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Debussy's 'Iberia'.

Article Excerpt
Debussy's 'Iberia'. By Matthew Brown. (Studies in Musical Genesis and Structure.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. [xv, 177 p. ISBN 0-19-816199-9. $85.] Music examples, bibliography, index.

One of Debussy's most significant works, the Images for orchestra have stood somewhat in the shadow of earlier masterpieces like Nocturnes and La mer. Matthew Brown provides us with an in-depth study of Iberia, the center trilogy of Images. His book has a double purpose: it explains the genesis of Debussy's work and provides an analysis, then moves beyond Debussy to place this analysis into a larger context, to be explained below.

The first part of the study deals with the compositional history and aesthetic context of Iberia. For this work the composer uncharacteristically left a substantial body of sketches, and Brown carefully extracts the information they have to offer. Through these sketches Brown observes that Iberia, like most of Debussy's compositions, took shape over a long period (1903-10) and went through numerous revisions, some of them drastic.

Iberia is the most substantial of Debussy's Spanish soundscapes, and the author asks what gives the piece the authentic flavor so praised by Manuel de Falla among others. Brown identifies its "Spanish" elements as idiosyncratic motivic formulae (though not...

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