This week has been a Claude Debussy kind of week. It all started a few weeks before when I heard CBC’s Paul Kennedy in Ideas discuss how Debussy ushered in the 20^th century with his Prelude to the Afternoon of theFaun.

On Wednesday I heard a modified Debussy work Des pieds sur la neige arranged by Jordan Nobles and played by Vancouver’s stellar Standing Wave.

I was not prepared for last night’s Music on the Point –Concerts with Personality featuring Canadian Lucas Wong on Piano in an all Debussy program.

Wong played 9 shortish works that included four Etudes. Of those Etudes Debussy said that these works composed in 1915, are a warning to pianists not to take up music professionally unless they have remarkable hands. That, at least, is what Debussy thought of his 12 extremely difficult piano masterpieces.

Claude Debussy & Igor Stravinsky - Photograph Erik Satie - 1910

Wong himself told us that the Etude Pour les accords was virtually almost impossible to play. And he played it! Wong played all from memory with a precision that almost made it seem like for him it was all easy. We would know differently.

Having been raised by my mother (she played the piano very well) to listen to the romantics and Bach she did play Debussy’s Claire de lune so my knowledge of the composer is spotty.

After the concert I spoke with Wong and Corey Hamm (who with Wong played Igor Stravinsky’s Danse Sacrale from the Right of Spring for one piano, four hands). I told them that as I listened to Wong I imagined the works of Monet and Manet in my memory. They told me that Debussy rejected the idea that he was an Impressionist. In fact I found out that Debussy called those who labeled his music as Impressionistic as “imbeciles”.I checked my very good copy of Ross King's book, The Judgment of Paris - The Revolutionary Decade That Gave Us Impressionism and found no citation of Debussy in the index.

I must be frank in saying that listening to Debussy’s piano works is much more difficult than to listening to my fave Thelonious Monk. Since last night’s concert I have been thinking about that.

In 1987 I watched Yehudi Menuhin’s TV series The Music of Man. Memorable to me was the episode when he tried to explain punk music with The Dead Kennedy’s playing behind him. The expression on his face did not hide his discomfort.

Claude Debussy - Photograph Igor Stravinsky 1910

In the late 70s I was attracted to Vancouver’s punk scene. I liked the loudness and energy which to me seemed primal. One of my faves were The Subhumans’ Slave to my Dick. I must have listened to it innumerable times. Now when I happen to listen to it seems tame and I can almost hum along.

In the last few years I have attended Vancouver’s Microcosmos String Quartet  and I have heard all 6 of Bartok’s string quartets many times. I still cannot identify each one.

Perhaps this is what I need to do with Debussy. I must hear it over and over until my memory will fill in the blanks and  perhaps this 20^th century man will also be ushered into that century, if, alas, a century too late.

Thanks to Lucas Wong (I would lose my shirt if I played poker with him) whose only emotion (that I could discern) here and there was a small smile, I have found out a lot about Debussy. I have learned that his piano works feature the relationship with a piano’s white keys and black keys. Wong told us that playing only with the black keys makes the sound seem Oriental.

Wong's notes on  his program did inject his brand (and Debussy's) humour:

Find out how Debussy played “Tai Chi” with the black and white keys in imaginative ways. The journey opens with black keys evoking bells from Pagodes. Gradually, the black and white keys go head to head on a collision course, creating interesting shapes such as Mists and Fireworks. The keys arrive at the finish line encountering Stravinsky’s infamous Sacrificial Dance for piano four hands with Corey Hamm piano. 

But more than anything Wong taught me that what I thought was a fairly remote kind of music was not and not only that, Debussy’s music has humour in it. The proof of that was Pour les huit doigts from Etudes. I watched (I was on the front row) and the whole piece was played without once using either of Wong’s thumbs!

The Oxford of the thumb being a finger or not says:

It's therefore more accurate to describe a thumb as one of five digits that we have on each hand, rather than as a finger. 'Digit' is the technical term which covers fingers, thumbs, and toes in humans, and similar appendages in some animals. The thumb is the short, thick first digit of the human hand.

The splendid evening finished with Hamm and Wong sitting at that one Steinway (expertly tuned by Scott Harker who was present at the concert) and pounding that Danse sacrale.

If Debussy ushered in the 20^th century it would seem that Stravinsky blasted it. I love going to listen to the Vancouver Symphony play the Right of Spring. There is a moment in the work where there is a sudden blast of musical noise that makes me jump from my seat. Stravinsky reminds me of American composer Charles Ives who once said,  “Stand up and take your dissonance like a man.”