In his inter­view for the Invis­i­ble Juke­box fea­ture in Wire mag­a­zine, Steve Reich casu­ally and know­ingly dropped the notion that the his­tory of music in the 20th cen­tury was an argu­ment between Schoen­berg and Debussy, and Debussy won. The results may seem obvi­ous in the grow­ing (and now dom­i­nant) preva­lence of tonal­ity in new com­posed music over the last fifty years or so, but the under­ly­ing mean­ing is impor­tant. And if the two names strike you as rep­re­sent­ing oppo­site ends of an aes­thetic con­tin­uum, one seek­ing, like a Repub­li­can run­ning for Pres­i­dent, to turn back the clock to a reac­tionary con­di­tion veiled in the lan­guage of progress, and the other, almost dilet­tan­tish, fol­low­ing an intu­itive and seem­ingly sybaritic path, pro­duc­ing truly new con­cepts that still strike many as as rep­re­sent­ing a deca­dent stew of absinthe and syphilis, then you will rec­og­nize that vic­tory meant the cham­pi­oning of cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ties far more fruit­ful, and requir­ing far more dis­ci­pline and rigor, than the sys­tem­ati­za­tion of everything.

Atonal music is like every other endeavor, it can be done well or badly. And, done well, it is as beau­ti­ful and expres­sive as any other. It’s pos­si­ble to acquire a taste for the style as a whole — a moti­vated and atten­tive ear can learn to hear a lot very quickly — but it’s not a com­pli­ment to qual­ify a piece of music or a style by say­ing that it can be appre­ci­ated once one gains a cer­tain amount of knowl­edge. Great music works on many lev­els, and the pri­mary one is that it sounds great, it’s imme­di­ately and pow­er­fully appeal­ing and attrac­tive, and the under­ly­ing intel­lec­tual and emo­tional con­tent keeps you com­ing back for more. There’s a rea­son why La Mer is so com­mon on orches­tral pro­grams: it sounds brilliant.

It also is bril­liant. Beneath the gor­geous sound, the col­ors, the lus­cious phras­ing, the pic­to­r­ial and expres­sive lus­ter, the piece is put together in a man­ner that is both rig­or­ous — we know this by how grip­ping it is to hear — and so new that there was no model for it at the time, and scarcely any since. Read this blog, and any other seri­ous and learned writer on music his­tory and com­po­si­tion, and you’ll fre­quently be read­ing about archi­tec­tural ideas, about how composer’s build struc­tures that hold together their sec­tions of ideas, the frame­work of their har­monies and rhythms, that pro­vide a place in time for melodies and their vari­a­tions and restate­ments. Debussy was a mas­ter archi­tect, but one work­ing with schema unlike any that had come before. Where Schoen­berg devised his twelve-tone sys­tem to fight a rear­guard action against Mod­ernism and pre­serve the struc­tural integrity of the ideas of his beloved Brahms, Debussy, as part of a gen­er­a­tion that sought to free itself from the influ­ence of Ger­man music in gen­eral and Wag­ner in par­tic­u­lar, fol­lowed what boiled down to writ­ing what he wished, cre­at­ing and work­ing with his mate­ri­als in a way that fol­lowed the needs of his mind and heart, and apply­ing the craft and hard work to find the form that fit each and every piece. His form fol­lowed its function.

A rough but use­ful way to hear this is to lis­ten to the first move­ment of some­thing by Haydn (sym­phony, string quar­tet, piano sonata). Count the bars, and you’ll hear how the struc­ture fits into a reg­u­lar pat­tern, e.g. an eight bar state­ment, often repeated, then eight bars of a counter phrase in another key, another eight bars of a vari­a­tion on that counter phrase, then a return to the orig­i­nal state­ment, again often repeated. From there, Haydn will vary his struc­ture, but it will still be built out of reg­u­lar units, two-by-fours of musi­cal infor­ma­tion out of which he builds larger scale pieces. Fun­da­men­tally, what makes him great is how he defined sym­phonic and string quar­tet struc­tures for the future (they are still with us) and cre­ated a for­mula while still con­stantly mak­ing it sound new and refresh­ing. Mozart also builds struc­tures that are easy to hear, as does Beethoven, although his par­tic­u­lar genius was to reduce his units down to very small and sim­ple forms and build and even greater and more pow­er­ful set of struc­tures from them.

Now lis­ten to Debussy. What do you hear?

There is the pic­to­r­ial color, of course, for which he’s famous and from which came the label of “Impres­sion­ist” for him­self and Ravel, though Debussy loathed that term. Aes­thet­i­cally, this is not out of line with the tone poem tra­di­tion of Roman­tic music which begins with Beethoven’s Sym­phony No. 6 and extends through Berlioz, Liszt and a great deal of Mahler (Mahler is, lit­er­ally, more of an Impres­sion­ist than Debussy). But in terms of the Haydn what you hear is an inde­scrib­able sense of form. The piece has a pow­er­ful struc­ture, it’s what keeps it mov­ing for­ward and, despite the repet­i­tive phrases and col­ors, makes it fas­ci­nat­ing to fol­low. But that struc­ture can­not be described in terms of bar length and sec­tions of keys, the means by which, look­ing back­wards, it’s been pos­si­ble to ana­lyze music from the Baroque. With Debussy, musi­col­ogy had to cre­ate a whole new con­cept of study, the idea of pitch sets. His music is clearly tonal, and it can be described as being orga­nized around groups of related pitches, where a stretch of music will empha­size one set, another stretch will empha­size another. Other than that, the forms are unique to each work, espe­cially the great bal­let Jeux which has no form, other than its own, which it seems to make up as it goes along.

And that’s how Debussy won the argu­ment, and what makes him one of most impor­tant com­posers, along with one of the great­est in terms of sheer plea­sure, in the West­ern clas­si­cal tra­di­tion. He won by cre­at­ing a path for music to both remain tonal and to be fully orga­nized while break­ing free of forms and struc­tures that, while always use­ful, where no longer nec­es­sary. Unlike Schoen­berg, he made the future pos­si­ble. He made Steve Reich pos­si­ble (music orga­nized organ­i­cally to a point where the com­poser found an end) and even Boulez who removed him­self from his own Schoenberg-ian trap of total orga­ni­za­tion into a style more tonal, more free and fully organized.

2012 is the sesqui­cen­ten­nial of his birth (the cen­ten­nial of his death is in 2018) and so what bet­ter time for boxed sets? A happy result of his pop­u­lar­ity is that there have been many great record­ings of his work, and the com­pe­ti­tion is between col­lec­tions from Sony and Deutsche Gram­mophon (the for­mer con­sol­i­dat­ing the RCA cat­a­logue, the lat­ter those from Decca and Phillips). Both these sets are excel­lent and mostly com­pre­hen­sive, yet there are dif­fer­ences. Each has all the orches­tral works, the piano music and cham­ber music, as well as the opera Pel­léas et Melisande. Where they dif­fer is in the vocal music and some extras. Sony’s The Claude Debussy Col­lec­tion includes the early “Pre­mier Trio en sol majeur,” not in DG’s The Debussy Edi­tion, while on DG you get more songs, includ­ing Trois poèmes de Stéo­hane Mal­larmé, Trois Mélodies de Ver­laine and Prose lyriques. That’s the equiv­a­lent of about two CDs, on with Sony that is filled out with a disc of “Encores” and one of music tran­scribed for the harp. These may seem less than essen­tial, and in fact a lot of this music is the kind of thing you might hear on one of those awful, Top-40 ‘relax­ing’ clas­si­cal radio sta­tions. But these selec­tions are also supremely beau­ti­ful, involv­ing rather than soporific, and James Galway’s arrange­ments of “Clair de lune” and oth­ers are skill­ful and sincere.

Boulez the con­duc­tor is one of the Debussy’s pre­miere inter­preters, so you get him on both, his early New York Phil­har­monic and Cleve­land Orches­tra of Noc­turnes, Print­emps, Jeux, Images and Deux Danses and Pel­léas on Sony, his later record­ings of the major orches­tral works with Cleve­land in the DG box. Sony fills the rest out with Charles Munch’s clas­sic La Mer and Prélude à l’apréd-midi d’un faune (they could have also gone for MTT’s record­ings, which are arguably the best), and DG gives you Clau­dio Abbado’s Pel­léas with Maria  Ewing, which is an excel­lent record­ing. Call it a draw, they say com­ple­men­tary and valu­able things about the com­poser. I per­son­ally pre­fer the piano works on the DG set, which has the all-time all-stars Mit­suko Uchida, Zoltán Koc­sis, Krys­t­ian Zim­mer­man and Arturo Benedetti Michelan­geli, but Sony has most of Paul Crossley’s ter­rific record­ings, sea­soned with Robert Casadesus and oth­ers. In the land of milk and honey, you would buy both of these, but if you would like one great Debussy col­lec­tion, the choice boils down to how hard-core you feel about him: for sim­ple lis­ten­ing plea­sure, it’s Sony, for know­ing the man inti­mately, it’s DG.

It’s a lit­tle sur­pris­ing that there is no com­pe­ti­tion here from EMI, who also have a great back list of this music. Instead, they are remas­ter­ing and reis­su­ing famous record­ings, includ­ing Wal­ter Gieseking’s col­lec­tion of the piano music, the sin­gle best of it’s kind, and three CDs of piano music from the impor­tant French pianist Sam­son Fran­cois. The label also has a valu­able box of Debussy and Ravel orches­tral music under Simon Rat­tle, the most impor­tant his­tor­i­cal record­ing of Pel­léas and the mes­mer­iz­ing, pow­er­ful CD of Debussy and Ravel under Carlo Maria Giulini. Taken all together, this is a won­der­ful recorded legacy, and any and all of these CDs would give you great joy and satisfaction.