The World Exposition of 1889 held in Paris was a spectacle in every sense of the word, there was a great deal of attention paid to capturing, and reproducing for the spectators, a scene that was a synthesis of the “essential” elements of the country or region in question. The Javanese pavilion, for example, became a world unto itself, being fenced in with a large entrance that was flanked by two large turrets in the related architectural style. Within, the spectator escaped the real world of Parisian life with its new machines, industrial developments (note that the Eiffel Tower was erected for this Exposition), noisy crowded streets, and stepped into a veritable Arcadian paradise where time seemed to be still in a moment of human history when humans were in communion with nature and the higher unexplainable forces therein. This was a very desirable setting for a society that was both excited but highly disturbed with the quickening pace of human technological development:
Like any other pastoral construct, the Javanese village depended on the dual opposition between city and country, artifact and nature, presenting a glimpse into an exotic Arcadia while containing the Other within the primordial natural space.(1)
Upon entering the village the spectators were guided to the performance space by a group of musicians carrying drums and bamboo instruments, thus giving the first encounter with the exotic Other, and helping to establish a transition from the outside world to the paradise within. This sort of procession was the visitor’s first encounter with music; one can imagine that to the psyche of the nineteenth century visitor this caused great curiosity and must have seemed to them as if they had literally stepped into another country and were thus engaged in a sort of safari expedition. Once established comfortably in their tables at the performance pavilion within the village, the audience would receive drinks and other such commodities, and the performance of music and dance begun. The audience was then enveloped in a world of different sights, sounds, textures, and scents that contributed to a complete sensory immersion into this other realm. To the artists among the lot, this sort of synesthetic experience would have recalled the Baudelairian principle of correspondances extolled in his famous poem of the same name.
(above: Four of the Javanese Dancers – Photograph from 1889;
Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris)
For composers such as Debussy this encounter with the musical Other served to expand the horizon of his musical language. It is reported by contemporary accounts that Debussy would spend endless hours in the Javanese (and Vietnamese) pavilion listening attentively to the wandering sonorities of the ensemble.
In a letter to the poet and writer Pierre Louÿs, Debussy states:
To Pierre Louÿs 22 January 1895
But my dear good fellow! Remember the music of Java which contained every nuance, even the ones we no longer have names for. There tonic and dominant had become empty shadows of use only to stupid children.
Later, in his 1913 article “Taste” he would also refer to the music of Java thus:
There were, and still are, despite the evils of civilization, some delightful native peoples for whom music is as natural as breathing. Their conservatoire is the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind among the leaves and the thousand sounds of nature which they understand without consulting any arbitrary treatise. Their traditions reside in old songs, combined with dances, built up through the centuries. Yet Javanese music is based on a type of counterpoint by comparison with which that of Palestrina is child’s play. And if we listen without European prejudice to the charm of their percussion we must confess that our percussion is like primitive noises at a country fair. (2)
In all the previous quotes one can grasp the impact this music had on Debussy, who at this time was still at quite a formative period of his career. What Debussy found in these musics was exactly what he was trying to achieve in his own æsthetic, which went strictly against that of the teachings of the Conservatoire where he had studied. In the music of the Other, he found validation for his æsthetic and received a great deal of new harmonic and melodic material. It is important to note that Debussy was not exactly concerned with documenting exactly the music he heard, but rather to gain from it and internalize its essential aspects into a style all his own. This harken to Théophile Gauthier’s Theory of Transposition where one takes an art form and tries to express it with another. In the nineteenth century, especially in this environment of discovering new cultures, appropriation was a concept that was a common thread among artists of the time; creativity lies not in what you appropriate but how you take the elements and synthesize them into your own style, which is what Debussy was able to achieve.
One of the first pieces that can be chronologically connected to the experience of hearing the gamelan is his Fantaisie pour Piano et Orchestre which was composed around 1890: Listen to it!
Peace.
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(1) Fauser, Annegret. Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair. New York: University
of Rochester Press. 2005. pp. 166-7
(2) Quoted in: Lockspeiser, Edward. Debussy: His Life and Mind. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1962.
