Claude Debussy - Music Quotes

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Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.

Claude Debussy
There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth — an open-air art, boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.

Claude Debussy
Music is a mysterious mathematical process whose elements are part of Infinity. … There is nothing more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little — the book of Nature.

Claude Debussy
The music I desire must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams.

Claude Debussy
Is it not our duty to find the symphonic formula which fits our time, one which progress, daring and modern victory demand? The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.

Claude Debussy
It is necessary to abandon yourself completely, and let the music do as it will with you. All people come to music to seek oblivion.

Claude Debussy
I wanted music to have a liberty it contains within it perhaps more than any other art, not being limited to a more or less exact reproduction of Nature, but possessing mysterious correspondences between Nature and the Imagination.

Claude Debussy
Collect impressions. Don't be in a hurry to write them down. Because that's something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture — a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is.

Claude Debussy
Music expresses the motion of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.

Claude Debussy
Music should humbly seek to please; within these limits great beauty may perhaps be found. Extreme complication is contrary to art. Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part.

Claude Debussy
Music would take over at the point at which words become powerless, with the one and only object of expressing that which nothing but music could express. For this, I need a text by a poet who, resorting to discreet suggestion rather than full statement, will enable me to graft my dream upon his dream — who will give me plain human beings in a setting belonging to no particular period or country. … Then I do not wish my music to drown the words, nor to delay the course of the action. I want no purely musical developments which are not called for inevitably by the text. In opera there is always too much singing. Music should be as swift and mobile as the words themselves.

Claude Debussy
But music, don't you know, is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It's not even the expression of a feeling, it's the feeling itself.

Claude Debussy