Lurking in the Background: Functional Tonality in Debussy
Jason Britton, University of Oregon
Claude Debussy is often credited with revolutionizing music by rejecting nineteenth-century tonal and formal practices. This image of Debussy as iconoclast, however, probably stems more from the composer's words than from his music. In a well-known letter, Debussy derides tonic and dominant as "empty shadows of use only to stupid children," yet he continues to draw on conventional tonic and dominant harmonies in his own compositions. To what degree then, does Debussy's music move beyond nineteenth-century tonal conventions? With the aid of Schenkerian theory, we can begin to recognize how Debussy's rich and exotic harmonic language, as demonstrated in the late piano piece, "The Little Shepherd" from Children's Corner (1908), has clear precedents in nineteenth-century tonal practice. The extent to which Schenkerian theory is able to illuminate tonal functions that might otherwise go unnoticed if we were to limit our investigation to the music's surface, suggests that Debussy, while a brilliant artist, was not the revolutionary rule-breaker that many, including the composer himself, would have us believe.