In a review of what brought about the changes of 20th Century art music, leads to at least one conclusion. It was Beethoven and then De Bussy to blame…. 😉
De Bussy Opening by Michael Doyle Music like all of life Is filled with balance and strife Both cyclical and linear Different in the ages, yet familiar Perspective makes this self confession Intimate in their very concession The syntax of music is progression Explosively in propulsion with each generation Simultaneously implosive in the frame of tonality While moving forward in range of instrumentality Beethoven celebrated self in the Enlightenment His music served as catalyst into things meant But little understood as it might be Perhaps because of the French language's fluidity And its influence on the ways of culture Symbolism imposed itself on artistic need to nurture Claude De Bussey composed French into action Seeking sound for sounds sake in self-satisfaction Ebbing and flowing for the simple sake of sound Touching musical modernism in depths quite profound Prelude To A Fawn serves as ground zero And De Bussey is 20th Century music's hero As Pierre Boulez noted form itself was no longer needed Its delicacy and transparency caused rules to not be heeded Melodic winds and strings brought to composition All the tickle of the French love of imagination Musical phrases of long, lush gentle articulation Sustained as objects of beauty persuasive in rumination All of this became held to have greater importance Then the motifs and development of aural romance No longer would music be kept in the old frames Tonal colors would be music's new game (c) May 1, 2020 Michael Doyle All Rights Reserved
