Section from chapter 1906-9: New Orleans: The Musical Melting Pot   [ return to introduction ]

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By Mervyn Cooke • 325 illustrations,
82 in full color • 256 pages • 8-1/2 x 8-1/2"
Cloth • ISBN 0-7892-0399-5 • U.S. $45.00
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Debussy, photographed in 1910 outside his home in the Avenue des Bois, Paris. [ view larger image ] (Photo Collection Viollet)
Debussy Discovers Ragtime

The development of classical music in the nineteenth century was dominated by composers working in Germany and Austria, and was seen by many at the turn of the century to have reached its height in the operas of Richard Wagner. Although in his youth Claude Debussy (1862-1918) had been an ardent admirer of Wagner’s music, the French composer eventually broke away from Austro-German musical techniques by cultivating an innovative style of musical impressionism. In the process, he laid the foundations for the extraordinary diversity in composition that characterizes twentieth-century music.

Debussy probably heard ragtime when the famous band led by John Philip Sousa appeared at the 1900 Paris Exposition as part of a European tour. The crisp clarity of the idiom must have appealed to Debussy’s growing sense of anti-romanticism, and he went on to emulate the ragtime style in three piano pieces. The best known of these is "Golliwog’s Cakewalk" (part of his Children’s Corner suite, completed in 1908), which includes an incongruous quotation from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. Debussy returned to the ragtime style in two later piano preludes: "Minstrels" (1910) and "General Lavine--excentric [sic]" (1913), the latter inspired by the antics of a clown from the Médrano Circus. Debussy’s music, and that of his younger contemporary Maurice Ravel, came in turn to influence a later generation of jazz musicians. The advanced harmonies of French impressionism, which included the emphasis of attractive 7th, 9th and 11th chords in unconventional ways, became the staple harmonic vocabulary of both big-band and bop idioms (• p. 96), while Debussy’s pioneering modal techniques exerted a major influence on the work of Miles Davis and Bill Evans in the 1950s (• p. 146).