my first love was debussy
PUBLISHED 7 March 2009 14:08
I have gone through various parts and times in my life where I’ve been very focused on one specific thing—it might be soccer, might be music, might be mountains. But my Debussy period, I’ve had, I think, six musical periods in my life characterized by focusing exclusively on a particular composer. Debussy was the first.
I remember we were listening to impressionist music in my music class at school. I heard “Clair de Lune,” and I liked it, so I went out and bought a record and then found out that he made all sorts of similar kinds of music—“Afternoon of the Faun,” “Suite Bergamesque” and all that. Following that, I went out and in quick succession bought the complete works.
I ended up buying all the Vox boxes. Vox was this record company that published complete collections of music by different composers, and I systematically went through and bought every one of them. I listened to them constantly, followed along on piano and tried to learn every piece.
For two years in high school, I guess it was 9th and 10th grade, I played pretty much exclusively Debussy. By the time I was 14, I was a good enough pianist to be able to play a lot of the stuff, but there was also a lot that was unattainable then and still probably is now—some pretty difficult music.
My favorite thing to do when no one was home was to turn off all the lights and play piano by myself. Especially “Clair de Lune” with the moonlight streaming through the window. The piano was next to these big front windows and I could play by the light of the moon sometimes.
I literally put thousands of hours into that during my two years of Debussy. I played pretty much everything he ever wrote, read books about him, and then ventured into the other impressionists, like Ravel and Fauré. After that, I went into a year of Chopin followed by a year of Grieg. When I was working overseas, I went through a Bach period where I played all the inventions and stuff I could do on a portable keyboard. But Debussy was first.
