Steve Schwartz on my comments to Dave Lampson:

>>Well, get your ears ready:-).  If you simply listen the orchestral music
>>of Debussy's elders (D'Indy, for example), or the orchestral music of
>>his contemporaries (Mahler, for example), you will notice some aspects:
>>a) Debussy's treatment of the harmony was something new by those times,
>
>Actually, Debussy's harmonic innovations are prefigured by such composers
>as Liszt, Wagner, and Massenet.

Sure.  However, I wrote "his treatment of harmony" not "his harmony".
Debussy was one of the first composers who payed a strong attention to
the textural, timbric characteristics of a chord or an interval (i.e.
the diverse sound qualities of its diverse internal positions), in many
cases despite its functional value within tonality.  That was quite new
(or perhaps not:  in fact Berlioz prefigured that somehow).

>>No. To prove that the work X has been useful, inspiring, etc.  to the
>>composers Z, Y and W.  That's all.
>
>I find it very odd that we're judging music on the basis of history,
>rather than on how much we like it.

If we are going to make a *value* judgement, that's odd indeed.  But
I wasn't talking here about "value".  "Historical importance" is not a
matter of quality or intrinsec value, it's just a positional indicator
(how A relates to B and to C).  I'm interested in musical genealogies
just as my aunt is interested in the genealogy of all the families in
my entire neighborhood.  That's gossip, I know, but all we secretly
enjoy gossip.

>The problem is that many of the composers we like most tended to be
>influenced by composers no longer heard much or inferior to whom they
>influenced.

That's true, but not always.  A composer usually receives a lot of diverse
influences along his creative life.

>As George Bernard Shaw once wrote, in art it doesn't matter who came
>before you.  It matters who comes after.

I find this better fitted to marriage than to art.  And in art, better
fitted to Whitman than to Eliot.

>>>All that's proved is that some writers have agreed.  You could easily
>>>assemble a group of writers that dissent.
>>
>>Not in the case of Debussy, I would bet.  In the case of other composers,
>>it's probable...
>
>Read Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective.  Some of my favorite
>excerpts:
>
>[Of Pelleas] ... interminable flow of commonplace sound.  The effect
>is quite bewildering, almost amusing, in its absurdity.

I was thinking on writers contemporary to us.  I think that it's difficult
to find a group of modern writers that deny the influence of Debussy on
Western Music.  However, I would like much to read the Lexikon:  as I wrote
before, I love gossip.

Pablo Massa
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