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This is apparent in his choice of texts, both for songs and for his only completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande (Pelléas and Mélisande), in which inscrutable characters of unknown origins and unstated desires wander through mysterious forests. ) heldentenors and Amazonian sopranos. Mélisande herself is a wisp of a girl, fragile, unknowable. ” Despite the fact that Debussy did write three sonatas toward the end of his life, his distrust of the sonata form is well known. Apparently he had planned to compose six sonatas, but ill health limited the project to the three for violin and piano, cello and piano, and flute, viola, and harp.

Musical individuality within collectivity . . 5 Compounding the difficulty of resolving such a debate is the fact that the earliest examples of what is acknowledged as actual jazz, in contradistinction to ragtime or popular music, were never recorded or notated, so no one knows exactly what they sounded like. On the other hand, the nature of this intrinsically oral tradition, whereby the younger players learned at their elders’ elbows, so to speak, makes it likely that the earliest recordings by such groups as the Original Dixieland Jass [sic] Band in 1917 sounded pretty much like the combos that preceded them.

In spite of being forced to learn the finer points of harmony and counterpoint on her own, she clearly knew what she wanted to say and how to say it. Among her smaller occasional pieces is Fireflies, a charming exercise in delicate, fleeting effects, and smoothly flowing double thirds, which became her signature encore. At about this time the slowly emerging American style of music got a boost from an unexpected quarter—the marches of John Philip Sousa (1854– 1932). Sousa’s impact on concert-hall music involves far more than just the rousing rendition of his Stars and Stripes Forever so frequently used as an encore by Vladimir Horowitz, in his own inimitable arrangement.