One of the discussions that struck me was how many writers were concerned with the places that composers drew their inspiration. Debussy was adamant that in order to produce true French music, one could only draw from original french ideals, which included the appropriation of “exotic sounds” from french held colonies, and a return to the modal qualities of the French renaissance, and importantly looking to past French master for inspiration. Ravel, however, looked at it with a more cosmopolitan view, and understood that they are influenced by more than just the purely French sounds, even when trying to avoid it.
In his first article of the three we read for class, Debussy discusses the importance of demolishing current dramatic trends, which he argued was pulling too much from the the philosophy of the Germans and the Italians , which he scorns as being “not a particularly French Orientation.” In the second essay from 1913, he continues to discuss dramatic music as pulling too much from the model of Wagner. “Let us purify our music!” Debussy yearns for a french sound that other french composers can research and imitate, even though Wagner, the Germans, and the Italians, are all influencing his music. He even does his best to offer an example of a model past French composer to mimic, Couperin.
Further, Debussy plays into the colonist tendencies of France in order to use the scales found in Javanese gamelan ensembles in his own music. I think that Debussy’s appropriation of the pentatonic scale was done as a indirect manifestation of France’s power. The mindset was that because France had colonized other world places, they had the right to use their music. If we look at the second movement of his piece Estampes, II La Soiree dans Grenade, Debussy uses an Arabic scale and mimics the plucking common in Spanish Guitar. This piece was written after Debussy had gone to the 1889 World’s fair, so he had not even been there, but rather he was influenced by the cultural displayed to him in French power.
Ravel, however in his lecture on contemporary music at Rice institute in Houston, Texas, advocates more for the importance of the individual’s voice. According to Ravel, it is not French nationalism that makes a French sound, but rather it is French composers who make French music. “Nationalism does not deprive either of his individual soul or its individual expression, for each creative artist has within him laws peculiar to his own being.”
I think also that when Ravel uses an exotic sounds, for example in his piece Rapsodie Espagnole, Ravel works in Spanish sounds, but not like Debussy to reflect the power of the French, but rather to reflect his Spanish descent. This follows Ravel’s writing that the composer ought to write what comes from their own individual experiences. Even though both composers wrote pieces inspired by Spanish music, they did so with different intentions.
It seems that Debussy was working hard to produce and build a French musical style and used French nationalism as a way of doing that. Whereas Ravel argued that french music comes from individual composers, that happened to be French, and did not need to be built up or manufactured.