3.5.2 White Music

These harmonies are therefore related to the dominant 9th chords of Debussy and Ravel, but are coloured even more by the use of notes that are alien to the chord. Throughout his life, Messiaen studied the score of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and his harmonic language from before 1950 can also be regarded as a logical step further on the road paved by Debussy.

Through his emphasis on the aspect of resonance, overtones and colour, Messiaen’s work becomes an important inspiration for the development of the later spectral music (see Chapter V, 11).

Another form of colouring which technically speaking is not real enriched harmony is the use of chromatic suspension, a characteristic of the music of Maurice Ravel. These altered harmonies are part of the language of late-Romanticism and, through the works of Ravel would later play a major part in jazz. One often points to the great influence American jazz would have had on Ravel’s music, but that is turning the chronology upside down: the harmonic language of jazz only became less elementary in its use of harmonies after 1940, in Bebop. Ravel was primarily influenced by the music-hall music of his day: the foxtrot, the ragtime (one of the dances in which jazz originated, though it was not jazz itself), and the waltz as employed by the Strauss family in Vienna. Although the harmonic language of these types of music was cadential, their harmonies are dressed up with all kinds of chromatics. Other music genres had also found their way to America, where they underwent significant changes. The operetta started a second life there as the musical. The music of George Gershwin, which Ravel knew very well, is on the intersection of jazz rhythms and European harmonic idiom (somewhat like Leonard Bernstein’s immensely popular West Side Story). The late romantic harmonic language, which had gone somewhat out of fashion in Europe, was given a second life in film music and musicals by the Jewish immigrant composer and conductor Eric Korngold.

3.5.2 WHITE MUSIC The response to the Teutonic violence of the ‘horrible German’ cannot have been felt more strongly than in the early works of Erik Satie, where he reduces music to a music for the white keys, without relevant cadential meaning. In this music, he strives to evoke an atavistic panorama of a lost mediaeval purity, we find simplicity as dogma. Satie’s music will be of great influence, on Stravinsky (Stravinsky calls his ballet Apollon Musagète his white music) and on John Cage, among others.