Modal music

In Paris, the musical world, dominated by the figure of Claude Debussy, remains perplexed vis-a-vis the redécouverte traditional musics - Eastern music, that made known the Parisian World Fair of 1889, the arabo-Andalusian Musique, that redécouvrent type-setters such as Albeniz or Manuel of Falla, etc -, of the modal Musique of the Moyen-âge, influences to which the wagnerism still present is added in the spirits at the time…

With these musical thoughts little by little the preponderance of the traditional harmony disaggregates, founded on, on the one hand a system of triads more or less derived from the principles of the Acoustique, on the other hand the omnipresence of the range which, minor or major, defines the sequences of a degree in another following of the immutable hierarchical principles. Thus one starts to foresee, in particular in the medieval music, of the modes which one believes then derived from Greek antiquity, and which are not other than the shifted traditional range - thus traditional “the C-D-semi-F-ground-the-if-C ” becomes “ D-semi-F-ground-the-if-C-D ”, etc

But very quickly Claude Debussy goes further with a major innovation - that it works out of all parts, in particular starting from the idea of agreements of decreased seventh perpetually reversed, omnipresent at Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt -: the mode by let us tons, a seven range either, but of six notes only, which cut out the octave into six tons equal.

This range by let us tons , very recognizable with the color felted and mysterious that it confers on the music, the way with a depolarized thought of the music opens: the notes of the scale all being separated by equal intervals, the concept of attraction or tension between them disappears little by little and opens the way with a language which is not exclusively any more organized around a tonic note acting as benchmark.

Internal bonds

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