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I am more and more convinced that music is not, in essence, a thing which can be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms.

Claude Debussy

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Claude Debussy
Age: 55 †
Born: 1862
Born: August 22
Died: 1918
Died: March 25
Composer
Music Critic
Musician
Pianist
St. Germain-en-Laye
Claud Debussy
Debussy
Claude Achille Debussy
Achille Claude Debussy
C. Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy
Achille-Claude
Achille-Claude Debussy
Form
Cast
Music
Casts
Thing
Fixed
Made
Rhythm
Traditional
Convinced
Essence
Rhythms
Color
Colors

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How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.
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The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.
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Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind.
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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.
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Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.
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Inspiration and ideas only come to me when I have not had a woman in a very long time... Ballads, polonaises, even a whole concerto may have been lost forever up your des durka, I can't tell you how many. I have been so deeply engulfed in my love for you I have hardly created anything.
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The trouble with the opera is there's always to much singing.
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What I am trying to do is something different - an effect of reality, but what some fools call Impressionism, a term that is usually misapplied, especially by the critics who don't hesitate to apply it to Turner, the greatest creator of mysterious effects in the whole world of art.
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Music is in the space between the notes.
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People don't very much like things that are beautiful - they are so far from their nasty little minds.
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Composers aren't daring enough. They're afraid of that sacred idol called 'common sense', which is the most dreadful thing I know - after all, it's no more than a religion founded to excuse the ubiquity of imbeciles!
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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.
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Art is the most beautiful deception of all!
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If we look at the works of JS Bach ... on each page we discover things which we thought were born only yesterday, from delightful arabesques to an overflowing of religious feeling greater than anything we have since discovered.
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Anyone who calls my music impressionist is an imbecile.
Claude Debussy
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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.
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People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?
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The music I desire must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams.
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Do not allow the accents in the brass to produce space between the notes.
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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.
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