Debussy and Gamelan according to a 150-year-old man
Hello!
If you haven’t been transported by the mesmerizing sounds of Gamelan yet, we recommend you give a listen to some. It will change the song you can’t stop singing. (As much as you love Whitney’s “I Will Always Love You,” it’s about time Kevin Costner got it out of your brain.)
Gamelan is like musical crack. Claude Debussy, French composer. he became addicted to it and changed the whole compositional style of him.
You do not believe me? So take this really old guy, Jean Michel, who I left in the Caribbean at a health spa. Jean is like 150 years old, and he told me about his old friend “Claudey D” while he was drinking margaritas, then during an herbal wrap, and finally stopped when he passed out during his Zinfandel colonics.
Is Jean’s story apocryphal? we don’t know. However, we do know that it shows the power of gamelan in a classical composer.
John Michel:
If you don’t think listening to a good gamelan will change your life, let me tell you about my old friend Debussy. Me and the Claude-homme used to hang out, back in the day. Now I just hang up. (sighs) It happened sometime after my 120th birthday. I take Viagra, but all I have is stiff shoulders.
Regardless, Claude had what the good ladies of Lourdes would call an “epiphany” the first time he heard a Javanese gamelan. He was so moved by the music that he wanted to cut off his old ears and replace them with Indonesian ones. Luckily, I grabbed his knife and smeared Brie over his ears so he couldn’t find them.
You see, it was in 1889 at the International Exposition in Paris, but I remember it like it was yesterday. Claude and I were eating baguettes and a round of Brie, standing at the recently completed Eiffel Tower, wondering how small the Eiffel was that he had to create his huge building. (Before sports cars, architecture was a man’s way of compensation.) And then we listen to the music.
That moment would forever influence the music of my dear sweet Debussy. Claude was so captivated and paralyzed, that he dumped all the soft Brie on the floor, smearing it with pigeon feces, pissing me off even more than when I see a piece of shitty sparkling wine trying to pass itself off as champagne. If the vineyard is not in France, it is not champagne. It’s a region, not bubbles!
But back to the composer. Debussy spent the rest of the Exposition in that shop. He got dirty, he didn’t care, he wouldn’t leave until they were done.
Even years after the experience, Claude wrote to our mutual friend, the poet Pierre Louys: “Do you remember the Javanese music capable of expressing all shades of meaning, even the nameless shades… that make our tonic and our domineering look like ghosts, for use by naughty little children?”
By the way, Pierre was a real poet. You know, when the only thing poets “closed” were doors. There was no such thing as “rhyming dictionaries”.
Claude also wrote elsewhere, speaking of European percussion in contrast to Gamelan: “You have to admit that ours is nothing more than the primitive noises of a traveling circus.”
“Naughty children.” “Traveling circus.” Strong words, yes? So strong that they have stood the test of time and are now the same phrases the French use to describe politicians in the United States.
Yes, I am stubborn. I am 153 years old and I am French. It is my harsh feeling of judgment that keeps me alive. That and the blood of poodles. I drink eight ounces a day.
Of course, Claude always felt that the main purpose of French music was to give pleasure to the listener. I agreed with him of course, I never really liked any music that caused me pain. He leaves Simon on American Idol to suffer the pain of bad music. Unlike him, I won’t sacrifice my eardrums for money and a parade of youngsters in my bedroom.
But despite Claude’s enthusiasm for gamelan, I could never persuade him to put actual gamelan scales, melodies, rhythms, or textures into his composition. He limited himself to referring to them, always maintaining a solidly European structure and harmony. He emphasized the “oriental flavor,” as it was called then, as if the music was something invented by La Choy. Examples of this are found in his work Pagodas or the prelude to Canopus.
You see, Claudey D couldn’t get to write for gamelan because he had to pay the rent. He wrote his compositions with his audience in mind.
And who was your audience? Rich and powerful Parisians. This group of self-satisfied Francophiles raised the children who would become the leaders of the Vichy government. You know Vichy, they were the group that turned around and took it on Germany’s butt in WWII. If a Frenchman were capable of hating himself, we would direct him to that blot on our history.
Claude Debussy, who turned his back on Richard Wagner’s Teutonic tones, would have been horrified by Vichy. However, like many great artists, and unlike many recent movie stars, Claude was more focused on creating timeless art, not ego-filled politics.
Debussy remarked that the school of the Javanese musician “consists of the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind in the leaves, and a thousand other minute noises, which they listen to with great attention.”
It is not beautiful? Oh how I miss Deb. Luckily, I can still get drunk and listen to her music.
Gamelan’s music, according to Claude, “was not concerned with movement in time, with leading towards something, but with timelessness.”
The cycles of gamelan music represent a more Asian view of the vast cycles of history, of death and rebirth, cycles that are long, longer than my 153 years. I’m a punk when it comes to those cycles. Cycles -as my friend Buzz Lightyear says- that go to infinity and beyond.
Oh! Look at my belly. I am surprised that I have spots on my liver that are bigger than my liver. Oh good, here comes the waiter with my poodle blood smoothie.
That’s what he said, almost verbatim. All I can say is go see some Debussy or some Gamelan and see what they do for you.