major and minor modes of the modern scale system, employs almost
continuously, as the structural basis of his music, the mediaeval church
modes, with their far greater latitude, freedom, and variety. It is, to
say the least, a novel procedure. Other modern composers before Debussy
had, of course, utilized the characteristic plain-song progressions to
secure, for special purposes, a particular and definite effect of color;
but no one had ever before deliberately adopted the Gregorian chant as a
substitute for the modern major and minor scales, with their deep-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
_clichée_: 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