“No one will ever know how different my music really is from what people think.  Do they realize that I've never heard what I hear in my head, and so often not even what's on the page?"

Claude Debussy, 1911

 

“You know that hashish always invokes the magnificence of light, glorious splendors, cascades of liquid gold; all light favors it: that which flows in sheets, that which hangs like straw on points and asperities, the candelabra of salons, the candles of Mary’s month, the rosy avalanches of sunset.”

Charles Baudelaire, 1860

 

“Debussy spoke enthusiastically of a rather vague project for which he even asked me to provide an outline. His idea was for a cosmogonic drama, without words or plot, in which invisible singers, soloists and chorus would deliver onomonopoetic syllables, to the accompaniment of lighting effects onstage. The orchestra, which would be hidden beneath the scenery, would symbolically represent clouds, the wind, and the sea.”

Jaques Emile Blanche, 1932

A voice from outside: "Ap-raman!"

At these words, a funereal silence fell upon the room, and the door opened by itself.

A specter entered, and what a specter! A gloomy bronze face, a somber, sinister, colossal figure that struck the resonant slabs with its bronze heels. Unlike the other ghosts, it had the advantage of being neither a chimera nor an apparition but a real, solid, and tangible horror that seized you harshly at the core. Its shadow passed slowly and coldly over the foreheads of the guests. It stopped in the middle of the table, cast livid looks over the guests, poured itself a drink into a leaden goblet, which it emptied in one gulp, and blew on the entire banquet as if to extinguish its joy. At this breath, the lights dimmed, the roses wilted in the women's hair, the masks fell, and the faces turned mournful. Indeed, it was the magician's artificial man.

Alphonse Esquiros, 1836

 

“I receive endless requests to write out lines of music along with my autograph. I don't often give them out. I rather fancy writing out false ones and distributing them. The other day I received a letter from Buenos Aires, in which an American lady made such a request and put 500 francs in the envelope for my reply. I kept the 500 francs and the reply.”

Claude Debussy, 1907

 

“I could dispense with explaining myself on the actual musicality of my reconstruction, my title of composer covering, at my risk and peril, the result obtained. If I don't stick to this easy attitude, it's because my ideas on the very nature of inspiration are quite different from those generally held. That the artist is, in the proper sense of the word, a creator, I do not believe. It is easier for me to admit the existence of some immense reservoir where, always and forever, by a volitional phenomenon which exceptionally puts in power certain mysterious springs of consciousness, it is given to draw sometimes unto the perfection, in proportion to the quality of the aesthetic sense of the perceiver.”

Edmond Bailly, The Song of the Vowels in Invocation to the Planetary Gods, 1912

My thanks to Phil Legard/Larkfall for the MIDI creation

 

“From the celestial vault hangs a gigantic spindle, which carries in its eternal course eight orbs of varied colors. On each of these circles sits a Siren 'uttering a single note of her voice, always in the same tone.' It is through the movement of this voice that the movement of the various celestial spheres is accomplished. The sound made by the golden axle of the world, turning on itself, accompanies their hymns. 

“This concert forms the triple voice of time, which tells of the past, the present and the future, and which wise men have sometimes heard on earth by approaching a tomb during the silence of the night.

“From the side of the moon rises a sweet concert; the sounds of the sun are admirable; a voice of thunder comes from Mars, a sweet nightingale song from Jupiter."

Jean-Georges Kastner, 1858

“Edmond Bailly is an improbable publisher who only puts out things that are of high quality, things that please him, and therefore it is not surprising his business is not going well.”

Ernest Chausson, 1897

“In Wagner's operas, the singers never appear without being accompanied by their damned leitmotif; sometimes they even sing it! This is about as crazy as if someone, in handing you his visiting card, were at the same time to sing what was written on it.

“Can you imagine that in a composition the same emotion can be expressed twice? Either one has never thought about it, or else it is just laziness.

“And four evenings for a play! Does that even seem to you admissible? Don't forget that during those four evenings you will be hearing always the same things. The characters on stage and the orchestra go on exchanging the same themes, and then you arrive at the Twilight of the Gods, which is once again a résumé of everything you have been hearing.

“This is inadmissible for those who like clarity and concision.

“I would like to see, and I will succeed myself in producing, music which is entirely free from 'motifs', or rather consisting of one continuous 'motif' which nothing interrupts and which never turns back on itself. Then we shall have a logical development, concise and deductive; there will be no hasty and superfluous padding in between two repetitions of the same 'motif ' which will be a characteristic and essential part of the work. The development will no longer be a purely material amplification, a rhetorical exercise performed by a well-taught professional, but will have a wider and indeed psychic significance.”

Claude Debussy, 1903

 

“Achille de Bussy does not lapse into banality nor is he platitudinous. On the contrary, he has a pronounced tendency—too pronounced—toward an exploration of the strange.”

Académie Report on Achille de Bussy, 1887

 

“I was still on stage when the final curtain had come down, and I saw Diaghilev coming toward me, accompanied by a dark man with a sort of double forehead: it was Claude Debussy.”

Igor Stravinsky, 1910

 

“What he saw happening as he stood back in a detached way was every individual disappearing, dissolving into the mass, melting together with millions of others. Suddenly overnight a young, mighty, titanic being grew into existence, das Volk.”

Hanns Heinz Ewers, 1921

 

“In former times, the bells had their role to play in the forbidden sciences. The art of predicting the future from their sounds is one of the least known and most neglected branches of the occult.”

J.-k. Huysmans, 1891

 

“I recommend the bookseller Edmond Bailly to you, that fellow! If you only knew what that little man harbors within himself— eminent knowledge and really very artistic ideas; and he has a tenacity that at times makes mine pale in comparison.”

Claude Debussy, 1893

 

“For years and years, amidst all the problems I have been concerned with, this one has kept me brooding over its mystery. Today a radiant intelligence, Pythagoras, has held out his hand to me across the twenty-five centuries that separate us...”

Edmond Bailly, The Song of the Vowels as Invocation to the Planetary Gods, 1912

“The possibility of a war preoccupies everyone. All of Europe is moving toward solutions of violence. We are breathing the oppressive air of l’avant-guerre.”

L'Anarchie, 1912

 

“In the music of Claude Debussy, these chords do not represent a continuity of musical thought; they merely exist in space, or more precisely, in musical time, as if drawn to each other by some astrological influence.”

Edward Lockspieser, 1962

 

“I don't see a circle: I only see circles described in one direction or another, what are called cycles. The problem is therefore reduced to this new statement: What are the pleasant directions? What are the unpleasant directions?  In other words: What directions do we associate with pleasure and pain?”

Charles Henry, 1885

“[Victor-Émile] Michelet says Paul Adam was one of the three or four minds of the Symbolist generation who really grasped what a symbol was and could thereby vivify his work with that perception; the others apparently only acceded to the 'threshold of allegory.' Adam swam deep into 'the oceans of gnostic intellectuality' and knew how to penetrate beyond appearances. 

“'Possessed of prophetic powers, Adam could read into the subterranean wefts beyond nature on 'which were embroidered the events of 1914 and the following years.' That is to say, he predicted World War I and subsequent events. 

“Paul Adam constructed his stories, the lives of his characters, the twists and turns of his dramas that link them into logical sequence, on the tarot. His dramas are the eruptions of invisible reality, symbolized by any manner of combination of the tarot’s seventy-eight cards. And if this all sounds implausible, Michelet reproduced a letter in his Companions of the Hierophany in which, in the most charming French prose, Adam congratulated Michelet on having penetrated his secret: that yes, the tarot had been for him a constructive key, indispensable to a 'thousand intutitions': 'I remain a docile disciple having received the highest recompense of his zeal, that of your approbation. Paul Adam. June 1919.'”

Tobias Churton, 2016

 

PAUL ADAM

French novelist (1862-1920), important for his LETTERS FROM MALAYSIA (1898) and for having sprinkled his work with small utopian and anticipatory sketches. A dozen of his stories interest us in whole or in part.

In chapter XVI of CLARISSE (1907), a floating factory off the coast of Brest uses the perpetual movement of the sea to produce electricity, which is then stored in “liquid accumulators,” jugs of energy which are conveyed worldwide for all purposes.

In USEFUL HEART (1892), we find a communist utopia with phalanstery. Locomotives pull harrows, plows, etc. The workshops are decorated and “functional” music lightens the work.

THE FUTURE TALE (1893) presents in 55 pages a coming war in which, very soon after the start, the combatants fraternize and establish an era of perpetual peace.

Under the title “Future Grandeur de l'Avare” (in the collection CRITIQUE DES MOEURS (1893)), we read this: “[..] machines which will feed, clothe, heat, refresh and gladden the world by means of the tappings of index fingers on the ivory of motor buttons,” and this again, which surpasses everything, in terms of energy: “The muscular contractions aroused by the yawns of strolling pedestrians will suffice to produce the initial force immediately stored, condensed, multiplied in receivers established everywhere.”