Free The Ellington Century by David Schiff Page B

as the speaker falls asleep.
    The Symbolist songs prepared Debussy for the full expression of textless musical symbolism in the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune , an orchestral work inspired by Mallarmé's poem. The Prélude is not a tone poem but what Ellington would term a “tone parallel.” Debussy explained to a critic that the music was “perhaps the dream left over at the bottom of the faun's flute.” 63 Debussy reduced Mallarmé's almost inscrutable text to its essential sonoric value, an unaccompanied C# on the flute in its breathy, slightly muted middle register, a pitch “naturally out of tune on French flutes of the period.” 64 The unaccompanied flute solo that begins the Prélude is not a diegetic sound within the action (real or dreamed) of the poem but a floating sound symbol poised to take on any of the poem's inflections. Placing the sound of the flute first before addressing, however indirectly, the action of the poem, Debussy was implementing Verlaine's instruction: “De la musique avant toute chose” (Music first!).
    Debussy's most sophisticated works of timbral symbolism, though, are not his songs or orchestral pieces but his piano compositions, especially Book I of the Préludes , a set of twelve “tone parallels” published in 1910. Debussy here applied the techniques of musical Symbolism to the central idea of Impressionist painting, the fleeting character of sensory experience. As in Turner and Monet, wind and water present images of constant change, but Debussy chose subjects that also placed those elements in relation to other works of art. Each prelude poses the question of how art can resist and embrace temporality. To indicate the thematic interplay of the enduring and the perishable Debussy framed the first book of Préludes with two dances, one from ancient Greece,preserved on a frieze in the Louvre, the other from contemporary America, a ragtime Debussy had heard performed by street musicians (probably in blackface) while on vacation in England.
    Debussy's piano never sounds simply like a piano but creates sonic metaphors. Lockspeiser describes Debussy's approach to the piano as illusionistic: “To both Marguerite Long and Louise Liebich [Debussy] insisted that the piano was to sound as if it were ‘an instrument without hammers’ and he wanted the fingers on the keyboard to appear to ‘penetrate into the notes.’ The illusion was to be complete. Nothing was to be allowed to destroy the impression that the mechanical piano, a mere ‘box of hammers and strings’ was not a piano.” 65 Illusionism is not the same as illustration; it would be a mistake to hear these pieces as musical depictions. The sound images evoked in the Préludes are themselves symbols; the music is part of the symbolic forest in which humankind wanders, a forest Debussy had evoked at the very opening of his opera Pelléas et Mélisande.
    Debussy signaled the complex symbolism of these relatively simple pieces by the placing and selection of titles. Titles appear in parentheses at the end of each prelude rather than at the top of the first page, as if they were just tentative, transient associations. Seven of the titles link the music to artworks, making the preludes reflections of reflections. “Danseuses de Delphes” refers to a Greek caryatid in the Louvre, “a support column sculpted in the form of a female figure.” 66 “Voiles” may refer either to the dancer Loïe Fuller or to sailboats, depending on the gender assigned to the title word. “Le vent dans la plaine” begins a line of a poem by Favart that serves as an epigram for Paul Verlaine's “C'est l'extase langoureuse,” which Debussy had set to music in his Ariettes oubliées. “Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir” is a line from Baudelaire's “Harmonie du soir,” which Debussy had set to