L'isle joyeuse
L'isle joyeuse, L. 106 (The Joyful Island) is a piece for solo piano by Claude Debussy composed in 1904. It is assumed that the painting The Embarkation for Cythera by Jean-Antoine Watteau served as inspiration for the piece, with Debussy reimagining a group's journey to the island considered Aphrodite's birthplace, and their subsequent ecstatic unions of love upon arrival.[1] According to Jim Samson (1977), the "central relationship in the work is that between material based on the whole-tone scale, the lydian mode and the diatonic scale, the lydian mode functioning as an effective mediator between the other two."
Structure
[edit]Exposition, bars 1–98
[edit]The introduction creates a whole tone context. This changes to an A Lydian context which, in bars 15–21, transitions, through the addition of G natural, to the whole tone context of a new motive at bar 21. This A Lydian context serves to transition from the whole tone mode on A to the A major context, inflected by occasional Lydian D♯s, of the second theme at bar 67.
Middle, bars 99–159
[edit]The other transposition of the whole tone scale, avoided in the outer sections, is used and provides further harmonic contrast.
Recapitulation, bars 160–255
[edit]The second subject appears in pure A major, the "ultimate tonal goal of the piece". The opening codas "louder and more animatedly until the very end". It ends with a loud tremolo, a group of grace notes ascending to two octaves of A notes in the highest registers of the piano, and a quick, final arpeggio, the same arpeggio used to accompany the first use of the second subject, played downwards, hitting the lowest note on the keyboard (A0) markedly.
References
[edit]- Samson, Jim (1977). Music in Transition: A Study of Tonal Expansion and Atonality, 1900–1920. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. p. 38. ISBN 0-393-02193-9.
External links
[edit]- L'isle Joyeuse: Scores at the International Music Score Library Project
- Recording by Alon Goldstein in MP3 format (archived on the Wayback Machine)
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