Claude Debussy

The greatest strength of Debussy's work lies in his innovations - which is not to say that his music is inadequate in other ways. Much of his work relies on the use of the whole-tone scale. Although Debussy did not invent this scale, he was the first composer to use it with such success and with such skill. In a whole-tone scale, there are only six notes to the octave (with each note a full whole tone, or two semi-tones, apart from its neighbors). This scale has been far more widely used in non-Western than in Western music - the French Impressionist composers such a Debussy used it more often than any other school of Western composers before or after - but the effect of this scale is not inherently non-Western (www.hypermusic.ca/hist/glossary.html).

Debussy's work has a somewhat surreal quality to it because of his use of this scale: We have the impression when we are listening to it that (no matter how loud the music may be or how close we may be to the musicians who are playing it) tha

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Some common words found in the essay are:
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