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Essay by Michael Arnowitt, November 2020
I like programming Bach and Debussy on the same concert. I have even put pieces by Bach and Debussy right next to each other in the program order, even though it would seem the music of these two composers wouldn’t go together. As I recall, Debussy was one of the few great composers who made some sour comments about Bach’s music, particularly Bach’s fugues.
I am not totally sure what makes me feel the music of these two composers somehow have some common threads, because on the surface Bach was extremely German and Debussy French, so their music emerged from two very different cultures, and of course there was a 200 year gap between when they lived. Here are some miscellaneous musings as to why I might feel comfortable programming these two composers together despite these obvious differences.
Both Bach and Debussy have a great feel for the texture and spacing of musical notes. I think when I listen to music, I’m primarily focused on what the texture is at any particular moment and how textures are overlaid and follow each other. Music which doesn’t change its texture much I’ve always found uninteresting. I am very attuned to how notes are spaced in chords, which musicians call voicing, and also where in the piano’s large pitch range a composer chooses to place their musical ideas and secondary lines. A piano has many different micro-registers, small ranges low, medium, and high which all have slightly different colors and tones. Bach and Debussy both vary beautifully how they use negative space in their textures, dropping out high or low notes for a while to make music airier or heavier, or they will introduce an unusually large empty space between the lowest or highest note and the middle notes of a wide chord, , producing interesting sonorities which have a suspended, weightless feel or resonate like bells. I like these more transparent, spacious textures - by comparison, Beethoven and the romantic composers who lived in the 19th century between Bach and Debussy’s times often use denser, more compact sounds.
I also love how both Bach and Debussy combine at the same time contrasting musical lines and textures, for example, block chords against a filigree nimble line of fast notes, or arching melodies with big curved leaps against narrow rough zigzag counterlines. It reminds me of painting and the feeling of an artist’s brushstrokes. The richness and changing nature of all these textures gives the music of these two composers a very tactile character which I think you can experience whether you are physically playing the piano or just listening.
Although I think Debussy didn’t appreciate his music being labeled impressionist, there is a certain natural, organic way his phrases flow that was probably influenced by impressionist art. To my ear, this aspect of Debussy’s music seems more akin to Bach than the more formal, structural music of the classical-period composers who lived inbetween Bach and Debussy. Mozart and Beethoven’s music was very humanistic, taking ideas of symmetry, proportions, and balance from ancient Greek rhetoric and architecture and translating these human ideas into music. In contrast, Debussy, and Bach at his finest, created this more elastic, fluid music inspired by natural elements such as water, sunlight and shade, and wind.
Another reason I love Debussy is that he was the first composer in many decades to return to music a sense of chromaticism. This is a bit of a difficult concept to explain easily, but imagine you restrict yourself to playing a melody using only the white keys of the piano, which are the notes of the C major scale. If you then insert into the middle of your melody a black key note, that is called chromaticism, the word chroma literally meaning color. You could also do the opposite, restricting yourself to a melody on just the black keys of the piano (an F# major pentatonic scale), and then if you played a white key note in the middle of all the black key notes, it would have an expressive effect. The off-scale note introduces a sense of dissonance, providing a new color to the established background of the consonant, harmonious notes of the main major or minor scale being used in that part of the piece. With Debussy, you feel like you are on a certain plane but then because of the chromaticism you can be shifted in mid-air to a new plane. The late Romantic era music that preceded Debussy was using all 12 notes of the piano so much that the notion of consonance and dissonance was disappearing, but Debussy, by limiting his palette, was able to restore this central idea of the music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven in a fresh way.
Finally, it could just be that my tastes were molded by my beloved first piano teacher, Mr. Angel Ramon Rivera, who taught me a generous amount of both Bach and Debussy, whose music I think he enjoyed teaching. Sometimes, as they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.