eep-rooted
and ineradicable harmonic tendencies, their perpetual suggestion of
traditional cadences and resolutions. To forget the principles
underlying three centuries of harmonic practice and revert to the
methods of the mediaeval church composers, required an extraordinary
degree of imaginative intuition; purposely and consistently to employ
those methods as a foundation upon which to erect an harmonic structure
most richly and elastically contrived--to vitalize the antique modes
with the accumulated product of modern divination and
accomplishment--was little less than an inspiration. Debussy must
undoubtedly have realized that the familiar scales, which have so long
and so faithfully served the expressional needs of the modern composer,
tend now to give issue to musical forms that are beginning to seem
_clichee_: forms too rigidly patterned, too redolent of outworn
formulas--in short, too completely crystallized. Chopin, Liszt, Wagner,
and after them the modern Germans and their followers, found in a scale
of semitones a limited avenue of escape from the confinement of the
modern diatonic modes, and bequeathed to contemporary music an
inheritance of ungoverned chromaticism which still clogs its progress
and obstructs its independence. Debussy, through his appreciation of the
living value of the old church modes, has been enabled to shape for
himself a manner of utterance which derives from none of these
influences. It is anything but chromatic; indeed, one of its most
striking characteristics is its use of whole-tone progressions, a
natural result, of course, of its dependence upon the old modes. Other
contemporary Frenchmen have made occasional use of Gregorian effects;
but Debussy was the first to adopt them deliberately as the basis of a
settled manner of utterance, and he has employed them with increasing
consistency and devotion. His example has indubitably served to enrich
the expressional material at the disposal of the modern
music-maker--there cannot conceivably, in reason, be two opinions as to
that: he has acted upon a principle which is, beyond question,
liberating and stimulating. And the adaptability to his own peculiar
temperament of the wavering and fluid order of discourse which is
permitted by the flexibility and variety of the antique modes is
sufficiently obvious.

His resort to Gregorian principles is, it has been observed, far from
being a matter of recent history with him. Almost twenty years