientific-sounding names. He pioneered the use of new instruments and electronic
resources (see below).
Expressionism[edit]
By the late 1920s, though many composers continued to write in a vaguely
expressionist manner, it was being supplanted by the more impersonal style of the
German Neue Sachlichkeit and neoclassicism. Because expressionism, like any
movement that had been stigmatized by the Nazis, gained a sympathetic
reconsideration following World War II, expressionist music resurfaced in works by
composers such as Hans Werner Henze, Pierre Boulez, Peter Maxwell
Davies, Wolfgang Rihm, and Bernd Alois Zimmermann (Fanning 2001).
Postmodern music[edit]
Postmodernism is a reaction to modernism, but it can also be viewed as a response to a
deep-seated shift in societal attitude. According to this latter view, postmodernism
began when historic (as opposed to personal) optimism turned to pessimism, at the
latest by 1930 (Meyer 1994, 331).
John Cage is a prominent figure in 20th-century music, claimed with some justice both
for modernism and postmodernism because the complex intersections between
modernism and postmodernism are not reducible to simple schemata (Williams 2002,
241). His influence steadily grew during his lifetime. He often uses elements of
chance: Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 radio receivers, and Music of Changes for
piano. Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48) is composed for a prepared piano: a normal
piano whose timbre is dramatically altered by carefully placing various objects inside the
piano in contact with the strings. Currently Postmodernism includes composers who
react against the Avant-Garde and experimental styles of the late 20th century such
as Astor Piazzolla,Argentina and Miguel del Aguila, USA
Minimalism[edit]
Main article: Minimal music
In the later 20th century, composers such as La Monte Young, Arvo Pärt, Philip
Glass, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and John Adams began to explore what is now
called minimalism, in which the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features;
the music often features repetition and iteration. An early example is Terry Riley's In
C (1964), an aleatoric work in which short phrases are chosen by the musicians from a
set list and played an arbitrary number of times, while the note C is repeated in eighth
notes (quavers) behind them. Steve Reich's works Piano Phase (1967, for two pianos),
and Drumming (1970–71, for percussion, female voices and piccolo) employ the
technique called phasing in which a phrase played by one player maintaining a constant
pace is played simultaneously by another but at a slightly quicker pace. This causes the
players to go "out of phase" with each other and the performance may continue until
they come back in phase.
Philip Glass's 1 + 1 (1968) employs the additive process in which short phrases are
slowly expanded. La Monte Young's Compositions 1960 employs very long tones,
exceptionally high volumes and extra-musical techniques such as "draw a straight line
and follow it" or "build a fire". Michael Nyman argues that minimalism was a reaction to
and made possible by both serialism and indeterminism (Nyman 1999, 139). (See
also experimental music.)

Atonality and twelve-tone technique[edit]

See also: atonality
Arnold Schoenberg is one of the most significant figures in 20th-century music. While
his early works were in a late Romantic style influenced by Wagner (Verklärte Nacht,
1899), this evolved into an atonal idiom in the years before the First World War (Drei
Klavierstücke in 1909 and Pierrot Lunaire in 1912). In 1921, after several years of
research, he developed the twelve-tone technique of composition, which he first
described privately to his associates in 1923 (Schoenberg 1975, 213). His first large-
scale work entirely composed using this technique was the Wind Quintet, Op. 26,
written in 1923–24. Later examples include the Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31 (1926–
28), the Third and Fourth String Quartets (1927 and 1936, respectively), the Violin
Concerto (1936) and Piano Concerto (1942). In later years, he intermittently returned to
a more tonal style (Kammersymphonie no. 2, begun in 1906 but completed only in
1939; Variations on a Recitative for organ in 1941). He taught Anton Webern and Alban
Berg and these three composers are often referred to as the principal members of
the Second Viennese School (Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven—and sometimes
Schubert—being regarded as the First Viennese School in this context). Webern wrote
works using a rigorous twelve-tone method and influenced the development of total
serialism. Berg, like Schoenberg, employed twelve-tone technique within a late-romantic
or post-romantic style (Violin Concerto, which quotes a Bach Choral and uses Classical
form). He wrote two major operas (Wozzeck and Lulu).

Electronic music

The development of recording technology made all sounds available for potential use as
musical material. Electronic music generally refers to a repertory of art music developed
in the 1950s in Europe, Japan, and the Americas. The increasing availability
of magnetic tape in this decade provided composers with a medium which allowed
recording sounds and then manipulating them in various ways. All electronic music
depends on transmission via loudspeakers, but there are two broad types: acousmatic
music, which exists only in recorded form meant for loudspeaker listening, and live
electronic music, in which electronic apparatus are used to generate, transform, or
trigger sounds during performance by musicians using voices, traditional instruments,
electro-acoustic instruments, or other devices. Beginning in 1957, computers became
increasingly important in this field (Emmerson and Smalley 2001). When the source
material was acoustical sounds from the everyday world, the term musique
concrète was used; when the sounds were produced by electronic generators, it was
designated electronic music. After the 1950s, the term "electronic music" came to be
used for both types. Sometimes such electronic music was combined with more
conventional instruments, Stockhausen's Hymnen, Edgard Varèse's Déserts, and Mario
Davidovsky's series of Synchronisms are three examples.

CHARACTERISTICS

20th Century music evolved both stylistically and characteristically, some of the
overarching changes were outlined in the first blog post – this post aims to explore
some of the style specific features – such as the characteristics of impressionism,
expressionism, and neoclassicism.
Firstly going into some more detail on the major changes in 20th century music
compared to that of the 19th century

 Rhythm became much more developed in the 20th century as it was often
complex and irregular
 Melody became of secondary importance, they were often unpredictable with
wide leaps, irregular rhythms, and unexpected phrases.
 In the words of Schoenberg, harmony was freed from “the tyranny of tonality”.
Keys and tonal centres became of less importance as atonality gained popularity.
 Timbre was explored in further depth. New playing techniques were developed
on traditional instruments which expanded their tonal range. New electronic
instruments were created that were unique to ethnic music.
 The capabilities and availability of recording technology greatly increased in the
20th century, changing the way that musicians created music and made a living.
Now that we’ve nailed some of the overarching characteristics, lets take a look at style
specific elements, and the major composers of each style.

Impressionism:

Impressionism refers to music whose intention is to evoke a mood, place, and natural
phenomena (in other words, to leave an impression of something).

 The pioneers of Impressionism were Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel.

  Impressionist music often contained non-functional harmonies
 Rich textures
 Ambiguity of form
 Unresolved dissonances
 Whole-tone scales, use of 9th chords, frequent use of modality, and exotic scales
Expressionism:

Expressionism music, is music that was written to strongly express intense feelings and
emotions. It is separated from other genres by its frequent atonality and fragmented
style.

 The pioneers of Expressionism were (and are) Arnold Schoenberg, and Milton
Babbitt.
 Expressionist music contained dissolution of tonality
 Extreme contrasts of dynamics
 Constantly changing textures
 ‘Distorted’ melodies and harmonies
Neoclassicism:
Neoclassical music refers to  music that sought to return the aesthetic precepts
associated with the broadly defined concept of “classicism”, namely order, balance,
clarity, economy, and emotional restraint.

 The main pioneers of neoclassicism were Igor Stravinsky and Dmitri

Shostakovich
 Neoclassical music often contained complex/quirky rhythms
 Large amounts of chromaticism
 Dissonances
 Tonal centers
 Clarity of form
 Melodic shape

FAMOUS COMPOSERS

Béla Viktor János Bartók 

 Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈbeːlɒ ˈbɒrtoːk]; 25 March 1881 – 26 September 1945)

was a Hungariancomposer, pianist and an ethnomusicologist.
 He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he
and Liszt are regarded as Hungary's greatest composers (Gillies 2001). Through
his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of
comparative musicology, which later became ethnomusicology.

 Béla Bartók Jr. was born in the small Banatian town of Nagyszentmiklós in

the Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary (since 1920 Sânnicolau Mare,
Romania) on 25 March 1881. Bartók had a diverse ancestry. On his father's side,
the Bartók family was a Hungarian lower noble family, originating
from Borsodszirák, Borsod county (Móser 2006a, 44). Although his paternal
grandmother was of a Roman Catholic Serbian family, Bartók's father, Béla
Bartók Sr., considered himself to be an ethnic-born Hungarian. Béla Bartók's
mother, Paula (born Paula Voit), was an ethnic German, though she
spoke Hungarian fluently (Hooker 2001, 16). She was a native of Turčiansky
Svätý Martin (today Martin, Slovakia).[citation needed]
 Béla displayed notable musical talent very early in life: according to his mother,
he could distinguish between different dance rhythms that she played on the
 piano before he learned to speak in complete sentences (Gillies 1990, 6). By the
age of four he was able to play 40 pieces on the piano and his mother began
formally teaching him the next year.
 Béla was a small and sickly child and suffered from severe eczema until the age
of 5 (Gillies 1990, 5). In 1888, when he was seven, his father (the director of an
agricultural school) died suddenly. Béla's mother then took him and his sister,
Erzsébet, to live in Nagyszőlős (today Vinogradiv, Ukraine) and then
to Prešporok (German: Pressburg, today Bratislava, Slovakia). Béla gave
his first public recital aged 11 in Nagyszőlős, to a warm critical reception (Griffiths
1988,[page  needed]). Among the pieces he played was his own first composition,
written two years previously: a short piece called "The Course of the Danube" (de
Toth 1999). Shortly thereafter László Erkel accepted him as a pupil.

 Bartók's signature on his high-school-graduation photograph, dated 9
September 1899

 From 1899 to 1903, Bartók studied piano under István Thomán, a former student
of Franz Liszt, and composition under János Koessler at the Royal Academy of
Music in Budapest. There he met Zoltán Kodály, who made a strong impression
on him and became a lifelong friend and colleague. In 1903, Bartók wrote his first
major orchestral work, Kossuth, a symphonic poem which honored Lajos
Kossuth, hero of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.
 The music of Richard Strauss, whom he met in 1902 at the Budapest premiere
of Also sprach Zarathustra, strongly influenced his early work. When visiting a
holiday resort in the summer of 1904, Bartók overheard a young nanny, Lidi
Dósa from Kibéd in Transylvania, sing folk songs to the children in her care. This
sparked his lifelong dedication to folk music.
 From 1907, he also began to be influenced by the French composer Claude
Debussy, whose compositions Kodály had brought back from Paris. Bartók's
large-scale orchestral works were still in the style of Johannes Brahms and
Richard Strauss, but he wrote a number of small piano pieces which showed his
growing interest in folk music. The first piece to show clear signs of this new
interest is the String Quartet No. 1 in A minor (1908), which contains folk-like
elements.
 In 1907, Bartók began teaching as a piano professor at the Royal Academy. This
position freed him from touring Europe as a pianist and enabled him to work in
Hungary. Among his notable students were Fritz Reiner, Sir Georg Solti, György
Sándor, Ernő Balogh, and Lili Kraus. After Bartók moved to the United States, he
taught Jack Beeson and Violet Archer.
 In 1908, he and Kodály traveled into the countryside to collect and research
old Magyar folk melodies. Their growing interest in folk music coincided with a
contemporary social interest in traditional national culture. They made some
surprising discoveries. Magyar folk music had previously been categorised
 as Gypsy music. The classic example is Franz Liszt's famous Hungarian
Rhapsodies for piano, which he based on popular art songs performed
by Romani bands of the time. In contrast, Bartók and Kodály discovered that the
old Magyar folk melodies were based on pentatonic scales, similar to those in
Asian folk traditions, such as those of Central Asia, Anatolia and Siberia.
 Bartók and Kodály quickly set about incorporating elements of such Magyar
peasant music into their compositions. They both frequently quoted folk song
melodies verbatim and wrote pieces derived entirely from authentic songs. An
example is his two volumes entitled For Children for solo piano, containing 80
folk tunes to which he wrote accompaniment. Bartók's style in his art music
compositions was a synthesis of folk music, classicism, and modernism. His
melodic and harmonic sense was profoundly influenced by the folk music of
Hungary, Romania, and other nations. He was especially fond of the
asymmetrical dance rhythms and pungent harmonies found in Bulgarian music.
Most of his early compositions offer a blend of nationalist and late Romanticism
elements.

 In 1909, at the age of 28, Bartók married Márta Ziegler (1893–1967), aged 16.
Their son, Béla Bartók III, was born on 22 August 1910. After nearly 15 years
together, Bartók divorced Márta in June 1923.
 Two months after his divorce, he married Ditta Pásztory (1903–1982), a piano
student, ten days after proposing to her. She was aged 19, he 42. Their son,
Péter, was born in 1924.
 In 1911, Bartók wrote what was to be his only opera, Bluebeard's Castle,
dedicated to Márta. He entered it for a prize by the Hungarian Fine Arts
Commission, but they rejected his work as not fit for the stage (Chalmers 1995,
93). In 1917 Bartók revised the score for the 1918 première, and rewrote the
ending. Following the 1919 revolution in which he actively participated, he was
pressured by the Horthy regime to remove the name of the librettist Béla
Balázs from the opera (Chalmers 1995, 123)[not in citation given], as he was blacklisted
and had left the country for Vienna. Bluebeard's Castle received only one revival,
in 1936, before Bartók emigrated. For the remainder of his life, although he was
passionately devoted to Hungary, its people and its culture, he never felt much
loyalty to the government or its official establishments.
 Folk music and composition[edit]

 Béla Bartók using a phonograph to record folk songs sung by peasants in what is
now Slovakia

 After his disappointment over the Fine Arts Commission competition, Bartók
wrote little for two or three years, preferring to concentrate on collecting and
arranging folk music. He collected first in the Carpathian Basin (then
 the Kingdom of Hungary), where he notated Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian,
and Bulgarian folk music. He also collected in Moldavia, Wallachia, and (in
1913) Algeria. The outbreak of World War Iforced him to stop the expeditions;
and he returned to composing, writing the ballet The Wooden Prince (1914–16)
and the String Quartet No. 2 in (1915–17), both influenced by Debussy.
 Raised as a Roman Catholic, by his early adulthood Bartók had become
an agnostic. He believed that the existence of God could not be determined and
was unnecessary. He later became attracted to Unitarianism and publicly
converted to the Unitarian faith in 1916. As an adult, his son later became
president of the Hungarian Unitarian Church (Hughes 1999–2007).
 Bartók wrote another ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin, influenced by Igor
Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Richard Strauss. A modern story of
prostitution, robbery, and murder, it was started in 1918, but not performed until
1926 because of its sexual content. He next wrote his two violin sonatas (written
in 1921 and 1922 respectively), which are harmonically and structurally some of
his most complex pieces.
 In 1927–28, Bartók wrote his Third and Fourth String Quartets, after which his
compositions demonstrated his mature style. Notable examples of this period
are Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) and Divertimento for String
Orchestra (1939). The Fifth String Quartet was composed in 1934, and the Sixth
String Quartet (his last) in 1939.
 In 1936 he travelled to Turkey to collect and study folk music. He worked in
collaboration with Turkish composer Ahmet Adnan Saygun mostly
around Adana (Özgentürk 2008; Sipos 2000).

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

Born: St.Germain-en-Laye, August 22, 1862 

Died: Paris, March 25, 1918

 was a French composer. He and Maurice Ravel were the most prominent figures

associated with Impressionist music, though Debussy disliked the term when
 applied to his compositions.[3] He was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in
1903.[4] 
 He was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, and his use of non-traditional scales and chromaticism influenced
many composers who followed.[5]
 Debussy's music is noted for its sensory content and frequent use of
nontraditional tonalities.[6] The prominent French literary style of his period was
known as Symbolism, and this movement directly inspired Debussy both as a
composer and as an active cultural participant.[7]

 Debussy was experimental from the outset, favouring dissonances and intervals

that were not taught at the Academy. Like Georges Bizet, he was a brilliant
pianist and an outstanding sight reader, who could have had a professional
career had he so wished.[11] The pieces he played in public at this time
included sonata movements by Beethoven, Schumann and Weber, and
Chopin's Ballade No. 2, a movement from the Piano Concerto No. 1, and
the Allegro de concert.[12]

 During the summers of 1880, 1881, and 1882, he accompanied Nadezhda von

Meck, the wealthy patroness of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Debussy.

 In September 1880 she sent his Danse bohémienne for Tchaikovsky's perusal; a

month later Tchaikovsky wrote back to her: "It is a very pretty piece, but it is
much too short. Not a single idea is expressed fully, the form is terribly shriveled,
and it lacks unity." Debussy did not publish the piece, and the manuscript
remained in the von Meck family; it was eventually sold to B. Schott's Sohne in
Mainz, and published by them in 1932.[14]

 A greater influence was Debussy's close friendship with Marie-Blanche Vasnier,

a singer he met when he began working as an accompanist to earn some
money, embarking on an eight-year affair together. She and her husband,
Parisian civil servant Henri, gave Debussy emotional and professional support.
Henri Vasnier introduced him to the writings of influential French writers of the
time, which gave rise to his first songs, settings of poems by Paul Verlaine (the
son-in-law of his former teacher Mme. Mauté de Fleurville).

 As the winner of the 1884 Prix de Rome with his composition L'enfant prodigue,

he received a scholarship to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which included a
four-year residence at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome, to further
his studies (1885–1887). According to letters to Marie-Blanche Vasnier, perhaps
in part designed to gain her sympathy,
 he found the artistic atmosphere stifling, the company boorish, the food bad, and
the monastic quarters "abominable".[15] Neither did he delight in Italian opera, as
he found the operas of Donizettiand Verdi not to his taste. Debussy was often
depressed and unable to compose, but he was inspired by Franz Liszt, whose
command of the keyboard he found admirable. In June 1885, he wrote of his
desire to follow his own way, saying, "I am sure the Institute would not approve,
for, naturally it regards the path which it ordains as the only right one. But there is
no help for it! I am too enamoured of my freedom, too fond of my own ideas!"[16]

 Debussy finally composed four pieces that were sent to the Academy: the
symphonic ode Zuleima (based on a text by Heinrich Heine); the orchestral
piece Printemps; the cantata La Damoiselle élue (1887–1888) (which was
criticized by the Academy as "bizarre", although it was the first piece in which the
stylistic features of his later style began to emerge); and the Fantaisie for piano
and orchestra, which was heavily based on César Franck's music and therefore
eventually withdrawn by Debussy

 During his visits to Bayreuth in 1888–9, Debussy was exposed to Wagnerian opera, which
would have a lasting impact on his work. Like many young musicians of the time, he
responded positively to Richard Wagner's sensuousness, mastery of form, and striking
harmonies.[18] Wagner's extroverted emotionalism was not to be Debussy's way, but the
German composer's influence is evident in La damoiselle élue and the 1889 piece Cinq
poèmes de Charles Baudelaire. Other songs of the period, notably the settings of Verlaine
– Ariettes oubliées, Trois mélodies, and Fêtes galantes – are all in a more capricious style.

 In 1889, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, Debussy first heard Javanese gamelan music.

He incorporated gamelan scales, melodies, rhythms, and ensemble textures into some of his
compositions, most notably Pagodes from his piano collection Estampes.[20]

 Debussy's private life was often turbulent. At the age of 18 he began an eight-year affair with
Marie-Blanche Vasnier, the wife of Parisian civil servant Henri Vasnier. The relationship
eventually faltered following his winning of the Prix de Rome in 1884 and obligatory He
ultimately left Dupont for her friend Rosalie ('Lilly') Texier, a fashion model whom he married
in 1899, after threatening suicide if she refused him.[21] However, although Texier was
affectionate, practical, straightforward, and well liked by Debussy's friends and associates,
he became increasingly irritated by her intellectual limitations and lack of musical sensitivity.
Moreover, her looks had prematurely aged, and she was unable to bear children.[22]

 In 1904 Debussy was introduced to Emma Bardac, wife of Parisian banker Sigismond
Bardac, by her son Raoul, who was one of his students.[23] In contrast to Texier, Bardac was
a sophisticate, a brilliant conversationalist, and an accomplished singer. After dispatching
Lilly to her father's home at Bichain in Villeneuve-la-Guyard on

 15 July 1904, Debussy secretly took Bardac to Jersey for a holiday. On their return to
France, he wrote to Texier on 11 August from Dieppe, informing her that their marriage was
over, but still making no mention of Bardac. He briefly moved to an apartment at 10 avenue
 Alphand. On 14 October, five days before their fifth wedding anniversary, Texier attempted
suicide, shooting herself in the chest with a revolver while standing in the Place de la
Concorde; she survived, although the bullet remained lodged in her vertebrae for the rest of
her life. The ensuing scandal was to alienate Debussy from many of his friends, whilst
Bardac was disowned by her family.[24]

 In the spring of 1905, finding the hostility towards them intolerable, Debussy and Bardac
(now pregnant) fled to England, via Jersey.[26] Bardac's divorce was finalized in May.[27] The
couple settled at the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, from 24 July to 30 August 1905,[28] where
Debussy corrected proofs to his symphonic suite La mer,[4][24] celebrating his divorce from
Texier on 2 August.

 After a brief visit to London, the couple returned to Paris in September, buying a house in a
courtyard development off the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne (now Avenue Foch) where
Debussy resided for the rest of his life.[29] Their daughter (the composer's only child) Claude-
Emma was born there on 30 October.[24] Her parents eventually married in 1908, their
troubled union enduring until Debussy's death in 1918. Claude-Emma, more affectionately
known as 'Chouchou', was a great musical inspiration to the composer (she was the
dedicatee of his Children's Corner suite). Claude-Emma outlived her father by scarcely a
year, succumbing to the diphtheria epidemic of 1919 after her doctor administered the wrong
treatment.[30]

 Debussy died of rectal cancer at his Paris home on 25 March 1918,[32] at the age of 55. He
had been diagnosed with the cancer in 1909[24]after experiencing bleeding, and in December
1915 underwent one of the earliest colostomy operations ever performed. The operation
achieved only a temporary respite, and occasioned him considerable frustration (he was to
liken dressing in the morning to "all the labours of Hercules in one").

 His death occurred in the midst of the aerial and artillery bombardment of Paris during the
German Spring Offensive of World War I. The funeral procession made its way through
deserted streets to Père Lachaise Cemetery as the German guns bombarded the city. The
military situation in France was critical, and did not permit the honour of a public funeral with
ceremonious graveside orations. His body was reinterred the following year in the
small Passy Cemetery sequestered behind the Trocadéro, fulfilling his wish to rest "among
the trees and the birds"; his wife and daughter are buried with him.[27]

Middle works
 The three Nocturnes (1899) include characteristic studies: in Nuages, using veiled harmony
and texture; Fêtes, in exuberance; and Sirènes, using whole-tones. Debussy's only complete
opera Pelléas et Mélisande premiered in 1902, after ten years of work, and contrasted
sharply with Wagnerian opera. Based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, the opera proved
to be an immediate success and immensely influential to younger French composers,
including Maurice Ravel. These works brought a fluidity of rhythm and colour quite new to
Western music.
 La mer (1903–1905) essays a more symphonic form, with a finale that works themes from
the first movement, although the middle movement, Jeux de vagues, proceeds much less
directly and with more variety of colour. The reviews were once again sharply divided. Some
critics thought the treatment to be less subtle and less mysterious than his previous works,
and even a step backward, with Pierre Lalo complaining "I neither hear, nor see, nor feel the
 sea." Others extolled its "power and charm", its "extraordinary verve and brilliant fantasy",
and its strong colors and definite lines.[36]
He wrote much for the piano during this period. His first volume of Images pour piano (1904–1905)
combines harmonic innovation with poetic suggestion: Reflets dans l'eau is a musical description of
rippling water, while the second piece Hommage à Rameau is slow and yearningly nostalgic, taking
a melody from Jean-Philippe Rameau's 1737 Castor et Pollux as its inspiration.
The evocative Estampes for piano (1903) give impressions of exotic locations. Debussy came into
contact with Javanese gamelan music during the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. Pagodes is the
directly inspired result, aiming for an evocation of the pentatonic structures employed by Javanese
music.[37]
He wrote his famous Children's Corner Suite (1908) for his beloved daughter, Claude-Emma, whom
he nicknamed Chouchou. The suite recalls classicism – the opening piece Doctor Gradus ad
Parnassum refers to Muzio Clementi's collection of instructional piano compositions Gradus ad
Parnassum – as well as a new wave of American ragtime music. In the popular final piece of the
suite, Golliwogg's Cakewalk, Debussy also pokes fun at Richard Wagner by mimicking the opening
bars of Wagner's prelude to Tristan und Isolde.

Pieces from first book

of Preludes
La fille aux cheveux de lin

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Performed by Mike
Ambrose

La cathédrale engloutie

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Performed by Ivan Ilic

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See media help.

The first book of Préludes (1910), twelve in total, proved to be his most successful work for piano.
The Preludes are frequently compared to those of Chopin.[clarification needed  Which set?] Debussy's preludes are
replete with rich, unusual and daring harmonies. They include the popular La fille aux cheveux de
lin (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair) and La Cathédrale Engloutie (The Engulfed Cathedral), although
since he wanted people to respond intuitively to these pieces, their titles were placed at the end of
each one in the hope that listeners would not make stereotype images as they listened.
Larger scale works included his orchestral piece Iberia (1907), a triptych medley of Spanish allusions
and fleeting impressions which was begun as a work for two pianos, and also the music for Gabriele
D'Annunzio's mystery play Le Martyre de saint Sébastien (1911). A lush and dramatic work, written
in only two months, it is remarkable in sustaining a late antique modalatmosphere that was
otherwise touched only in relatively short piano pieces.
As Debussy's popularity increased, he was often engaged as a conductor throughout Europe during
this period, most often performing Pelléas, La Mer, and Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. He was
also an occasional music critic, to supplement his conducting fees and piano lessons, writing under
the pseudonym "Monsieur Croche". He avoided analytical dissection and attempts to force images
from music, saying "Let us at all costs preserve this magic peculiar to music, since of all the arts it is
most susceptible to magic." He could be caustic and witty, sometimes sloppy and ill-informed. He
was for the most part enthusiastic about Richard Strauss[38] and Stravinsky, and worshipful of Chopin
and Bach, the latter being acknowledged as "the one great master."[39] His relationship to Beethoven
was a complex one; he was said to refer to him as "le vieux sourd" (the old deaf one)[40] and adjured
one young pupil never to play Beethoven's music for "it is like somebody dancing on my grave."[40] It
was said that "Debussy liked Mozart, and he believed that Beethoven had terrifically profound things
to say, but that he did not know how to say them, because he was imprisoned in a web of incessant
restatement and of German aggressiveness."[40] He also admired the works of Charles-Valentin
Alkan.[41] Schubert and Mendelssohn fared much worse, the latter being described as a "facile and
elegant notary".[42]

Late works[edit]
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Debussy's harmonies and chord progressions frequently exploit dissonances without any formal

resolution. Unlike in his earlier work, he no longer hides discords in lush harmonies,[43] and the forms
are far more irregular and fragmented.[44] These chords that seemingly had no resolution were
described by Debussy himself as "floating chords", and were used to set tone and mood in many of
his works. The whole tone scale dominates much of his late music.
His two final volumes of works for the piano, the Études (1915), interpret similar varieties of style and
texture purely as pianistic exercises, and include pieces that develop irregular form to an extreme,
as well as others influenced by the young Igor Stravinsky (a presence too in the suite En blanc et
noir for two pianos, 1915).[45] The rarefaction of these works is a feature of the last set of songs,
the Trois poèmes de Mallarmé (1913), and of the Sonata for flute, viola and harp (1915), though the
sonata and its companions also recapture the inquisitive Verlainian classicism.

Caplet and Debussy

With the sonatas of 1915–1917 there is a sudden shift in the style. These works recall Debussy's
earlier music in part, but also look forward, with leaner, simpler structures. Despite the thinner
textures of the Violin Sonata (1917), there remains an undeniable richness in the chords themselves.
This shift parallels the movement commonly known as neo-classicism, which became popular after
his death in 1918. He planned a set of six sonatas, but had only completed three (cello, flute-viola-
harp, and violin) before he died.
The final orchestral work by Debussy, the ballet Jeux (1912) written for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets
Russes, contains some of his strangest harmonies and textures in a form that moves freely over its
own field of motivic connection. At first, Jeux was overshadowed by Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of
Spring, which was composed in the same year as Jeux, and was premiered only two weeks later by
the same ballet company. Decades later, composers such as Pierre Boulez and Jean
Barraqué pointed out parallels to Anton Webern's serialism in this work.
Other late stage works, including the ballets Khamma (1912) and La boîte à joujoux (1913), were left
with the orchestration incomplete, and were later completed by Charles Koechlin and André Caplet,
who also helped him with the orchestration of Gigues (from Images pour orchestre) and Le martyre
de St. Sébastien.[46]
The second set of Préludes for piano (1913) features Debussy at his most avant-garde, where he
uses dissonant harmonies to evoke specific moods and images. He consciously gives titles to each
prelude which amplify the preludes' tonal ambiguity and dissonance. He uses scales such as the
whole tone scale, musical modes, and the octatonic scale in his preludes which exaggerate this
tonal ambiguity, making the key of each prelude almost indistinguishable at times. The second book
of Preludes for piano represents his strong interest in the indefinite and esoteric.
Although Pelléas was Debussy's only completed opera, he began several opera projects which
remained unfinished, perhaps due to his fading concentration, increasing procrastination, and failing
health. He had finished some partial musical sketches and some unpublished libretti for operas
based on Poe's The Devil in the Belfry (Le diable dans le beffroi, 1902–?1912) and The Fall of the
House of Usher (La chute de la maison Usher, 1908–1917) as well as considering projects for
operas based on Shakespeare's As You Like It and Joseph Bedier's La Legende de Tristan.
Further plans, such as an American tour, more ballet scores, and revisions of Chopin and Bach
works for re-publication, were all cut short by poor health and the outbreak of World War I.

Mathematical structuring[edit]
Some people have contended that Debussy structured parts of his music mathematically.[47][48] Roy
Howat, for instance, has published a book contending that Debussy's works are structured around
mathematical models even while using an apparent classical structure such as sonata form. Howat
suggests that some of Debussy's pieces can be divided into sections that reflect the golden ratio,
frequently by using the numbers of the standard Fibonacci sequence.[49]

Influences[edit]
Debussy's influences were wide-ranging. He acquired a taste for parallel motion in fifths, fourths and
octaves from medieval music,[citation needed] and an appreciation for figuration and arabesque from the
Baroque masters. He especially had a great love for the French clavier composers Couperin