Walter van Nus

The celebration of the first lustrum of Museum Waterland was the reason to organise an exhibition dedicated to the number '5'.This 'five' inspired me to the drawing of two crayons, two portraits of composers who both had something to do with the number five. But both in a opposite way:Debussy and Stravinsky.

Debussy, impressionistic , melodious and resolving, Stravinsky quite expressionistic, rithmical with clusters of chords, used as percussion.

The pieces of music by which the crayons were inspired ,  Debussy's Prélude á l'Après-midi d'un Faun Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, both have, according to their title, a mythical sorce of inspiration.In the first piece it's about a slumbering faun , the other a pagan springritual in which a young girl is sacrificed to comfort the gods.

It is remarkable that both pieces show in their introduction  a great resemblance . In the 'Prelude' the dreamlike character continues ,  the 'Sacre' completely changes of character in the next parts; the listener and viewer is literally beaten to the ground by chords like soundclusters in a constant change of irregular times.

By what the resolving effect of the 'Prelude' is initiated actually ?

Exactly by the 'five', in other words the use of a special kind of scale, the socalled pentatonic scale( penta=5), which Debussy borrowed from the Balinese gamelanmusic. this music undermines by its special character , the halftones lack compared with the western  scale of seven tones , our fundamental key-note feeling.The listener melts away into the environment : impressionism. On the other hand Stravinsky leaves, after the introduction of the'Sacre', the resolving effect and makes one loose oneself by the opposite , the '5' in times,rithms and chord-clusters: the chords do not work in a harmonical way anymore but sound like  percussion,even increased by  a constant change of times, sometimes in one bar.The continuing bouncing causes a flush, the doors of the subconscious are opened, ancient forces get unchained and make the crowd do anything, even sacrifice a human being : expressionism, the utmost form of it.

At the end of the nineteenth century several composers felt that the funtional harmony they had used until then, had reached the end of development, got even overmature ; to western ears a piece of music is build on the key-note of a scale and has a explicit start and ending.Everybody experiences the end of a 'normal' piece of music as the end of it because of the strong accent on the last key-note.

For instance, sing : do-ré-mi fa-sooool..... do ! Do is the key-note and when you jump from sol, the fifth note in the scale , at once to do, the first and keynote of the scale, repeat this, if necessary , a few times and everybody kows , only by hearing this socalled end-formula : We are home again, the song has ended.The keynote is like the solid ground the piece  is build on; the end really feels like that, back on solid ground again.But at that time, when great composers like Wagner, Liszt and Mahlwer lived, the changed so many times of key within one composition, the socalled 'modulation', that you could say there is no real key-note anymore.Obviously they felt by intuition , that music was to fossilate when composers would follow the mainstream of materialistic-mechanic tendencies in society at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.

Debussy tried to escape this deadendstreet by harking back to music in wich no real keynote is used : pentatonic music . Actually Stravinsky did the same by means of the irregular times taken from the slavonic folkmusic , like the 5/8th, 7/8th, etc.Both used, of course in their own special way music from a time and culture within modern individualism did'nt exist. It is music that resolves your 'ego', the feeling of being unique.

 Arnold Schönberg would be the first composer ('someone had to do it') who totally abandoned the keynote, and left by that tonality completely.For a start he used the socalled 'atonality' in his famous Verklärte Nacht , and later on he developed his 'twelvetone technique' by wich every tone within a chromatic scale is equally important;  no key-note  does exist anymore.

Paradoxically, Schönberg had to revert to the polyfonic composers of the fifteenth century to make is system manegeable , but that's another story.

Also see  information pages ( under construction ) : ' Abstract Art Versus Musical art' and 'Streaming or Remain Standing; the time-phenomena in arts'