The Theories of Claude Debussy

Music as a Free Art

One day, in the course of an interview (for which he had been asked), Debussy, trembling at his own audacity, declared that 'music until the present day has rested on a false principle. There is too much writing of music. Music is made for its effect on paper although it is intended for the ear. Too much importance is attached to the writing of music, the formula, the craft. Composers seek their ideas within themselves when they should look around for them. They combine, construct, imagine themes in which to express ideas. These are developed; they are modified when they encounter other themes representing other ideas. All this is metaphysics, it is not music. The latter should be spontaneously registered by the ear of the listener without his having to discover abstract ideas in the meanderings of a complicated development.'

When he was writing the score of the 'Martyre de Saint Sebastien,' he delighted in extolling the freedom of music, an open-air art, and in denouncing academic excesses.

'Composition as a craft,' he says, 'is no doubt very fine. I used to be enthusiastic about it myself. But I have given much time to reflection, and the writing itself might with advantage be simplified, the means of expression made more direct...'

His study of pure music had led him, as he tells us in a statement concerning 'Pelleas' which is given farther on, 'to a hatred of classical development whose beauty is only technical and can only interest the highbrows among us.'

This dislike for musical complication was constantly in evidence and was expressed and illustrated in a variety of ways. Monsieur Croche is, of course, extremely vehement when he touches the subject.

He protests against an art that is 'almost incomprehensible,' and addressing Debussy himself, or rather his fellow composers, he says: 'Would it not be well to suppress those superfluous complications whose ingenuity remind one of the lock of a safe? ... You are marking time because you know nothing but music and conform to barbaric and unknown laws... Glorious epithets are showered on you, but you are merely cunning! Something half-way between a flunkey and a monkey.'

On another occasion Monsieur Croche similarly inveighed against 'intricacies that resemble those of a Byzantine locksmith.'

His articles in 'S.I.M.' were written at a time when Debussy was irritated by the attacks which a number of musicians directed against his own art, styling it 'Debussyst.'In these articles he repeats his condemnation of academic music in an exaggerated form, probably overstating his own convictions.

Comments by Ivor Darreg

Long before the New Orthodoxy of 'Music in Cold Blood' -- atonal serialism with relentless application of the twelve-tone-row principle right up to the bitter end -- had set in, Debussy had the proper protest ready. * * * If only someone had heeded it!

Debussy could modulate into and out of atonality and/or the whole-tone system, so that the audience didn't get too bored. It has taken all of the seventy-odd years since his views were expressed for a healthy reaction against total serialism, in the form of 'free atonaLity,' to manifest itself to any detectable extent.

I don't think it is entirely Coincidence that this dry-as-dust craft of total premeditation and condemnation of spontaneity grew in importance right along with the successful tyranny of Behaviorism in applied psychology, and just begins to wane as that movement begins to show traces of decline.

Inspiration is treated as a dirty word by the people who never have it. What they want is a Foolproof System for hardworking conscientious drudges.

This Applied Determinism wouldn't be quite so bad, if we didn't have this visually-biased culture which values the written music-score far above the sound-patterns which it represents.

Indeed, from John Cage's Notations and Erhard Karkoschka's Das Schriftbild der neuen Musik, it is evident that musical notation and abstract drawing have merged!

I wonder what Debussy would have thought of the strange notations for aleatory music, which uses the Laws of Chance to transform the concert-hall into a glorified gambling casino.

There certainly are a lot of those 'Byzantine Locksmiths' still around -- only they throw away the key!