Voiles ~ Sails

Good evening young musicians!

Okay, as I wrote in my first blog post, I am going to show you all a bit of Claude Debussy's work.
I also wrote about Voiles, Debussy's piece about sails. Since I have done work in class on this particular piece, I figured I'd start somewhere where I knew what I was talking about.

So:
I'm going to do some short analysis of a couple bars in the score of Voiles, and show you guys what I'm going on about.

Okay, so in the first nine bars it is pretty darn evident that this composition isn't exactly like any other composition that I have come across. Many scores that I have studied, have been in class so they are usually quite defined and stabilized.

Debussy uses one crescendo and three decrescendos in the first four bars, making the starting impression that lasts throughout the song. It makes the music become louder and then very, very quiet again. Debussy uses the dynamic markings of p and pp, which mean piano and pianissimo. Piano means soft and pianissimo means very soft. He used these markings to make the piece super quiet.

In the sixth bar we can see a random bass clef in the treble. At first I was really thrown off by this as I hadn't seen in any scores I have looked at. I was really confused as to if this was a mistake or if it was on purpose. After talking to my music teacher about it, I understood reasoning why the bass clef is placed here. Having the bass clef in the treble helps make it much easier to read. The lines above the notes in bars are signifying that they are supposed to 'swing' into each other. The way I say it is to 'swing' but the quick explanation is that the lines instruct the musician to play them some what together and not ridged and  to not play the notes one-by- one.

From the tenth bar we can see these round half-circle lines. These are indicating to us that these certain notes are to be resinated, in other words, to echo. Also in the tenth bar we see the treble re-appear! Every thing is okay again! In the bass we get these heavy, low notes being played quite loudly. The long line under the notes tells us that Debussy wants them to be played and echoed into each other. In bar eleven the treble is resting and the bass is carrying the melody. we see a large de crescendo which makes the piece barely audible. The dots under the notes are accents, telling us to play them loudly and rigidly.  



The treble comes in to the bass in the fifteenth bar. This is so the low notes are easier to read and play. The bass returns for a brief bar, playing just four notes and then the treble takes back over.

Okay, well that's it for now, I hope some of you learned something. I will post another post shortly, analysing another one of Debussy's pieces, Valse Romantique.

Thanks for reading!
Tanisha Ivy Pearl


Score from:
http://imslp.org/wiki/Pr%C3%A9ludes_%28Book_1%29_%28Debussy,_Claude%29