Claude Debussy – Reverie – Luca Weller
The French composer Claude Debussy has always been known for his remarkable impressionistic music. Debussy’s composition Reverie was composed in 1890 and was one of his earliest works. The piece became popular although Debussy had not wanted it to be published at first, he said, “I regret very much your decision to publish Reverie… I frankly consider it absolutely no good”. Either way, his composition was a great success and a wonderful start to his contributions to the impressionist movement. How and why Reverie is an impressionist piece, along with other musical and contextual factors will be thoroughly discussed in the following investigation.
Impressionistic music was a movement among many Western classical composers such as Claude Debussy, mainly during the 19th and early 20th century. It is a style in which the music focuses on atmosphere and conveying moods and emotions creating s sense of “detached observation” rather than expressing a detailed tone-picture, by portraying deeply felt emotion to tell a story. Depending on the artist, one of the most important musical element in impressionism is timbre, which is often by the use of orchestration, harmony, texture variants and gradients etc. These impressionistic pieces often also accommodate new chord combinations, ambiguous tonality, extended harmonies, exotic scales, parallel motions and irregular phrase structures and lengths.
The French work “Reverie” means daydream in