The name is absent

170 Lectures on Modem Music

IL Sails (Voiles—the word is ambiguous and
could also be translated Veils').

The piece might well have been inspired by some remem-
bered sight of sail-boats drifting listlessly at anchor. It is
extraordinary for the vagueness of its atmosphere and the
manner in which it suggests—to me, at least—the para-
doxical sense of mobility in immobility. With the excep-
tion of six measures (based on one of the pentatonic scales:
Eb, Gb, Ab, Bb and Db), the Prelude is entirely constructed
on the notes of the whole-tone scale, a scale which, little by
little, assumed a rôle of no slight importance in Debussy’s
work, and whose origins are far back in the past.¹

III. Wind on the Plains (Vent dans la Plaine)

Obviously a “descriptive” piece, remarkable for the vivid-
ness with which the composer has suggested the light, swift,
capricious movement of the wind and the silence and the
vastness of the plains.

IV. “Sounds and Perfumes Turn in the Evening
Air” (Les Sons et les Parfums Tournent dans
I’Air du Soir—Baudelaire.)

The languor and mystery of a summer night with its ac-
companying, diffused sense of melancholy and solitude. On
page 2, at the points marked “Rubato”, are examples
of the somewhat vulgar and equivocal lyricism character-
istic of Chabrier, to which we have previously alluded.
Notice also the originality and mystery of the sonorities
in the passage marked “Tranquille et Flottant” and, at the
very end, the chords—of such frequent and characteristic

* The more recent stages in the evolution of the whole-tone scale have
been traced by Mr. Hill in his book on Modern French Music, p. 201 ff.

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