Debussy: La Mer (3rd Movement)

Debussy annoys me a bit. Not that I dislike his writing, but so much of his music is about colours, that it makes it difficult to look at the score and quickly understand what is going on. Probably a good reason to study his scores more.

La mer (the sea) is a 3 movement symphonic poem that aims to depict the ocean. In the first 7 pages of the third movement I noticed some really effective devices which provided a sense of nautical essence, or perhaps nausea for some. To create a sense of waves crashing onto a boat Debussy gradually builds the waves by presenting a chord with a crescendo, then as it dimuendos he drops the chord, mostly down a semitone. The waves rise and fall like this with the combination of movement chromatically and rise and fall of dynamics, then once the waves become large enough the stop retreating and instead the strings aggressively rise from a soft piano, surging in pitch and dynamic until the wave smashes onto the deck with a cymbal crash.

Even just from a few pages, Debussy manages to create a strong sense of his subject matter for the listener. I feel that often when music is associated with an extra musical idea we only can make the connection as we have been informed of the extra musical idea, but with this work I’m pretty sure most people would notice the representation of the ocean without being told.

Warren.

Bartok: Concerto for Orchestra (5th Movement)

The movement starts with the horn sections in unision presenting some rapid changes in modality. The opening bar suggests C major (or minor) with a rising octave, immediately followed by four descending quavers that that suggest G major with the use of a sharpened F. In bar three it seems like we have returned to C with a run up the scale, but the scale finishes a note early in the fourth bar as it pauses on a Bb. Are we now in F Major I wonder? The next bar the piece takes off and we are presented with a continual pizzicato quavers from the cellos and violas, outlining a cluster chord built on E.
A section that really caught my eye was a simple but effective augmentation of a basic rhythm from Bar 468. Triplet crochets are followed by crochets, which are followed by minims, which are then followed by tied minims. It works especially well as it is a descending phrase, so the lower it gets, the more drawn out it is.
The trumpets announce a considerably lengthy melodic phrase about a third of the way through. It’s drawn out a bit like a sausage dog, with what initially felt like too many repeated quavers in the middle of the material. It is hard to tell if this phrase is composed used the multiple little motifs featured in the work, or if the work is composed using small fragments of this phrase.
I’m wanting to develop my writing for strings more at the moment, and found this score to demonstrate a variety of really effective ideas.

Warren