Debussy-

Side A: Iberia performed by The Philadelphia Orchestra Side B: La Mer performed by Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York

Tangential Intro

I’m listening to some intense Shostakovich while writing this so bear with me. Where have I been? I’ve been down and distracted by meaningless things. Filling my attention with an embarrassment of digital nonsense - procrastinating the act of committing this essay to paper due to a spiritual blockage, perfectionism, and the routine cognitive dissonance that is required simply to exist in this often horrifying world - all while pretending, most of the time, that the future is going to be alright: “We just need to save enough for retirement.” “I work a meaningful job, at least.” “I’ll get to that later.”

Also - Neurosis, a ‘post-metal/atmospheric sludge’ band just released an album: An Undying Love for a Burning World. I can’t help but love the world and the people in it even as I watch those people destroy the world and themselves. But this review is about music that was released a long time ago.

Relevant Intro

Debussy composed these pieces within the same few years, maybe even consecutively. La Mer was composed between 1903 and 1905; Iberia between 1905 and 1908.

Impressionism is the name of the game here. Debussy and Ravel, who’s coming up soon in this series, are the one-two Impressionist punch. The heavy hitters. The dynamic duo. Lou Gherig and Babe Ruth. Oprah and Gayle. Manet and Monet.

Debussy hated the term Impressionism. This appears to be because the term “impressionism” was derogatory in origin. It all goes back to a painting by Monet entitled, Impression, Sunrise, which was displayed at an art exhibition in Paris in 1874. This show later came to be considered the first exhibition of impressionist painters because of the sequence that followed: Louis LeRoy, an artist and an art critic at the time, attended the show and was thoroughly unimpressed. He wrote and published a severely critical satirical essay, “The Exhibition of the Impressionists.” To him, the paintings were incomplete and ineffectual. They were impressions of paintings. And that’s how the term was coined.

That’s a good insult - especially because it used the title of Monet’s painting. The painters reappropriated the insult, adapting it into the moniker of their art movement. Punk Rock. But not to Claude Debussy.

Impressionism vs. Absolute Music

While listening to these pieces, I found that knowing the title of not only the piece itself, but each movement, really enriched the music. Which is notable - Beethoven’s 5th is called Beethoven’s 5th because its actual title was Symphony no. 5 in C Minor. It was Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. Nothing florid or poetic. Just a sequence with instructions for performing the music. Movements like, “Adagio”, “Allegretto”, “Allegro con brio” – these terms just tell you what to expect of the sounds and tempo: “Slowly”, “A little fast/lively”, “Lively, with spirit.”

Richard Wagner called Beethoven’s composition approach, “absolute music.” Which is metal as fuck - both the term and the history. As I understand it, absolute music was also meant to be a bit of an insult - paralleling LeRoy’s intention behind the term Impressionism but for a nearly opposite reason. Impressionists’ approach was too sentimental and lacked technique, absolute music was too analytical. All passion, no technique vs. No passion, all technique.

Compare that to the sections in these pieces:
Iberia:

1. “In the streets and byways”
2. “Perfumes of the night”
3. “The morning of a festival day.”

La Mer:

1. “From dawn to noon on the sea”
2. “Play of the waves”
3. “Dialogue of the wind and the sea”

Not only are these section titles beautiful and poetic in themselves, but they also really enriched my listening experience by giving me a visual to focus on.

Nearly all modern popular music follows this format. What you buy, consume, stream; the music that ultimately enriches your life is not just the music, but the words and visuals that describe or define the band, the album, the artist, the song.

I avoided listening to My Bloody Valentine for like a decade because I thought their name sounded like something out of a 5th grader’s diary. Anyway, I think this is an important divergence from Beethoven’s naming conventions and musical philosophy. Debussy didn’t start this trend, but these poetic titles absolutely shaped or altered my listening experience.

And I think it brings up subsequent musico-philosophical questions like:

1. How much can the name of a piece influence the listener’s appreciation of the music?
2. Would I have enjoyed these pieces more or less without the written prompt?
3. If the name of a piece can influence its appreciation, then isn’t that a crutch?
4. Isn’t that the entirety of modern pop music?

The answer to that final question, is unequivocally, yes. We don’t just buy into a song or a band, we buy into an aesthetic, a lyric, a scene, or a style. Not that pop music should be directly compared to symphonic music. There was folk music in Beethoven’s day with more descriptive and playful titles. So I am not making a grand argument, just noticing what I find to be interesting thoughts, and hopefully you do too.

Iberia

I’m reviewing this one first because it sucked. It didn’t grab or move me much at all. It felt “impressionistic” in LeRoy’s sense of the word. Sure it evoked “Spanishness” (Spain is on the Iberian peninsula and this was obviously Debussy’s intention), but I got little to no emotion out of it - just an assemblage of half-fitting motifs.

According to the liner notes, “Debussy spent only a few hours in Spain in his entire lifetime..” Quite an audacious move to compose this symphony - hubristic ultimately, in my opinion.

There was one very small melodic section that sounded to me a lot like a melody in Bolero, Ravel’s ode to Spanish culture, that I’ll be reviewing soon. So yeah, Spanish? Sure, there were castanets and shit. Emotive? Spiritually gratifying? NO.

La Mer

OK - now we’re talking. He’s doing something here that is sophisticated - it evokes the images of the sea, and that feeling of vastness, texture, and change through repetition that the sea provides.

Going back a pace though, why does this invoke the sea? Is it purely musical? Or is it the title and the movement names? Or is it the fact that this piece influenced later works that invoked the sea - 120 years of cultural influence over musical interpretations of the sea between its first performance and me listening now?

I’m sure someone with more musical knowledge than me could tell us what is objectively happening in the rolling drums, the dancing strings, and the cresting winds that psychologically conjure up the sea. It’s beautiful, it’s playful, and I got goosebumps while listening. Compared to Iberia, it doesn’t just make me think of the thing, but I am emotionally moved by the thing and by Debussy’s musical interpretation of it.

Notably, Debussy composed this piece nowhere near the ocean, but in the pastoral landscape of Burgundy. “You will say that the ocean does not exactly wash the Burgundian hills… My seascapes might be studio landscapes had I not an endless store of memories, worth more than reality, in my mind.”

That’s beautiful.

Final rating

I’m planning to get rid of this album. It’s in rough shape - lots of static, skips, and pops. It’s very old and I’m pretty sure I found it on a sidewalk in Brooklyn about twenty years ago. Plus Iberia isn’t worth owning at all. I have to give two ratings because these pieces were so different.

Iberia
*
La Mer
***