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 [log in to unmask]