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Debussy: A Painter in Sound, by Stephen Walsh

Free Ebook Debussy: A Painter in Sound, by Stephen Walsh

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Review

“Outstanding.”—Booklist (starred)   “[Debussy] shines a welcome light on the composer, his music, and his times.”—Library Journal   “Perceptive and authoritative. . . . A sensuous portrait of an iconic composer. . . . A richly detailed life of a modernist master.”—Kirkus (starred)   “Stephen Walsh has followed his magnificent, two-volume Stravinsky biography with this smaller but no less brilliant gem of a book on Debussy. Combining psychological perspicacity about his subject’s life with deep insight into his music, Walsh has made me not only better understand the composer—he has also made me want to re-listen to and re-reflect upon every piece that Debussy ever wrote.”—Harvey Sachs, author of Toscanini: Musician of Conscience   “Stephen Walsh’s Debussy: A Painter in Sound articulates with skill, taste and flashes of humor the evolution of an artistic giant who preferred to leave things ‘half said.’ It is impeccably researched and intellectually engrossing—a thorough and important study of the composer who forever changed the direction of music in our time.”—Stuart Isacoff, author of When the World Stopped to Listen: Van Cliburn’s Cold War Triumph and Its Aftermath   “In Debussy Stephen Walsh has produced a wonderfully detailed biography of a truly ground-breaking composer. This book should be of interest to any Debussy enthusiast.”—John Powell, author of Why You Love Music and How Music Works “Compelling. . . . Finely tuned. . . . [Walsh] employs a delightfully fluent prose to carry the general reader along.”—Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian   “[A] wonderfully warm, wise and witty book about the greatest French composer of the modern era. As a comprehensive and integrated survey of Debussy’s life and work, it could hardly be bettered.”--Rupert Christiansen, Literary Review   “Walsh is one of our most insightful writers on music, and his judgment always illuminates what it touches. . . . Published to mark the centenary of the composer’s death, Debussy: A Painter in Sound concentrates on what truly matters.”—Philip Hensher, The Spectator   “An enjoyable and impressive achievement. . . . Lively yet learned. . . . Walsh depicts Debussy’s Paris with the same verve and scholarship that he applies to the man.”—The Economist   “A beautifully written study, mercifully free of academic jargon. . . . [Debussy is] a genuine intellectual biography. . . . It’s a tricky thing to bring off, but Walsh is certainly the right man for the job. . . . He gets as close as anyone to catching in words the peculiar quality of Debussy’s harmony. . . . [Walsh] combines delicacy of perception, refinement of expression and quiet persistence, in a way not so far from the great composer himself.”—Ivan Hewett, The Daily Telegraph   “Excellent. . . . [a] lucid and elegant introduction to the French revolutionary.”—Michael Henderson, The Times (UK)   “[An] excellent new biography. . . . [This] fascinating study will help to win [Debussy] new admirers. . . . Walsh is a superb guide to this music.”—Ian Thomson, The Observer

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About the Author

STEPHEN WALSH is Emeritus Professor of Music at Cardiff University and author of a number of books on music including Musorgsky and His Circle and the prizewinning biography of Igor Stravinsky, selected as one of the ten Books of the Year by The Washington Post. He served for many years as deputy music critic for The Observer and writes reviews for many journals. He lives in Herefordshire, England.

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Product details

Hardcover: 336 pages

Publisher: Knopf (October 23, 2018)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1524731927

ISBN-13: 978-1524731922

Product Dimensions:

6.6 x 1.3 x 9.6 inches

Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

3.8 out of 5 stars

17 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#116,626 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

I take my review’s key note from the title claim of Stephen Walsh’s recent analytical biography, Debussy: a Painter in Sound (New York, Alfred A. Knoph: 2018). A painter in sound? Hmmm. As craft and as technology? Really? The traditional invisible art made visible? What magic lies here? Walsh’s examination of Debussy’s career in chapter and verse (musical scores and thematic intent) is about as satisfying and complete as any interested reader could ask, except in one fundamental concern. Walsh relentlessly defers to (or is mastered by) Debussy’s fantasy of visual music without offering any reasonable, empirically based explanation or evidence of that possibility realized. Lots of associations are offered but no visuals are produced. As a metaphor of a composer’s intent, fine, but as a perceptually apparent i.e. heard/seen result? How sound paints or, in this case, how Debussy could imagine that he did so and that audiences would see the picture by listening is never really explained. A turbulent passage of sound does not visualize a storm at sea for instance, although Debussy and Walsh think it does. There is for sure a formidable tradition of visualizing scenes in and with music in the classical canon from Mussorgsky to Liszt and beyond, but the tradition offers no clues about how this could be. All such synesthetic assertions are visionary, not visual. Paintings, after all, communicate their themes visually, music does so musically, and never the twain shall meet despite a strong desire that they can. The idea of painting in music is an accepted norm of description in the classical music world. Few in that cultural sphere would question the reality of induced synesthesia by skillfully arranged sounds. Save as a clue to what the composer had in mind when composing—the sea, a stroll in the woods—such attributions are pie in the sky idealizations or, historically, desperate remedies for meaning after the collapse of sacred music and the rise of Absolute music. Musical visual description was “literalized” as a kind of representation that could depict a seascape, a picture at an exhibition, or anything that painting could. Yet show anybody a painting of the sea and ask them what they see; then play Debussy’s La Mer and ask them what they see and you will see the problem of metaphorical visual representation: the former clearly depicts what it is about; the latter does not depict at all. It expresses it but does not depict (which is why Abstract Expressionism often casts its mannerisms in musical terms). Or in the spirit of Descartes’ devious imp, tell listeners that the composition pictures mountains in different weathers and see if they nay say that with something like, “Oh no, that’s the sea for sure.” Probably not. The point here is as banal (obvious) as it is critically significant to all who believe in the possibility that music can paint in sound. To broaden the picture, the problem Walsh’s Debussy evades is inherent in classical music from the 19th century onward, that sound can paint and incidentally narrate. Basically the common fantasy is that anything the other arts do to communicate meaning music can do as well. Music became so successful raider of the other arts that by the late 19th century it was heralded as the art to which all the others aspired, when of course it was the reverse that was true. But a musical image, whatever that means, is always and only arrangements of sound. Not a big point for sure but a hugely important one given the widespread and pervasive distortions broadcast by the music industry in all its manifestations. Music is a language of sorts, but not a true language (another iffy claim in musicology) that directly communicates even in the weak way that a narrative describing a painting does. The picture music is alleged to picture begins and ends in the composer’s mind. Furthermore, to see a painting described in a novel for instance, we have to know the language of the description. Likewise in music. But most do not. Picturing what is painted in the language of music is for most like hearing an audiobook in French without knowing French. Walsh reasonably explains how Debussy’s language of music paints; he knows the “French” and can tell us what we are intended to see and, oftentimes, how, but it is “Greek” to most listeners. On this understanding, Debussy’s visual description, all of them might justly be titled “Enigma Variations”; to musically illiterate listeners they are charades acted in sound. Walsh never confronts the big critical question of how such an imagining came to be understood as a cognitive possibility without any supporting evidence. How did composers in the nineteenth century "see" this when composers in all other centuries did not—settling on a reasonable onomatopoeia when music was to imitate the natural world, birds etc. And a modern corollary: would an fMRI of subjects listening to Debussy’s Images show activation in the visual cortex? Or would it all be auditory? For an agnostic like me, the belief that a composer can be a painter in sound demands a “faith in things unseen.” That is to say that even if we take Debussy’s “paintings in sound” as a species of musical Impressionism, there is still a good deal wanting to establish its credibility: Monet’s Haystacks is impressionistic but clearly, visually a picture of haystacks; Debussy Images just as clearly do not show what they are Impressionistically of. We need to read all about them to even to pretend to see them. In sum, seeing a painting is clue-rich of meaning; hearing a painting is clueless of the same. “Missing in Action,” calls to the bar of empirical judgment the belief or fantasy that sound can paint and that a composer, Debussy in this case, can be a painter in sound. Because no credible examples or explanations of the phenomenon appear in Walsh’s Debussy, I assume that there is no such musical phenomenon and further that the claim is not more than a manner of speaking that describes intentions but nothing more.Kevin MooreBrooklyn, January 20, 2019

This is a very good biography of Debussy, explaining how he developed musically throughout his life. It includes extensive analyses of his works in addition to describing what type of man Debussy was.. The only drawback is there are no musical examples in the book. Some excerpts of the music being analyzed would be helpful. Overall, though, it is a great addition to the books on Debussy.

To set the stage, while not a professional musician, I play mutiple instruments, know a bit about music theory, and am aware of and listen to many genres including those by Debussy. This book contains a lot of interesting information but the writing comes across as pretentious and arrogant. The continuous discussion of various works by others and the insertion of very selective terminology and verbiage drove me away from this work. I plodded on because I truly wanted to learn more about debussy and his music and the influences behind his beautiful accomplishments until I could stand it no more.I learned a lot but it was painful. This book would be appealing to an elite group but not to music lovers like myself.

I enjoyed the author’s biography of Stravinsky tremendously, so I had high hopes for this bio of Debussy. Unfortuntely the reader is subjected to complex musical analysis combined with mundane definitions (a mode is “the white keys of the piano”). I only got a third of the way through when I encountered this sentence: “Melisande’s hair tumbling from her window in the tower obviously respresents her sexuality, just as the doves that fly away at the climactic moment of Pelleas’s love-making clearly stand for orgasm and the loss of virginity.” Well sure, obviously. I rarely put books down without finishing them, but I did with this one. An extreme disappointment. Hard to believe it’s the same author as the Stravinsky bio.

The author forgot who his readers were. Too many French words and phrases without translation. He is a professor who is writing to other professors. I gave up after the third chapter. Itis a shame because I like the composer and wanted to learn more about him.

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