Syrinx

The syrinx flute is a product of classical mythology. As the story goes, Syrinx was a nymph pursued hotly by Pan, but just before being caught she changed herself into a reed on the banks of the River Ladon. Set in motion by the wind, the reeds produced a sweet timbre, which gave Pan the idea to join different lengths of reeds together as a musical instrument. Despite the extensive reading into antiquity undertaken by Renaissance thinkers—which would have convinced them that the unaccompanied flute was a principal medium of expression for the ancient Greeks—the genre of solo flute compositions never grew large. Debussy’s Syrinx may fairly claim to provide an ideal attempt at revising a lost musical tradition that exists for us today only in words. (Something similar is evoked at the start of this composer’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.)

Debussy organizes the music of Syrinx around certain key pitches that act like nodal points. The first is B-flat, which sounds at the beginning of each of the first five measures. By departing and returning to that pitch, Debussy achieves a combination of spontaneity—captured in the circling, chromatic figuration—and permanence. The serpentine melody contributes mystery and sensuality, while the periodic return to a focal pitch raises the suggestion of hypnotic fixation, of a monotone that recalls both medieval chant and psalmodic recitation. This is tonality by reinforcement; tonality based on pitch as a reference point more than functionally related chords and chord tones. B-flat provides an anchor rather than generating a set of related pitches. Pitch anchors take on the structural function commonly associated with keys. For instance, just as the middle section in a Chopin nocturne would be in a contrasting key from the outer sections, so Syrinx shifts to emphasize D-flat, D, and E-flat before returning to the opening figure and its focus on B-flat.

The analyst will also uncover a touch of whole-tone and pentatonic composition, two strategies of which Debussy was an early proponent. These pitch collections lack the crucial semitone interval that defines common-practice, major-minor tonality (as heard in Bach, Mozart, Chopin, etc.). In those passages not governed by whole-tone and pentatonic collections, Debussy mixes the full range of pitches (there are 12 in the Western musical octave). Debussy proceeds rather quickly through 10 of the 12 pitches, often stringing together irregular patterns of half steps and whole steps. The result is a lack of teleology, and an almost spiritual atmosphere of discovery. The musical surface seems to unfold continually before us with no obvious direction or goal. Such alterations of conventional artistic space and experience bring Debussy into close association with Impressionism.

(c) Jason Stell