My taste in classical music is always changing, but right now my favorite piece has to be “L’isle joyeuse” by Claude Debussy. It is a pretty virtuosic piece for solo piano that is about 6 minutes long.

Some background on Debussy: He was a French composer who lived from 1862 to 1918. He wrote some very experimental music for the time and is often regarded as an “impressionist” composer, although he himself didn’t like that term. His music often uses modes and weird tonalities that you don’t get hear too often. In this piece, you can hear a lot of Lydian and whole tone scales throughout. He wrote music for almost every ensemble, but I really only like his piano music. Other people love his orchestral music and his string quartet, but I’ve always found them to be boring and not his best work. His piano music is outstanding though. He has been very influential to jazz musicians because of his approach to harmony and piano voicings. Many of my jazz-playing pianists friends love his music, as well as famous jazz icons like Bill Evans citing him as an inspiration.

The piece’s title, “L’isle joyeuse”, translates to “The Joyful Island”, and it was written in 1904.

This piece has a kind of a perpetual motion to it, where there is almost always some kind of flourish going on in one of the hands. The beginning starts with just one single line, playing a sort of cadenza. From the start, you can hear the Lydian and whole tone scales in the melody, which gives it the other-worldly quality. I personally love the whole tone sound, it is just so different from the diatonic chords that we hear all the time.

The middle section is quite solidly in A major, but also incorporates some emphasized Lydian elements. I love all of the suspensions in the melody, and the rhythm is very unstable, with a quintuple base line under syncopated triplets.

The third section is a recapitulation of the first, with some added rhythmic energy that accelerates towards the end. There are some very dramatic, very fast flourishes to set up the finale. The coda at the end is the best part. It’s noticeably the loudest part of the piece, and it brings back the melody from the middle section. The chords are just huge, and feature some very creative bass notes and harmonic progressions. I love the middle line at the end, it adds so much to the excitement. The last few measures bring back the opening cadenza, and rapidly accelerates even more to the last note. Fun fact, the last note is the lowest key on the piano, $A_0$.

My favorite performances are by Marc-André Hamelin and Seong-Jin Cho. I find Seong-Jin’s to be more exciting, but the audio quality on that video is worse.