The Harmony of Ravel and Debussy and its Impact on Contemporary Music

Every genre of music has its not-so-obvious predecessors.  Looking at the history of

music, it's safe to say that all contemporary music has come from a similar place in time.  The

harmony of this music has simply been passed down from generation to generation and can be

traced back and compared to the most creative types of music we hear today.  Claude Debussy

and Maurice Ravel are two massive contributors to the types of static harmony we can hear in

modern music.  Debussy introduced the extensive use of tall, rich chords with larger extensions

such as ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth chords.  Usually, these chords were only used as passing

chords for brief periods of time in compositions.  Debussy sought to place these chords composi-

tionally for longer, adding richness and warmth to the composition.  Ravel coined the impeccable

use of modes and assigning scales to traditional chord progressions.  Modes are a great device to

use in improvisational-based music, where similar chords can be simplified by assigning a mode

or scale to use and to open up possibilities.  These two pioneers can be considered to be the fore-

fathers of contemporary harmony at its best.  Influencing countless composers and musicians

spanning many genres, their legacy will never be forgotten.  This paper will seek to examine the

legacy and harmony that Debussy and Ravel left behind while looking at the history of their lives

and how they came to produce such memorable material and connect their harmonic devices to

the more contemporary music of the 20th and 21st  centuries. 

Impressionism
  Impressionism was an art movement in the 19th century that came out of visual art in

France.  Impressionism can be seen as the reaction against the expression of Romantic music by

disrupting the momentum carried forward by standard harmonic progressions.  It described an art

that featured open composition and art that depicts the passage of time in its works.  Its name

came from a painting by Claude Monet entitled “Impression, soleil levant” (Impression, Sun-

rise).  The term Impression was used by the critic Louis Leroy to describe a sketch of something

or an “impression” of it or not a finished painting.  Light and color were used in unorthodox

ways to convey mood and atmosphere.  Rather than use neutral whites, grays, and blacks, Im-

pressionists often utilized shadows and highlights in their works.  Impressionists preferred to

paint outside because the sunlight is able to capture more transient effects when you work

quickly, which resulted in greater awareness of the light and color qualities in a painting.  Im-

pressionists were recognized today for their modernity, which represented their rejection of the

orthodox and established styles of art, their incorporation of new ideas, and their depiction of

modern life as a whole.  Color is a word that is used a lot to convey timbre in music, which was

an essential part of this movement.  

Impression, soleil levant (1872) by Claude Monet

Impressionism's influence on the musical world was been very impactful throughout

music’s history.  The connection that critics discovered between visual art and music was mainly
the similarity of titles.  Composers had been given the label Impressionists because of their abil-

ity to convey mood using colorful textures in orchestration and static harmonies which sought to

break away from formal listening patterns in classical music.  These composers also sought to

put the intent on the state of mind or sensation rather than the details of the piece,  just as the vis-

ual artists did.  Instead of concrete details such as line and form in visual art, it shifted emphasis

on mood instead of melody and structure.  This music sounded like a dream in a way in which a

dream works with no structure or rooted time feel.  Sadness and beauty take the stage here and

an art form where the space in between the notes become just as important as the notes them-

selves. This period of music lasted for fifty years from 1870 to 1920. Impressionist composers

such as Debussy rejected the label, calling it the formulation of critics.  After all, it was used to

describe an unfinished work of art by a painting that was compared to wallpaper.  At a certain

point in time, it was a derogatory term that became an easy way to classify this music and to

make it seem less unusual.  There is even controversy that claims that Debussy is not even an

Impressionist at all.  Ravel also was known to be uncomfortable with the term, claiming that it

could not be used to describe music.

As a jazz musician, impressionist music sounds almost familiar because of its direct in-

fluences on harmonic approaches.   Jazz composers and musicians such as Miles Davis, Wayne

Shorter, John Coltrane, and Joe Henderson have been known to reflect and draw inspiration from

impressionist and late romantic music.  They, at a certain point, broke away from tin pan alley

harmonic progressions and instead wrote music that was unique to them, which utilized this neo-

classical harmony that defined the hard-bop/modern jazz movement of the 1960s. This included

the use of implying a tonality but then quickly leaving that implication and exploring somewhere
else.  Impressionism is also a music that hits home for many jazz musicians who understand that

music isn't just simply about things, it is things.  Provocative titles of songs became apparent in

the 1960s as well with names such as “A Shade of Jade,” “E.S.P,” and “Satellite.”

Claude Debussy

Claude-Achille Debussy (1862-1918) was considered to be impressionism’s first and

foremost composer.  He was born just outside of Paris, France, and was the oldest of five sib-

lings.  He showed enough musical promise to be accepted into the Conservatoire de Paris at the

young age of ten.  He originally studied piano but at the disapproval of his professors at the Con-

servatoire, he went on to uptake composing instead.  He eventually went on to win France’s most

prestigious award, the Grand Prix de Rome with his cantata entitled L’Enfant prodigue (The

Prodigal Child).  The reward for winning this honor was a three-year stay at the Villa Medici in

Rome where he was to pursue his musical work.  During this time, he met one of his muses,

Blanche Vasnier, who was a singer and the young wife of an architect.  Debussy was torn by in-

fluences coming from many directions at this time which led him to create his early style that

produced one of his most famous pieces entitled Clair de Lune (Moonlight).  He was adamant

about finding experiences and knowledge from every region that a creative individual could in-

vestigate.  His initial influences of this period were Frederic Chopin, Johann Sebastian Bach, and

Richard Strauss.  

He was greatly affected and influenced by symbolism which generated the provocative

titles he gave to his music. Symbolism, which originated in France, Belgium, and Russia, “was

largely a reaction against naturalism and realism, anti-idealistic styles which were attempts to
represent reality in its gritty particularity and to elevate the humble and the ordinary over the

ideal.”(Anna Balakian).  He cited, "We must agree that the beauty of a work of art will always

remain a mystery [...] we can never be absolutely sure 'how it's made.' We must at all costs pre-

serve this magic which is peculiar to music and to which music, by its nature, is of all the arts the

most receptive.” Symbolism can be regarded as an aesthetic that in many ways, is the opposite of

impressionism.  Debussy’s work can actually be considered musical symbolism at a certain point

in time.  His interest in the symbolism movement has generated some of the vexing titles that he

has named some of his famed pieces of art.  His piece “Prelude to an Afternoon of a Faun”

(1894) comes from a title of a poem that Stephane Mallarmè (1842-1898) composed.  Mallarmè

was actually one of France’s leading symbolists and Debussy became great friends with him. 

When this piece was premiered, it was startling but not shocking and it was accepted by the pub-

lic almost all at once.  La Mer (1905) was inspired by the celebration of Claude Monet and the

English painter, J.M.W. Turner.  The main influences in his middle period were of course

Richard Wagner, and the Russian composers  Aleksandr Borodin and Modest Mussorgsky.  His

single completed opera Pelléas et Mélisande (first premiered in 1902) showed how to use Wag-

nerian techniques to portray the dreamy, nightmarish characters presented in the play. 

Debussy, despite having a relatively short career spanning twenty-five years, was con-

stantly moving forward and innovating the music scene.  Since the beginning of his musical jour-

ney, he questioned the harmonic rules of the romantic period and favored dissonances, and ex-

perimented with intervals that were not favored and unorthodox at the time.   After returning to

Paris from the Villa, he lived a bohemian life, hanging out at cafes with symbolist poets and fel-
low composers and peers.  He continued composing, painting, and writing poetry while later

turning to conducting until he died of cancer in 1918 at age fifty-six.

Maurice Ravel

Joseph Maurice Ravel was regarded as France’s greatest living composer in the

decades of 1920 and 1930.  He can also be regarded as the headman of the impressionism move-

ment in music.  His style is described as a mixture of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism, and in

his later works, jazz.   He was a very slow worker and composed much fewer pieces than his

peers.  He is one of those distinct composers whose early work seems less mature than those of

his maturity.  Ravel entered the Paris Conservatoire at age 14 and composed some of his best

works such as Pavane for a Dead Princess, Sonatine for piano, and the String Quartet.

He attempted three times for the Prix de Rome while he was attending the Conserva-

toire but failed to win the award.  This caused quite a controversy with protests by liberal-

minded writers and musicians.  The incident was entitled the Ravel Affair by the Parisian Press

and resulted in the director of the Conservatoire, Théodore Dubois to resign and be replaced by

Ravel’s teacher, Gabriel Fauré.  

Ravel was considered and considered himself a classicist.  He was at no means a revo-

lutionary musician, as he was rooted in tonality and still sought to use the formal and established

harmonic conventions of his day.  It was his adaption and manipulation of these traditional prac-

tices that put him on his own pedestal by creating his own distinct sound and personality as much

as the composers Chopin and Bach are thought to have.  While critics thought he was mainly in-

fluenced by Debussy, he himself thought that he was more interested and influenced by Mozart
and Couperien whose compositions followed more structured classical forms.  But in these tradi-

tional structures and forms, it was here where he discovered and presented his new and innova-

tive harmonies.  He was also highly interested in the Black American Music called jazz, Asian

music, and folk music across Europe.  His melodies were almost exclusively modal (Mixolydian

instead of major, aeolian instead of minor, etc).  As a result, there were basically no leading

tones in his works.  There was an acidity in his harmonies which describes his fondness for unre-

solved appoggiaturas, which are basically unresolved notes that are irrelevant to the chord. 

Ravel's ability to both copy tradition and to remain original set him apart from the rest of the mu-

sician world.  He is more than just an impressionist in the eyes of many purists.  Ravel had a very

keen ear for a certain kind of orchestration and at the same time had a great sense of harmonic

nuance the create novel and colorful originality.

 Ravel’s life was mainly uneventful for the reason that he was never married, and en-

joyed the company of a few chosen friends.  He had a few long-term relationships and was

known to frequent brothels in Paris, but his sexuality mostly remain a mystery.   He mostly lived

a semi-reclused life in a country retreat.  He had to serve in the First World War but because of

his fragile body, he only served a short time as a truck driver. Ravel was among one of the first

people to recognize the potential of bringing recorded music to a wider public.  He began a piano

tour in 1928 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in that same year.  

Ravel became involved in an automobile accident in 1932 that was very detrimental to his

health.  He went into surgery in 1937 hoping to restore his health but the operation was a failure

and he died shortly after. 

 Debussy’s Contribution to Contemporary Music

“Miles Davis seems to have become a sort of Claude Debussy of jazz. . . . [Some of his

recorded pieces] might be the work of a “classical” impressionist composer with a great sense of aural po-

etry and a very fastidious feeling for tone color. . . . The music sounds more like that of a new Maurice

Ravel than it does like jazz. . . . If Miles Davis were an established “classical” composer, his work would

rank high among that of his contemporary colleagues.”1

Jazz showcased very simple harmony in its early years of conception in the 1900s. We

can call this the Tin Pan Alley harmony which featured the tonal harmonies not much different

from the harmony of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Richard Strauss.  Its major characteristics

featured the “blue notes” which represented the flatted 3rd and 5th.  Thanks to Debussy and

Ravel, we see extensive, more advanced harmonies explored in modern jazz by the 1950s-60s.

We start to hear more dense chord changes and lavish piano and horn voicings that were made

possible by these two contributors to music history.

  Prior to Debussy, extensive 9th, 11th, and 13th chords were used only in passing

chord changes, not for bars at a time.  Debussy was the first to use these chords extensively as he

chose to ‘marinate’ these chords for longer sections at a time.  9th chords were among Debussy's

favorite chords to use, dedicating entire sections of compositions to these chords.  The 9th chords

that he used included all of the possible alterations of the chord tensions such as the dominant

C9, the flat ninth (C7b9), the sharp ninth (C7#9), and the major ninth (Cmaj9). 

1 Sergeant, Winthrop Jazz: A History pg 257-258

 9th Chords “Reverie” Bars 13-17

Ninth chords and their variations are a staple jazz voicing that can be heard in instru-

mental music that ranges from soul to R&B, hip hop, funk, and even some forms of popular mu-

sic. They are used extensively for composition but we can mainly hear these voicings behind the

melody or solo that is occurring. This form of support in music is called comping and is usually

played in the left hand. We can see a master like Herbie Hancock utilize them throughout his

timeless standard One-Finger Snap. This is a transcription excerpt from Freddie Hubbard’s solo

on this recording and we can see that the ninth is utilized in every voicing Herbie Hacncok plays:
 A modern, contemporary example of extended chords can be seen in the guitar and

bass intro to the “Spanish Joint” by D’Angelo, which was released over a hundred years after

Debussy introduced us to this application.

Debussy was also constantly taking in knowledge and influences from other countries

besides Europe during his career. This generated a large catalog of exotic scales that was at his
disposal compositionally. Scales such as the whole tone, pentatonic, and octatonic scales be-

came to be heard in music. These scales weren’t used by his predessecers and were used to ex-

pand the tonal pallet of color and are what adds an unfamiliar exotic sound to his music which

set him apart from many composers.

Jazz composers and musicians greatly took this method into account not only during

composition but also in improvisations. Whole tone scales and augmented triads are the perfect

tools for the ii-V-I progression as it utilizes the root, flat 7th, 3rd, and raised 5th all in the same

scale. Here is an example of one of the first and foremost examples of the musical language we

call be-bop by Charlie Parker utilizing the whole tone triad (or augmented triad) over an impro-

visation over the jazz standard Cherokee:

 Pentatonic scales are used heavily in modern improvisation in jazz, rock soul, etc.

They are especially useful in improvisation because of their ambidextrous use over certain

chords. Over major seventh chords, the major tonic pentatonic scale can be used but also the

dominant pentatonic scale can be used on the same chord. This is because the dominant penta-

tonic outlines the major 3rd, 7th, and 5th of the chord scale, culminating in a more colorful and

thorough sound that tends to other chord tones that are more employed in jazz and contemporary

music. The minor pentatonic is also the skeleton of the blues scale. The only addition to this

scale is the flatted 5th degree. This scale can too be inverted into a more major sounding blues

scale if started on the 6th degree of a major chord scale. This scale is found in traditional and

modern forms of improvisation everywhere in the western world.

Debussy was also a pioneer of ambiguous tonality used in his music. In the common

practice, one of the most important rules was when the dominant chord was proposed, it was ex-

pected to resolve to the tonic. Debussy stretched and broke this rule constantly, allowing for dif-

ferent chord centers and keys to not instantly resolve. This allowed chords to be used for their

timbre and richness and not just harmonic functionality. Jazz composition started to move away

from the simple tin pan alley chords in the late 1950s and early 1960s and started exercising this

technique of harmonic function. Composers such as Wayne Shorter, Joe Henderson, John

Coltrane, and Andrew Hill started to flesh out unique chord progressions and forms that defined

who they were as artists. It was interesting to see these composers’ nods to functional harmony

and their leniency toward it. They didn't completely ignore tradition nor did they completely ac-
cept it. This type of harmony is only more recently falling into the structures of popular music

with musical acts such as Jacob Collier and Neo-soul acts like Hiatus Kaiyote.

Maurice Ravel’s Contribution to Contemporary Harmony

“Harmony, as the jazz musician employs it, is a purely European structural principle. . . .

The native African has no harmony in the European sense of the word. (147-50). . . . Harmony as

used in jazz, spirituals, blues and most types of hot improvisation consists of orderly arrange-

ments of chords based upon what are indisputably long-established European laws of sequence.

These chords and sequences, which form a part of the technique of "harmony" as Europeans

know it, are utterly foreign to the music of Africa. . . . The system of harmonization used by the

American Negro is not the African system, but a simplified and characteristic dialect of the Euro-

pean system.”2

So many of Ravel’s melodies were based on entirely modes such as Dorian, Mixoly-

dian, and aeolian. This has directly influenced jazz musicians like Bill Evans, Miles Davis, and

John Coltrane to start making use of modality in their music. They used short forms to use im-

provisation to make the music sound more colorful and interesting. Miles Davis believed that

less is more and using the devices of modal jazz made it easier for him to play lyrical and

singable melodies in an improvisation. “So What” is probably Miles’ most popular song to date

that was recorded on the most successful jazz album to date. This slow swinging tune has only

one chord change; up a minor 2nd after two A sections so that it's the same scale, just up a half

step. Miles even says, “When you go this way [improvise on scales], you can go on forever.

You don’t have to worry about [chord] changes and you can do more with the line. It becomes a

challenge to see how melodically inventive you are. When you’re based on chords, you know at

2 Sergeannt, Winthrop Jazz: A History pg 191

the end of 32 bars that the chords have run out and there’s nothing to do but repeat what you’ve

done--with variations.” It allows him to stretch and become the Miles that we all know and love.

“I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords, and a re-

turn to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation. There will be fewer chords but infi-

nite possibilities as to what to do with them. Classical composers--some of them--have been

writing this way for years, but jazz musicians seldom have.”

We can compare Ravel’s Concerto with the composition “So What” and other Miles

compositions such as “Circle”, and “Milestones”

Another Innovation Ravel has brought to the musical world is the popularization of

quartal harmony. Forths are stacked on top of each other in the melody of So What and in Bill

Evans comping voicings. This came to be known as the “So What” voicing and is used all

throughout the history of jazz.

McCoy Tyner has made this sound his own and is a heavy user of fourths in his left

hand. He has made this sound vital to the aesthetic of the John Coltrane Quartet and has made it

his own style of playing the piano. Pianists draw from this sound still today when they play the

music that draws from the Coltrane quartet such as minor blues, modal jazz, and one-chord

vamps in the spirit of swing time.

 Conclusion

Impressionist harmonies have secretly been integrated into many types of music today.

Every type of music we hear can be traced to its ancestors. Debussy and Ravel were the direct

link from classical music to contemporary music and are one of the most transparent bridges be-

tween these two genres of music. The music we have reached today wouldn’t be anything with-

out the influence of these two giants. There is still so much to learn from these two composers

today and will be remembered forever. Thank you, Debussy and Ravel.

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