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I am a Los Angeles-based twentysomething. I have a profession, and I have a secret life in music, and this blog isn't about any of that. I like Blogger because I can't read what you're thinking.

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Friday, March 6   >>

DEBUSSY'S CLAIRE DE FUCKING LUNE, MAN

Posts like this don't come without having consumed enough beer. It is 3:26 a.m., moments after a great listening session with a homie.

Claire Debussy's "Claire de Lune," from the Suite Bergamesque, changed my fucking musical life when I was in the ninth grade.

I dropped out of private piano classes and spent months by myself figuring out how to get to the next step, whether it be jazz, classical, or whatever Ben Folds cover I could cover 1/4th of due to my limited ability.

I found "Claire de Lune" in my sheet music library and tackled it, eventually getting it down some four or so months later.

After hearing Debussy's suite tonight (inspired by a recent visit to the Getty, where I wanted to give a mental middle-finger to all things rococo), I realized that this piece was instrumental in the way I play, listen, and write.

Listen to what happens at 1:47:



Reading those notes from then on broke me free from the limits of classical form, and, I swear to god, this one moment was so definite for me that it felt like Debussy was saying to me, "Hugo. I just put an E maj. 7 arpeggio in a song in Db major. This can happen. Stop listening to everything any theory teacher has ever told you and, fuck it, if you want to put your own E maj. 7 arpeggio in a song in Db major, go for fucking it. DO WHATEVER YOU WANT AND BE AN ARTIST, YOU MORON."

Don't even get me started on what happens at 2:20. B-o-n-e-r.

From then on everything to me, musically, was about chords. Not time, not feeling, not execution. No. Just. Chords. Things have changed since then, but I find myself always going back to chords. This is probably why I consider artists like The Reign of Kindo and The Bird and The Bee and a very few others innovative in pushing music in spaces we've yet heard.
Dear Claude Debussy,

Thanks, you sly motherfucker. You're a goddamned genius.

Love,
Hugo
Have a good weekend,
The Fucking Man