About this Piece

French composer Claude Debussy was not content with the musical status quo of his times and, by virtue of the progressive instincts he harbored, he moved to the forefront of the Parisian avant-garde of the 1890s. A wholly original creative artist, Debussy initiated a musical style so special and individual that, in spite of its enormous influence on 20th-century musical thought, it remained very nearly his exclusive property.French composer Claude Debussy was not content with the musical status quo of his times and, by virtue of the progressive instincts he harbored, he moved to the forefront of the Parisian avant-garde of the 1890s. A wholly original creative artist, Debussy initiated a musical style so special and individual that, in spite of its enormous influence on 20th-century musical thought, it remained very nearly his exclusive property.

That style, judged by critics of the day to be the musical counterpart of the vague, suggestive pictorialism of France’s new wave visual artists, was thus labeled “Impressionism.” Although Debussy protested the use of the term (but applied it on occasion when describing one or another of his pieces), it remains the operative—and apt—word to characterize the elusive aural imagery of the composer’s works. Having defined the distinctive musical language in the early 1890s with pieces like Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, Debussy refined it in the ensuing years, marking it his single, unique means of expression.

Danse sacrée et danse profane for harp and strings, translated as “Sacred Dance Profane Dance,” was composed in 1904 and is representative of Debussy’s fully formed style. It was commissioned by the firm of Pleyel, which wanted it for use in competitions associated with a newly inaugurated class in the chromatic harp at the Brussels Conservatory. (The harp’s ability to sound the closest adjoining pitches—the chromatic tones—is achieved through the use of seven pedals located at the instruments base).

Debussy’s titles for what are in reality two pieces played without pause suggest a little more musical contrast than actually exists. This is all benign, lovely music flowing in chromatic modal swirls, perhaps a little more heavenly in the Sacred than in the provocatively pagan Profane, but singular in its washes of gorgeous Impressionistic sounds.

— Orrin Howard