“The cries that Doctor Colombat transcribed are of several species and systematically classified.

“There is first the cry determined by the application of fire (PI. I, series A, no. 1), a serious and deep cry running through the interval of a third, followed by the interjection 'ah!'

“There is then the cry determined by the action of a sharp instrument, a very rapid first sound and a very high of the falsetto register on which it extends.

“Nothing is more moving, more terrible than the cry produced by throbbing pain (no. 5). The voice in the high-pitched tremolo is one that the most indifferent man cannot hear without emotion.

“Twice in our life cries of distress of the most heartbreaking effect have struck our ears. The first by a man who voluntarily killed himself, a few years ago, in Versailles, by falling through a window the height of a third floor.

“We passed near the place where he had just come to fall, his fall had been horrible; his limbs were broken: he uttered in a clear and shrill voice a sinister tremolo (no. 6).”

Georges Kastner, The Voices of Paris, 1857

"I glimpsed a great light, rather pale, and in this light a magical scene: among jets of water fluttered metallic butterflies, marvelous hangings of them, and the splendor of a strange architecture, towers billowing to the sounds of a singular music sung by men and women of tall stature, whose extreme beauty surprised me."

Charles de Sivry, 1873

“Harmony is awakening for all of us. Wagner anticipated it in his enormous choirs. Soon will come sequences of notes as intimate as the breath of the wind, and others, on a larger scale; and when, after glissandos that will no longer be audible to our ears, they cover larger distances, this will be an enormous source of musical richness. We have experienced it down here when, after the quarter-tones sounded by the cyclone to the Canaques in one of our distant colonies, a frisson caused the nerves to quiver as if they were the strings of a harp.”

Louise Michel, 1887

 

“Do you wish to become acquainted with the hierarchy of Angels, the virtue of Numbers, the explanation of germs and metamorphoses?”

Gustav Flaubert, 1874

 

“Strabo speaks of the sound of the sun setting in the sea, between Spain and Africa. Apollo in Greece, like Roudra in India, is represented in the form of an archer-god, who takes his bow and launches his arrows, from which light results. Now, the bow, strongly stretched, resonates; the arrows, crossing space, whistle.

“Since Science has not, in short, yet answered our question concerning the essence of the sound phenomenon, let us open the annals of universal Knowledge, the sacred books where the thought of all humanity is condensed. There, we see the contemporary sound of the origin of Things, and all cosmogony agrees to hail it as promoter of the manifestations of the divine will.”

Edmond Bailly, 1900

 

“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

“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