ExclusiveDebussy: Danse sacrée et danse profane - 2. Danse profane

【Classical music and nature 古典音樂小站】Claude Debussy: Danse sacrée et danse profane - 2. Danse sacrée. This beautiful piece was played by United States Marine Band. It has Creative Commons license (CC BY 3.0 DEED Attribution 3.0 Unported) and is provided through www.musopen.org.

Debussy's Danse sacrée et danse profane:

A mysterious introduction in the strings that sounds like an ancient priestly chant, followed by delicate chords on the harp - this is how the Sacred Dance from Claude Debussy's Dances for Harp and Strings from 1904 begins. Debussy repeatedly evoked antiquity in his music: the mysterious aura of an archaic rite connected to nature. This is also the sound of his Sacred Dance. Movement only gradually enters the initially static soundscape through simple four-note scales that are constantly repeated in the harp, underpinned by mysteriously illuminated string sounds. After the reprise of the opening, the dance ends with a strange, almost sombre coda. The key is the archaic Dorian D minor - in keeping with the strict, measured movements of dancing priests of antiquity, as Debussy obviously imagined them here.

The second dance, the Danse profane, is clearly more secular and urban: the strings intonate a gentle waltz rhythm in the friendly key of D major. Above this, the harp unfolds gentle melodies and glamorous cascades. Admittedly, the music in this movement also remains largely in soft tones and a quasi-naïve expressive attitude. "I detest doctrines and their impertinence," Debussy confessed, "which is why I want to write down my musical dream with the greatest serenity. I want to sing my inner landscape with the naïve guilelessness of a child." The dreamy atmosphere of the two harp dances is perfectly suited to these movements.

They were composed as a commission for the Parisian piano and harp company Pleyel, specifically to propagate the new type of "chromatic harp". The competition from the Erard company dominated the ever-growing demand for harps at the time with their pedal harps. Pleyel's attempt to displace the Erard harp with the new chromatic system failed, but Debussy had arranged his two dances in such a way that they could also be performed on the traditional harp without any losses. (Source: kammermusikfuehrer.de)

The waterdrop was filmed by Simone Schlegel and the video was edited by Wenjing Ma.







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