Debussy's Estampes: Javanese Percussion, a Spanish Evening and French Children's Songs at the Piano

Written in Bichain, Premiered in Paris

Debussy wrote the three pieces during the summer of 1903 while staying in Bichain, in northern Burgundy. A letter to Messager from the same period describes his thoughts of distant countries and his difficulty affording the journey. The titles in Estampes name architecture outside France and a Spanish city, yet Debussy completed the collection while remaining in France. The music draws on what he had heard and on scores he had written before, rather than recording a succession of places he had visited. In 1902, the preceding year, his opera Pelléas et Mélisande had reached the stage, and in 1903 he also began work on the orchestral La Mer. The summer of Estampes belonged to a period of continuing work on opera, orchestral music and piano pieces.

Debussy also gave detailed instructions for printing the collection. He chose the paper and asked the publisher to print the title and his monogram in pale gold, with the individual piece titles in blue. A monogram is a mark made by combining the letters of a name. Alongside writing the notes to be played, he prepared the score's cover, arranging the lettering and dividing the colours as he brought three titles together in one collection. His requests for paper and colour, sent by letter, were specific production instructions for the score that readers would first hold in their hands.

Debussy received the proofs that August, and the collection was published on 20 October. Its dedicatee was the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche. Ricardo Viñes gave the premiere the following year, on 9 January 1904, at the Salle Érard in Paris. Debussy completed the music in summer, prepared it for printing, published the score in autumn and had a pianist present the three pieces to listeners in winter. Viñes played Pagodes, La soirée dans Grenade and Jardins sous la pluie at a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique. The collection completed in Bichain was introduced to the public in Paris.

Javanese Ensemble Music at the Paris Exposition

The first piece, Pagodes, reflects the Javanese gamelan that Debussy heard at the 1889 Paris Exposition. A gamelan is an ensemble of several instruments. In traditional ensembles in Java and Bali, musicians played a range of instruments centred on bronze percussion. These ensembles also accompanied court and village rituals, community events and shadow theatre. Long before Debussy encountered them in Paris, musicians had used these instruments to accompany ceremonies and performances. The exposition introduced their music to European audiences.

The exposition included a Dutch display and an area recreating a Javanese village. Among the gamelan instruments brought to France at that time were instruments given to the French government by an administrator in the Dutch East Indies. Both the performances and the movement of the instruments involved colonial administration and the running of the exposition. Debussy's discovery of unfamiliar sounds in Javanese music therefore needs to be considered alongside the circumstances that brought instruments and musicians from a colony to Paris. Even after Debussy's piano piece became widely known, the traditions of the Javanese musicians who played its source material continued in their own right.

In Pagodes, Debussy expressed the gamelan's influence through intervals of fourths and fifths and through the combination of sounds in several registers. The piece brings together resonances in the piano's lower register, repeating figures and movement in the upper register. A figure is a short sequence of notes that can be repeated or varied. Debussy drew on the ensemble sound he had encountered in gamelan when writing a score for a single piano. By asking the pianist's two hands to work across several registers, he gave that influence a specific form on an instrument different from those in a Javanese ensemble.

An Evening in Granada and Falla's Tribute

The second piece, La soirée dans Grenade, carries an instruction to follow the movement of a habanera. Debussy used a dance rhythm to shape a piece named after a Spanish city. He had spent only one day in Spain, but the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla thought highly of the work's Spanish character. Without learning local music through extensive travel, Debussy wrote something that a Spanish colleague could recognise. The recurring dance rhythm under the title Granada contained features of Spanish music that another composer identified.

In 1920, Falla wrote the guitar piece Homenaje for a special magazine issue commemorating Debussy. He later arranged the work for piano himself. Near its end, he quoted music from La soirée dans Grenade, using a passage Debussy had written for piano to honour his colleague in a guitar piece. A work that began with a magazine's commemorative project included a passage in which Debussy's melody could be played again in his memory. The music Falla had admired thus became part of his own tribute and survives in versions for guitar and piano.

Debussy also drew on an earlier work of his own when preparing La soirée dans Grenade. He revised and reused music from Lindaraja, a piece he had written for two pianos. Material originally shared between two performers was adapted for solo piano. Before writing this work named after a Spanish city, he had already explored related music for a different combination of instruments. In Estampes, he reshaped that material, placed it after Pagodes and linked it with a final piece drawing on French songs.

Two Songs in Gardens in the Rain

The third piece, Jardins sous la pluie, includes two French songs. Debussy used the melodies of Nous n'irons plus au bois and Do, do, l'enfant do. The first title can be translated as We Will Go to the Woods No More; the second contains words sung to lull a child to sleep. In a piece with rain in its title, Debussy drew on melodies that people sang. He placed this song material within a rapidly moving piano score, making familiar French music the basis of the last of the three pieces.

Blanche's painting of Debussy's portrait on a rainy day may also have prompted the composition, although this cannot be established as the reason he wrote it. Independently of that possibility, Debussy reused music from his unpublished Images of 1894 in Jardins sous la pluie. The earlier score also contains Nous n'irons plus au bois. The final piece, following Javanese music and a Spanish dance, preserves both French songs and piano music Debussy had explored nine years earlier.

In the final piece, music quoting the French songs continues before changing to E major at the end. This change can be likened to rain stopping and the sun coming out. Such a description of the weather is an interpretation that considers the title alongside the change of key. Debussy changes the key as the music progresses and ends the piece in E major. The quoted songs and the change at the close belong to the same composition. He put rain in the title, but the music continues to develop rather than repeating unchanged to the end.

Different Musical Materials for a Single Piano

Listening to the three pieces in order allows us to compare the different musical materials Debussy brought into his piano writing. Javanese ensemble music is central to Pagodes, the habanera to La soirée dans Grenade, and French songs to Jardins sous la pluie. He gave each piece its own title and organised its music differently. His experience of hearing the sounds of gamelan, his experiments with Spanish-style piano music and children's songs used in an earlier score came together in one collection. All three are written for solo piano, but their materials and the way they unfold differ.

Mahina's lunch and dinner playlists include all three pieces of Estampes played by Zoltán Kocsis. A single pianist plays them all, yet each uses different material. Pagodes combines intervals influenced by Javanese ensemble music with sounds in several registers; La soirée dans Grenade repeats the habanera rhythm. The final piece, Jardins sous la pluie, incorporates two songs sung in France. While revising piano music he had written before, Debussy placed an ensemble heard at an exposition, a dance and familiar songs into three separate solo scores.

Listening at Mahina

At Mahina, we play the three pieces of Estampes performed by Zoltán Kocsis. Knowing how a Javanese ensemble, a Spanish dance and French children's songs became piano music adds to the pleasure of recognising the differences between them.