L'isle joyeuse, L. 106 (The Joyful Island) is a piece for solo piano by

Claude Debussy Achille Claude Debussy (; 22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionism in music, Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influe ...

composed in 1904. It is assumed that the painting The Embarkation for Cythera by

Jean-Antoine Watteau Jean-Antoine Watteau (, , ; baptised 10 October 1684died 18 July 1721) Alsavailablevia Oxford Art Online (subscription needed). was a French Painting, painter and Drawing, draughtsman whose brief career spurred the revival of interest in colour ...

served as inspiration for the piece, with Debussy reimagining a group's journey to the island considered

Aphrodite Aphrodite (, ) is an Greek mythology, ancient Greek goddess associated with love, lust, beauty, pleasure, passion, procreation, and as her syncretism, syncretised Roman counterpart , desire, Sexual intercourse, sex, fertility, prosperity, and ...

's birthplace, and their subsequent ecstatic unions of love upon arrival. According to

Jim Samson Thomas James Samson, FBA (born 6 July 1946), commonly known as Jim Samson, is a musicologist and retired academic. Described as "a leading authority on the music of Chopin", his research extends to Romantic music, early 20th-century classical ...

(1977), the "central relationship in the work is that between material based on the

whole-tone scale In music, a whole-tone scale is a scale in which each note is separated from its neighbors by the interval of a whole tone. In twelve-tone equal temperament, there are only two complementary whole-tone scales, both six-note or '' hexatonic'' ...

, the

lydian mode The modern Lydian mode is a seven-tone musical scale formed from a rising pattern of pitches comprising three whole tones, a semitone, two more whole tones, and a final semitone. : Because of the importance of the major scale in modern m ...

and the

diatonic scale In music theory a diatonic scale is a heptatonic scale, heptatonic (seven-note) scale that includes five whole steps (whole tones) and two half steps (semitones) in each octave, in which the two half steps are separated from each other by eith ...

, the lydian mode functioning as an effective mediator between the other two."

Structure

Exposition, bars 1–98

The introduction creates a whole tone context. This changes to an A Lydian context which, in bars 15–21, transitions, through the addition of G natural, to the whole tone context of a new motive at bar 21. This A Lydian context serves to transition from the whole tone mode on A to the A

major Major most commonly refers to: * Major (rank), a military rank * Academic major, an academic discipline to which an undergraduate student formally commits * People named Major, including given names, surnames, nicknames * Major and minor in musi ...

context, inflected by occasional Lydian Ds, of the second

theme Theme or themes may refer to: * Theme (Byzantine district), an administrative district in the Byzantine Empire governed by a Strategos * Theme (computing), a custom graphical appearance for certain software. * Theme (linguistics), topic * Theme ( ...

at bar 67.

Middle, bars 99–159

The other transposition of the whole tone scale, avoided in the outer sections, is used and provides further

harmonic In physics, acoustics, and telecommunications, a harmonic is a sinusoidal wave with a frequency that is a positive integer multiple of the ''fundamental frequency'' of a periodic signal. The fundamental frequency is also called the ''1st har ...

contrast.

Recapitulation, bars 160–255

The second subject appears in pure A major, the "ultimate tonal goal of the piece". The opening codas "louder and more animatedly until the very end". It ends with a loud tremolo, a group of grace notes ascending to two octaves of A notes in the highest registers of the piano, and a quick, final

arpeggio An arpeggio () is a type of Chord (music), chord in which the Musical note, notes that compose a chord are individually sounded in a progressive rising or descending order. Arpeggios on keyboard instruments may be called rolled chords. Arpe ...

, the same arpeggio used to accompany the first use of the second subject, played downwards, hitting the lowest note on the keyboard ( A₀) markedly.

References

External links

*
Recording
by Alon Goldstein in

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

format (archived on the

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Launched for public access in 2001, the service allows users to go "back in ...

) {{DEFAULTSORT:Isle Joyeuse, L' Solo piano compositions by Claude Debussy 1904 compositions