Anthony (Toney) Trionfo has performed across the United States, in Canada and South America. He began studying the flute at age eleven and is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion work. In 2020, he co-curated “Learning to Listen: A discussion addressing the nuances of the Black experience within classical music” in addition to the Sphinx Organization’s “Illuminate!” series. Anthony is also a creator of the Umoja Flute Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to cultivating flutists of African descent. He’s also on the faculty of MusicAlly, an international virtual learning platform that provides musical instruction to all interested students, regardless of financial constraints, and serves on the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee of the Aspen Music Festival and School. CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918) PRELUDE TO THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN (1894) Scored for: three flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, antique cymbals, two harps, and strings Performance time: 10 minutes First Grant Park Orchestra performance: July 3, 1937, Henry Weber, conductor Claude Debussy and renowned French poet Stéphane Mallarmé possessed a strong mutual admiration. In 1890, the composer began working on a musical setting of Mallarmé’s “Afternoon of a Faun,” a dreamy monologue chronicling a half-human, half-goat creature and its sensual adventures after waking from a midday nap. Though the original project dissolved, Debussy continued to daydream about bringing the faun’s thoughts to life through music, and after a few more years’ work, his textless tone poem “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” enjoyed a positive debut. Reception from both Mallarmé and the audience was so positive, in fact, the orchestra played the entire piece again that same evening! Of the music, the poet declared, “I wasn’t expecting anything like that! It prolongs the emotion of my poem and conjures up the scenery more vividly than any color.” The hazy rhythmic feel and lack of a clear tonal center in “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” may sound nebulous, but it’s actually precisely crafted, thus serving as a solid foundation for Debussy’s bountiful sonic palette. The music’s texture is weightless, with slender orchestration that omits trumpets and trombones, uses percussion sparingly, employs restrained woodwind writing, and divides strings into several parts to encourage chords to blossom. Offering his thoughts about how his tone poem connected to Mallarmé’s poem, Debussy shared a few sentiments, intriguing in their lack of specificity: “It is perhaps the dream left over at the bottom of the faun’s flute? ...it is the general impression of the poem. If the music were to follow it more closely, it would run out of breath…. All the same it follows the ascending shape of the poem as well as the scenery…. As for the ending, it’s a prolongation of the [poem’s] last line: ‘Couple farewell, I go to see what you became.’”
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