Cutting Room Floor: More Debussy Than You Can Shake A Baton At

In past seasons, Sarah and I have written a series of Cutting Room Floor blog posts in the weeks leading up to each of our Inside the Classics shows, highlighting extra material that we didn't have time to include in the concert. This year, we're tweaking that idea a bit, and putting all the extra material in a single post. Mostly, what you'll find below are links to other sites with more in-depth information on some of the topics we'll be touching on all too briefly on stage.

When it comes to Debussy, the tidal wave of available biographical and musical information is almost overwhelming, and it took us a while to figure out just where we wanted to focus our ItC script. Eventually, we decided that we'd spend most of our time on Debussy's unique "layering" effects and how that distinctive style of composition contrasts with other composers, both in Debussy's time and other eras. But if you're listening closely, you'll hear references to a lot of other fascinating stuff about the man and his music. If any of those references made you want to learn more, click away below...

-- Debussy had a deep affection for Japanese landscape painting, and asked his publisher to print a copy of a painting of a huge wave by Katsushika Hokusai on the cover of the score to La Mer. Hokusai, for his part, had also taken much inspiration from the landscape painters of France and Holland. Learn more about this iconic artist here...

-- Speaking of art, Debussy's music is often called Impressionistic, after the visual art movement of the same name. But Debussy rejected the label, and Sarah and I think his music actually had much more in common with another style of art that gained currency in France in the 19th century - pointillism, which is primarily associated with its creator, Georges Seurat. Seurat's masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grand Jatte, which hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, actually inspired another composer to compose an entire Broadway musical about him. Stephen Sondheim's Sunday In The Park With George was a heartbreakingly beautiful (but fictional) account of the painter's life, and the lives of his 20th-century descendants.



-- Toru Takemitsu, a profoundly influential Japanese composer who died in 1996, had a deep fondness for Debussy's music, and La Mer in particular. During our concerts, we highlighted a brief section of Takemitsu's Quotations of Dream, which quotes Debussy's masterpiece directly. Bringing him into our evening was entirely Sarah's idea, because, as she wrote during the planning process, "Takemitsu's serious concert music is sadly underrepresented in the States. I think part of it might be the dreamlike quality and the transparency of textures and utterly Eastern instinct for time and space that is so far removed from our particular Western aesthetic. It's such a shame, as I know of few composers of the late 20th century who create such a distinctive sound world and speak with such an intensely individual musical voice."

-- More Takemitsu: The BBC did a short documentary on him a while back, which you can see here. Also, here's a section of another documentary on his work in film, containing a fascinating discussion of "ma", one of those nearly untranslatable words that captures the essence of his music. As it happens, Takemitsu is also the composer of one of my favorite works for solo viola, A Bird Came Down The Walk. And last but not least, Sarah herself was once featured as the narrator in a Takemitsu piece commissioned by the New York Philharmonic.

-- From the "in case you were wondering" file: that overly cliched "Sea Symphony" that the orchestra played near the top of the show (the one that ended with a big foghorn blast from the tuba) was composed by Sarah. And if you thought you heard a familiar melodic snippet floating around in the violin area, you were right. It's from Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, also known as Fingal's Cave.

-- Towards the end of the first half, I mentioned an ugly incident in Debussy's personal life which caused Parisian audiences to feel quite uncharitable towards him around the time that La Mer was premiered there in 1905. Debussy had always been a bit of a carouser - he was known to have had at least two simultaneous affairs in the 1890s, and one of his mistresses tried to shoot herself when she found out about the other one. Later, Debussy married a woman named Lilly Texier in 1899, but left her in 1904 for a married woman named Emma Bardac. Lilly, hugely distraught, did manage to shoot herself, though not fatally. Even before the advent of the celebrity-soaked culture we live in today, this was the kind of gossip that got whole cities buzzing, and Debussy was widely reviled in polite society for his actions.

-- Finally, because we always seem to get questions from people wondering where to find some work that we excerpted on the first half of these ItC programs, here's a complete playlist of everything we played, either in whole or in part, on this week's show:

DEBUSSY Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
DEBUSSY La Mer (The Sea)
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Scheherezade
HICKS A Sea Symphony of Sorts (not actually available outside of these concerts)
RAVEL Finale (The Enchanted Garden) from Ma Mere L'Oye (Mother Goose Suite)
DEBUSSY Claire de Lune
TAKEMITSU Quotations of Dream
STRAUSS Don Juan