Debussy, Ravel, Satie: music of colours

Paris, around 1890. The city had just hosted the 1889 World's Fair, where visitors could hear a Javanese gamelan, an orchestra of gongs and metallophones with sounds unknown in Europe. Impressionist painters had already shown that one could paint light rather than outlines; Symbolist poets such as Mallarmé and Verlaine preferred suggesting to describing. A young composer, Claude Debussy (1862–1918), would do the same with sound.

An afternoon that changed everything

In 1894 Debussy presented the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), inspired by a poem by Mallarmé. It opens with a solo flute weaving a line with no clear key; then the orchestra enters in light touches: harps, muted horns, divided strings. No big theme developed in Beethoven's manner, no heroic crescendo: a ten-minute daydream. Many musicians regard it as the starting point of modern music.

Debussy went on to write an opera, Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), where the characters sing almost as they speak, then La Mer (1905), three "symphonic sketches" painting wind and waves. For piano he wrote Estampes, Images and two books of Préludes (1910 and 1913).

A different way of writing

Debussy disliked the word "Impressionism", borrowed from painting. Yet it does describe a few new choices:

• Scales from elsewhere: the pentatonic scale (five notes, like the black keys of the piano), the old modes, the whole-tone scale.
• Chords for their colour: a ninth chord no longer needs to "resolve"; it can be slid around as a block.
• Timbre in the foreground: for Debussy and Ravel the choice of instrument matters as much as the note.

Listen to the opening of La Fille aux cheveux de lin (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair, Préludes Book I, 1910): the unaccompanied melody is almost entirely pentatonic. No accompaniment, no tension: a suspended phrase, like a song hummed to oneself.

M:3/4
L:1/16
Q:1/4=60
K:Gb
d6 BG E2GB | d2BG E2GB G2GE | G2FE D8 |]

Ravel the watchmaker

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) shared Debussy's love of colour, but he liked clear forms and precise mechanisms, regulated like clockwork. An outstanding orchestrator, he composed the ballet Daphnis et Chloé (1912) for the Ballets Russes, orchestrated Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition in 1922, and in 1928 wrote Boléro: a single theme repeated as it passes from instrument to instrument, over a snare-drum rhythm that never stops. It is an orchestration lesson in itself. Ravel was also curious about jazz, which he listened to keenly, notably on his 1928 tour of the United States; it echoes through his two piano concertos.

Satie the outsider

Erik Satie (1866–1925), a cabaret pianist in Montmartre and a friend of Debussy, took the opposite road from grandeur: short, slow, bare pieces full of humour (he gave his scores eccentric titles and instructions). His three Gymnopédies (1888) rest on a left hand rocking between two chords and a melody floating above:

M:3/4
L:1/4
Q:1/4=66
%%staves {RH LH}
V:RH clef=treble
V:LH clef=bass
K:D
[V:RH] z3 | z3 | z f a | g f c | B c d | A3 |]
[V:LH] G,, [B,DF]2 | D, [A,CF]2 | G,, [B,DF]2 | D, [A,CF]2 | G,, [B,DF]2 | D, [A,CF]2 |]

In 1917 the ballet Parade, written with Cocteau and Picasso for the Ballets Russes, brought a typewriter and sirens into the orchestra. The young composers of "Les Six" (Poulenc, Milhaud, Honegger…) saw Satie as a model of simplicity; later the American minimalists would rediscover him.

What to listen for

• Blurred outlines: few clear cadences, a floating sense of key.
• Parallel chords gliding as blocks.
• Refined sounds: flute, harp, muted strings, softly brushed cymbals, a piano bathed in pedal.
• Often very soft dynamics, and titles that evoke an image (water, the moon, mist, the sea).

Listening list

• Debussy: Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, La Mer, Clair de lune, La Cathédrale engloutie.
• Ravel: Boléro, Daphnis et Chloé ("Daybreak"), Pavane pour une infante défunte.
• Satie: Gymnopédies, Gnossiennes.
• Around them: Lili Boulanger, the first woman to win the Prix de Rome for composition (1913), and Gabriel Fauré, Ravel's teacher.