My apologies for omitting to start a thread on my favourite composer of all time, the centenary of whose birth falls this weekend, with Radio 3 commemorating this coming Friday and Saturday.
Introducer of the notion that "the unexpected is ever upon us" if we open our senses, expander of "the permissible in the empire of sound": what more is there to say of Debussy as the Father of Modern Music, in Boulez's terms, than that he more than anyone furnished the sound and content of so much of what we think of being 20th century music: from composers across the international range to jazz, to electronic music's preoccupation with sound, and (lastly?) as the arpeggiating forerunner of Minimalism. A complex, contradictory figure, Debussy was the "bourgeois" composer of music that epitomises an ideal notion of life lived in the Now, anticipating a time still to come when time management can allow the omnipresent scarcity of opportunity imperative to be ahead to be in control to die, yet who chose dowdy circumstances to "co-inhabit" his unfortunate if not hapless partners. The pursuit of the sensory expressed in the late 19th century arts was as much the tail-end of Romanticism's priviledgeing of the subjective as its questioning of religious truths with resort, according to inclination, to their forsaken underbelly. One likes to hope those women, voiceless to history, by-passed that part of his personality to love him for his music; to what if any extent can he be exonerated by what he gave us for what he wilfully and selfishly took from them? Is man's pursuit of the sensuous pre-programmed to use women to its end? Or is this the flip side of religion's obsession with the genital: a guilt-tripped inversed justification that men still rattle out for the consequences on women it purports to deplore? Debussy's treatment of women was the blemish glaringly at odds with what comes across as the feminine in-touchness of his music. In this he also anticipated the myth-making perpetrated by the hippie movement which helped generate the rebirth of feminism that immediately followed. This version of masculinity tacitly informs this week's COTW subject, though that probably won't be mentioned, and while I still love Debussy's music, I don't anticipate it being the challenge of a broader discussion, here or anywhere.
Introducer of the notion that "the unexpected is ever upon us" if we open our senses, expander of "the permissible in the empire of sound": what more is there to say of Debussy as the Father of Modern Music, in Boulez's terms, than that he more than anyone furnished the sound and content of so much of what we think of being 20th century music: from composers across the international range to jazz, to electronic music's preoccupation with sound, and (lastly?) as the arpeggiating forerunner of Minimalism. A complex, contradictory figure, Debussy was the "bourgeois" composer of music that epitomises an ideal notion of life lived in the Now, anticipating a time still to come when time management can allow the omnipresent scarcity of opportunity imperative to be ahead to be in control to die, yet who chose dowdy circumstances to "co-inhabit" his unfortunate if not hapless partners. The pursuit of the sensory expressed in the late 19th century arts was as much the tail-end of Romanticism's priviledgeing of the subjective as its questioning of religious truths with resort, according to inclination, to their forsaken underbelly. One likes to hope those women, voiceless to history, by-passed that part of his personality to love him for his music; to what if any extent can he be exonerated by what he gave us for what he wilfully and selfishly took from them? Is man's pursuit of the sensuous pre-programmed to use women to its end? Or is this the flip side of religion's obsession with the genital: a guilt-tripped inversed justification that men still rattle out for the consequences on women it purports to deplore? Debussy's treatment of women was the blemish glaringly at odds with what comes across as the feminine in-touchness of his music. In this he also anticipated the myth-making perpetrated by the hippie movement which helped generate the rebirth of feminism that immediately followed. This version of masculinity tacitly informs this week's COTW subject, though that probably won't be mentioned, and while I still love Debussy's music, I don't anticipate it being the challenge of a broader discussion, here or anywhere.
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