American artist John Basquiat (1960–1988) once said “Art is how we decorate space. Music is how we decorate time.” French composer Claude Debussy stated “The musician attempts to translate for the ear impressions received by the eye.” Eerily similar statements from two wildly different men, though both observations are true. The symphony orchestra is often likened to a visual artists’ palette: different sections of the orchestra provide different sonic colors, specific techniques manipulate their saturation, and different combinations of instruments manipulate the work’s overall tone. Claude Debussy is especially adept in this regard; his orchestral colors are remarkably vivid and multidimensional. Images is a stunning example of Debussy’s unbridled skill as a painter of sound. 

Debussy, although he hated the label, led the charge as an Impressionist composer. The Impressionists were a sect of French musicians whose florid compositions evoked colorful, graceful imagery like that of Monet and Renoir. Impressionists created their sonic portraiture through careful instrumentation of intentional, detail-oriented compositions. Just as visual artists labored over the length of a brush stroke or exacting the perfect shade of yellow, composers poured over articulation and timbre. 

Claude Debussy was well aware of the timbral differences in instruments although he himself was a pianist. If orchestrating was painting with vivid oils, composing at his piano was sketching. Debussy had written six small works, also titled Images, for solo piano and intended his next book of similar works to be a companion piece to the first. As he worked the melodies at his keyboard, an orchestral vision came to life. Debussy continued his sketch at the keyboard with every intention to color his music with vibrant orchestral hues. Due to the expansive colors available in a symphony, the orchestral set of Images is imbued with much more textural variance, harmonic color, and musical dimension than the works for piano alone. 

The most illuminated example of Debussy’s grasp on orchestration is the viola and English horn soli in Number II, Iberia. The sound quality of these unlike instruments collide in such a way that a new instrument is created from thin air. This combination of timbres—the reedy English horn and throaty viola—nearly conjure a Chinese string sound (the erhu comes to mind). At the turn of the twentieth century, “Orientalism” in music—utilizing East Asian soundscapes and subject matter—was still all the rage, now in some part due to the  magnificent displays of culture and art at World Fairs. 

Debussy’s orchestration is nuanced and calculated but sounds effortlessly transparent; his arranging is so skilled it’s as if he paints multiple images and sets them atop one another, forming a vastly multidimensional composite image in sound. Images is a thirty-seven minute portrait of French and Spanish elegance; in musical phrases, Debussy suspends time in service of illustrating French and Iberian vignettes, all in perfect sonic clarity.