As I’ve stated in another thread, I’m recently “getting into” classical music more than I have been in the past. Since I don’t quite have a “entire history of composition” vocabulary yet, I have a hard time putting particular works in their historical contexts and understanding what made them particularly important.
Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune is particularly confusing for me; everything I’ve read about it implies that it was “the birth of modern music” or otherwise completely revolutionary, but when I listen to it it doesn’t exactly seem like a paradigm shift from that which came before it. What am I missing about the piece? What am I not “getting?” What should I pay attention to more in order to understand what makes it so notable?
It’s always been my understanding that what PAMF did was give composers persmission to make their own rules: it follows, IIRC, no previously established musical form. It also doesn’t really stick to one key. It even uses silence as a musical element. It’s an exercise in formlessness, patternlessness, rulelessness. It’s abstract painting, in music. Well, not entirely abstract, of course; that would come later. But the door to entirely abstract music was first cracked by Debussy with PAMF.
Anyway, the point being, before PAMF–the “birth of modern music” part–academic music; art music; non “folk,” or "popular [i.e., “of the people”] music had always adhered, to a certain extent, to a certain conservatism of form. Think of a sonnet versus free verse, and think of Debussy as the first “poet” to write in free verse.
This is on the right track. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it “gave composers permission to make their own rules” (Berlioz took that liberty long before ), and composers had been breaking conventions of form for programmatic reasons for decades already.
But the form of PAMF is strangely elusive. It actually works more like a film with sections “dissolving” into new sections. (e.g. there’s one point where the whole orchestra is fading out while the strings and harp fade in to begin a new section). Near the end there are a series of “cuts” where the the flute plays a version of the main melody, and then the oboe plays a quicker, more ornate version of the same melody (they do this a few times I think), giving the impression that you’re sorta viewing the same scene but from different angles.
Also, the main theme itself has this strangely elusive quality. You know you’ve heard it many times by the end, but it’s difficult to pinpoint where exactly the clearest statement of it was.
Not only does it not stay in one key, it really never firmly establishes any key. The harmonies are used like rich splashes of color, rather than as a series of tensions and releases to move time forward (as the tonal music that preceded it did).
The piece so visually brings to life this daydreamy, fantasy scene of this sex-crazed faun’s afternoon hanging around doing faun things.
But to answer the original question in very general terms, I think the piece eluded tonality in a way that few, if any, had done to date.
If your library has the videos of Leonard Bernstein’s Norton Lectures, you can see how he covers this in lecture #4, “The Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity”. I don’t know how much this agrees with current music theory, but he makes the subject approachable by anyone. The entire series is titled “The Unanswered Question” (after Ives’ famous piece) and is a survey of the history of tonality and its possible future. The series is well worth viewing (as are his Young People’s Concerts).
Among the elements contributing to the ambiguity of the piece are the whole-tone scale and the tritone interval, which is 1/2 of that scale.
Actually I think that comment is a little confused. I can’t remember the comment from Bernstein that this was in response to so I’m not entirely sure of the context, but I think this student was conflating 2 different things. It’s true that the most important piece of thematic material in Prelude… features the G-C# tritone, which is at different points transposed up to Bb-E, and it is true that those 4 notes form a diminished chord, but since these occur in different sections, I don’t think we perceive a prevailing diminished harmony in the piece.
However, there is a prevailing half diminished harmony in both this piece and in Tristan. (In fact, it’s so prominant in the latter that it’s commonly referred to as “The Tristan Chord”).