Claude Debussy occupies the border area between late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century styles. His investigation of sensuous new tone colors for orchestra and for piano, his development of new rich harmonies, and his search for new ways to express emotion in music all remind us of the Romantics. Yet while in some ways his work seems tied to Romanticism, in others it represents a direct reaction against it.

Debussy’s tone colors avoid the heavy sonorities that were usual in late Romantic music, merging instead into subtle, mysterious shades of sound. His melodies and motives are usually fragmentary and tentative, his harmonies sound strangely vague, and the tonality of his music is often clouded. He often draws on the vague-sounding new scales mentioned in Chapter 20.

Debussy’s orchestral sound differs sharply from that of his contemporary Gustav Mahler, another great innovator in orchestration. Mahler treated the orchestra more and more contrapuntally; each instrument tends to stand out from the others like a Romantic hero striving for his own say in the world. Debussy’s orchestra is more often a single, delicately pulsing totality to which individual instruments contribute momentary gleams of color. In this it reminds us of an impressionist picture, in which small, separate areas of color, visible close-up, merge into unified color fields as the viewer stands back and takes in the painting as a whole (see page 306).