And now, in honour of the 150th anniversary of Beethoven's death, I would like to play 'Clear the Saloon', er, 'Clair de Lune', by Debussy. I don't play Beethoven so well, but I play Debussy very badly, and Beethoven would have liked that.
Asian music influenced Debussy, who influenced me - it's all a huge circle.
Claude Debussy's 'Children's Corner' is a suite with six movements just for piano. Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli and Alfred Cartot's versions are amazing, but my favorite is Menininha Lobo's. Her version was done when she was an old lady - and you can hear it.
I thought we had opposite visions of electronic music. Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk had a very robotic, mechanical approach. I had a more impressionist vision - a Ravel/Debussy approach.
We all shared an admiration of Debussy both as a musician and as sort of an icon for the 20th century. It seemed like an interesting idea to go right back 100 years to find the source of some new ideas now.
For me, Debussy is the door to all 20th-century music.
Although I am basically self taught, I consider Debussy my teacher - the most important elements are colour, light and shadow.
When my dad went to college to get his master's from Loyola, he was playing Debussy and Chopin and Beethoven. But he played all that New Orleans stuff, too. I would go with my dad to gigs, pick up the piano and the speakers, and I would be like his roadie.
I only know two pieces; one is 'Clair de Lune' and the other one isn't.
Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
I had no idea Stravinsky disliked Debussy so much as this.
I am a classical fan. I like Debussy a lot, so I was trying to learn it on the piano. I've learned like a third of it, but I think I'm getting to a section that may be beyond my skill level.
I just started studying opera - very, very much as hobby - and for some reason I've been gravitating toward French composers, like a lot of Debussy and Faure. I find it a really sinuous and spooky language to sing in.
I have no doubt that there are great people about though... the thing of it is, nothing to this day moves me like classical music (Debussy, Vaughn Williams).
I love Italian opera - it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don't care about their immortal souls, and don't worry about the ultimate.
For Debussy the musician and the man I have had profound admiration, but by nature I'm different from him. I think I have always personally followed a direction opposed to that of the symbolism of Debussy.
I think you can move to everything, but with some music you just want to sit still. Like Claude Debussy - I couldn't dance to that.
Debussy is one of the few composers who actually created a new sound on the piano - or perhaps we should say a new smell, so perfumed are the vibrations which emanate from the instrument.
For me, playing music while I write is important. Several of the romantic scenes in 'Paris' were written with Debussy's 'String Quartet,' his 'L'Apres-midi d'une Faune,' or Canteloube's 'Songs of the Auvergne' playing in the background.
No two composers were more totally at home in front of the piano than Debussy and Chopin, hands to keys to strings to sound waves to pen and paper in one perfect gesture of inspiration.
I like classical music. I especially like the French composers: Ravel in particular. Debussy. That's so soothing in a nervous world.
What is a seemingly conservative Englishman doing, leading the world in the mastery of a classically Spanish instrument? Debussy wrote some of the best Spanish music, and the only time he was ever in the country, he saw a bullfight which made him ill.
For ten years, I went to piano lessons. I don't think I'm a very musical person, and the theory quite defeated me, but I had a freak aptitude for Debussy and Ravel.
The impressionists, Debussy, Faure, in France, did take a few steps forward.
They both changed the way we hear the sound of the piano, both of them inventors of sonority: Chopin took bel canto singing lines and reproduced them on the keyboard above richly upholstered counterpoint; Debussy somehow preserved vibrations in the air, blending their ephemeral magic into music that reaches far back into deep memory.
