His music is like the peaks of a
mountain range, of which one of the first and nearest is the highest,
while the others appear scarcely less high. And they are some of the
bluest, the loveliest, the most shining that stretch through the region
of modern music. It will be long before humankind has exhausted their
beauty.
Ravel
Ravel and Debussy are of one lineage. They both issue from what is
deeply, graciously temperate in the genius of France. Across the span of
centuries, they touch hands with the men who first expressed that silver
temperance in tone, with Claude Le Jeune, with Rameau and Couperin and
the other clavecinists. Undiverted by the changes of revolutionary
times, they continue, in forms conditioned by the modern feeling for
color, for tonal complexity, for supple and undulant rhythm, the high
tradition of the elder music.
Claude Le Jeune wrote motets; the eighteenth-century masters wrote
gavottes and rigadoons, forlanas and chaconnes, expressed themselves in
courtly dances and other set and severe forms. Ravel and Debussy compose
in more liberal and naturalistic fashion. And yet, the genius that
animates all this music is single. It is as though all these artists,
born so many hundred years apart from each other, had contemplated the
pageant of their respective times from the same point of view.
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