"Among all our musical masters, l should say, Claude Debussy was the least weighed upon by the dead hand of formula. Yet neither was he an improviser. This latter art, indeed, among all the compositional techniques, is the one most servile to rules of thumb. Debussy's operation was more thorough. Like any Frenchman building a bridge or cooking a meal, painting a picture or laying out a garden, he felt, he imagined, he reasoned, he constructed—and in that order."
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Sources
Virgil Thomson, Foreword to Schmitz's The Piano Works of Claude Debussy (1950), p. ix-x
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Claude_Debussy
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Claude Debussy
1862 – 1918
französischer Komponist
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