🌊 Happy Birthday to the composer of "Clair de lune"!

August 22nd is Claude Debussy's Birthday! 

So how can you celebrate?

🌊 Listen to Debussy play his own compositions. 

🌊 Listen to my mashup of Clair de Lune and Happy Birthday To You. 

Melted Melodies · Happy Birthday/Clair De Lune

Buy sheet music

🌊 Sight-play an "easier" piece such as Rêverie or Page d'Album. 

 
🌊 Choose a Debussy piece to start learning as a repertoire piece. 

• Here are my personal suggestions!
• Arabesque No. 1 in E Major 
• Rêverie 
• Prélude from Suite Bergamasque
• Clair de Lune from Suite Bergamasque
• Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum
• La Fille aux cheveux de Lin 
• La Cathédral engloutie - I think I will begin learning this one. 

🌊 Listen to La mer.

🌊 Watch Carolina Kostner skate to Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune.

🌊 Go for a boat ride. 

🌊 Visit The Art Institute of Chicago to view paintings by Claude Monet. 

🌊 Read poetry by Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé.

Clair de Lune by Paul Verlaine

Your soul is like a landscape fantasy,
Where masks and Bergamasks, in charming wise,
Strum lutes and dance, just a bit sad to be
Hidden beneath their fanciful disguise.

Singing in minor mode of life's largesse
And all-victorious love, they yet seem quite
Reluctant to believe their happiness,
And their song mingles with the pale moonlight,

The calm, pale moonlight, whose sad beauty, beaming,
Sets the birds softly dreaming in the trees,
And makes the marbled fountains, gushing, streaming--
Slender jet-fountains--sob their ecstasies.

Apparitions by Stéphane Mallarmé

The moon grew sad, and weeping seraphim,
Musing among the vaporous flowers aswim,
With slow bows from the sobbing viols drew
White tears that sank in their corónals blue.
It was the blesséd day of your first kiss.
My reverie, eager with new miseries,
Was all a-swoon with perfume of shy grief
That leaves the heart to gather its own sheaf,
And frets not, nor yet sickens of its prize.
I wandered, and the worn way held my eyes
When in the street I saw your sun-girt hair
And you all smiling in the twilit air.
I took you for that elf who, crowned with beams,
Once passed before me in my childish dreams,
And shed white posies of sweet-smelling flow’rs
Star-like for tiny hands in snowy show’rs.

🌊 Learn musical terms in French.

🌊 Read Edgar Allen Poe, especially The Fall of the House of Usher. Debussy was working on an opera based on this work. 

🌊 Read a biography about Claude Debussy. 

What are some of your own ideas to celebrate Debussy's birthday?

-Jenny