Instrumentation: 2 Flutes, Piccolo, 2 Oboes, Eng. Horn, 2 Clarinets, 2 Bassoons, Contrabassoon, 4 Horns, 2 Trumpets, 3 Trombones, Tuba, Timpani, Percussion (2 players), Celesta, 2 Harps, Strings
First Performance: Brown University Orchestra, conducted by Mark Seto. Sayles Hall, Providence, Rhode Island, November 19-20, 2022.
Duration: 5 minutes
Cloches à travers les feuilles (1907/2021), a new orchestration of Debussy’s solo piano work, from Images II.
The most decisive turning point in Debussy’s musical career occurred when he heard the sounds of Javanese gamelan music at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. His initial reaction, that it “make[s] our tonic and dominant seem like ghosts!” and that its contrapuntal intricacies make Palestrina’s multi-part masses “child’s play,” reveal an open ear attuned to the expressive power of rich timbres, staunchly rejecting the “arbitrary treatises” that he found stifling in his musical education. From that point on, Javanese gamelan was to occupy a prominent place his work. It can be heard directly in his treatment of a melody in several layers across multiple registers, each elaborated with its own distinctive rhythmic and timbral profile.
These textures are clearly present throughout “Cloches à travers les feuilles” (“Bells through the leaves”), the first piece in the second set of Images for piano. Also memorable is Debussy’s use of the floating, unresolved whole-tone scale at the outset, a sonority which has become synonymous with his music, and which has sometimes been likened to slendro tuning in gamelan music. After the opening, he offsets the whole-tone scale with other extended chords and modes, and a brightening middle section opens the space up in an ever more ecstatic E Major, before returning to the muted colors of the opening.
My interest in making an orchestral version comes out of an initial love for the original as a pianist. The six pieces that form the two sets of Images are amongst the most evocative and poetic in the piano literature, and really make the instrument orchestral in its scope. I’ve tried my best here to make the bell-like sonorities distinctive and return them to their source, to honor the crucial presence of gamelan music’s timbres and layers, and to bring out the orchestral colors that are inherent to the composer’s treatment of the piano.
Anthony Cheung