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Debussy is often called a musical Impressionist, invoking an analogy to the emerging trend in French painting in which, in Paul Henry Lang's pithy phrase, the how dominates the what. Detail of a Renoir painting of a water lily, showing the vivid, discrete brushstokes that give the distinctive Impressionist look As Lang and Jonathan Kramer noted, much as earlier painters used color and light to illuminate realistic objects, musicians' textures had always served to articulate or enrich their melodic, harmonic or rhythmic structures, but Debussy was the first composer to create music of sheer sonority that simply was allowed to exist, without constantly having to progress toward a prescribed goal. As David Ewen put it, for Debussy color, nuance, mood, atmosphere and sensation were far more significant than drama or realism - his music is intended to appeal to the senses, not the intellect.
Debussy chafed at the comparison with the Impressionist painters, since his work was far less representational (although perhaps he would have felt differently had he known the very late works of Cezanne and Monet, in which their subjects are far less apparent). Indeed, by its very nature music is abstract, free from the realistic imagery to which the visual arts are inexorably tied. Rather, he aligned himself with the Symbolist poets, who reveled more in the sound of words than in their actual meaning, and sought to suggest reality through a dream-world of metaphor and symbol.
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Debussy was described by his associates as a difficult and reserved man, with an independence that bordered on disdain for convention. From about this time, he began a liaison with Gabrielle Dupont (profession unknown) with whom he lived in near poverty for the next nine years.
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In his desire to move beyond the all pervasive Wagnerisms of the day, Debussy used a new vocabulary including whole tone, modal, and pentatonic scales that were in part influenced by his exposure to the Balinese gamelan orchestra that he heard at the World Exposition in 1889. Debussy found sonata procedures and German linear thinking meaningless to him. There is in mature Debussy less a reliance on thematic logic than on intuitive associations and connections. He wrote in 1902, "I wanted from music a freedom which it possesses perhaps to a greater degree than any other art, not being tied to a more or less exact reproduction of Nature but to the mysterious correspondences between Nature and Imagination."