Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussywas a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures associated with Impressionist music, though he himself disliked the term when applied to his compositions. He was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in his native France in 1903. Debussy 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...
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth22 August 1862
effort perception appeals
Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part.
imbeciles impressionists
Anyone who calls my music "impressionist" is an imbecile.
children vision wish
I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child.
past symphony listening
When asked by a grumpily puzzled professor what "rules" he followed, Debussy is said to have retorted, mon plaisir "whatever I please" and he further claimed that more was to be gained by watching the sun rise than by listening to the Pastoral Symphony. Although such remarks were intended to shock, they contain a core of Debussyan verity...
people strikes affront
Beauty seems to strike some people as a personal affront.
dream iron soul
the colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.
names saint forget
I have a horror of sentimentality, and I cannot forget that its name is Saint-Saëns.
music clouds silence
He was the incomparable painter of mystery, silence, and the infinite, of the passing cloud, and the sunlit shimmer of the waves-subleties which none before him had been capable of suggesting.
two paris age
When Claude Debussy studied at the Paris Conservatory from age ten to age twenty-two, many considered him a rebel because of his treatment of dissonance and his disdain for the established forms. He reputedly turned to a fellow student during a performance of Beethoven with the words, "Let's go. He's starting to develop.
idols ubiquity common-sense
Composers aren't daring enough. They're afraid of that sacred idol called 'common sense', which is the most dreadful thing I know - after all, it's no more than a religion founded to excuse the ubiquity of imbeciles!
trying music-love tradition
I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.
beauty music art
Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.
law people wish
Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law.
beautiful book sunset
There is nothing is more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little - the book of Nature.