At the 1889 Paris Exposition he stood a long time in front of a Javanese gamelan. That music has no Western harmonic progression, only layers of sound stacked up — and he later said that next to it, our own music sounds barbaric.
Debussy was born in 1862 at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, into a family that ran a china shop and had no musical background. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at ten and stayed eleven years. He was not a docile student — in harmony class he wrote things his teachers called wrong, and asked what rule he was following, he answered: my ear.
In 1884 he won the Prix de Rome with the cantata L'enfant prodigue, which required three years at the Villa Medici in Rome. He hated it and came back to Paris after a little over two.
The 1889 Exposition Universelle was the turning point. He stood for a long time before a Javanese gamelan and Vietnamese theatre music — sound with no rule that this chord must resolve into that one, only layers that stand up by themselves. After that his harmony stopped going where it was supposed to go.
The Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune made him famous overnight in 1894, and the opera Pelléas et Mélisande put him at the centre of an argument in 1902: some heard the beginning of something new, others said it was not opera at all.
He was filed under "impressionism", a label he disliked and called a term critics invented to save themselves work. He died of cancer in Paris in 1918, while German artillery was shelling the city; few people came to the funeral.
Debussy's music never gives you the feeling that something is bound to happen next. Ordinary harmony works like a sentence and you expect the ending; his harmony does not end, it simply changes colour and stays.
Two audible fingerprints. First, whole chords move in parallel — the same shape slides up or down intact, like sliding a sheet of coloured paper across, rather than each voice going its own way. Second, the rhythmic accents are rubbed out; you often cannot hear where a bar starts, and the music floats rather than walks.
And one very concrete thing: he writes quietly. Whole pages sit in the softest range, and the biggest change is usually not getting louder but getting emptier.
