Theme: Debussy's Soundscapes: Painting with Notes in an Age of Impressionism

Language: English

Speaker: Prof. Grace YU

Host: Prof. Zhuosheng Jin

Date&Time: Apr. 29, 2025 (Tue.) 19:00

Venue: Lecture Classroom 102, Teaching Building (MUS)

Admission Free.

Visitors are requested to scan the QR code for registration.

Abstract

Claude Debussy's music resists categorization yet pulses with the same revolutionary spirit that defined Impressionist painting: a rejection of rigid forms in favor of fleeting impressions, where light, color, and motion dissolve into ambiguity. This lecture reveals how Debussy's piano and orchestral works — through gestural fluidity, planing harmonies, and unresolved dissonances — mirror the techniques of Monet's brushstrokes, Hokusai's arrested dynamism, and Symbolism's elusive poetry. Live performances of excerpts from Debussy's piano works Reverie, "La neige danse" from Children's Corner, "La cathédrale engloutie" from Preludes Livres I, and playing from the recording of orchestral work of "De l'aube à midi sur la mer" from La Mer illuminate these parallels, positioning Debussy not as a "musical Impressionist," but as an alchemist translating visual and literary innovation into sound.

In his early composition Reverie, Debussy's meandering phrases and ethereal harmonies dissolve melody into atmosphere, echoing Monet's Impression, Sunrise and its hazy daubs of light; "La neige danse" fractures melody into glittering staccato gestures, mirroring Monet's mosaic of winter's landscape in his Snow at Argenteuil. "La cathédrale engloutie" conjures Monet's Rouen Cathedral Series through submerged harmonies and melodies that rise and recede, which draws parallels to Monet's transforming Rouen cathedral images, while La Mer channels Hokusai's The Great Wave of Kanagawa in orchestral surges that arrest nature's sublime force. Planing harmonies become musical brushstrokes, unresolved dissonances evoke blurred edges, and pentatonic melodies nod to the alluring of Orientalism. Yet Debussy rejected the "Impressionist" label, dismissing it as reductive—his resistance underscoring a deeper kinship with Symbolism's pursuit of abstraction. Like Monet and Hokusai, he sought not to depict, but to perceive: to dissolve boundaries between senses, transforming sound into color, texture, and light.

Engaging with Debussy is to inhabit a synesthetic world where music transcends notation: a cathedral rises from harmonic depths, snowflakes crystallize in staccato, and the sea's menace surges in orchestral crescendos. This lecture reframes Debussy's legacy as a bridge between disciplines—a composer who, like the painters and poets he admired, reshaped art into a medium of fleeting beauty, sensory paradox, and boundless imagination.

About the Speaker

Grace YU, a music theorist, pianist, conductor, and performing arts curator, is an associate professor at the School of Music, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. She was born and grew up in Hong Kong SAR, China.

As a music theorist and researcher, she has given numerous paper presentations and recitals on Liszt, music significations and interpretations, music practice research, and performing arts education at numerous international music conferences, including the International Congress of Music Theory and Analysis, International Congress of Music Signification, World Congress of Semiotics, International Symposium on Practice-As-Research, European Music Analysis Conference, International Liszt Bicentennial Conference, Canadian University Music Society, West Coast Conference of Music Theory and Analysis, Indiana University Graduate Theory Symposium and Innovation in Performing Arts Education Symposium. She has also given numerous Chinese Orchestral Music Analytical Seminars at the International Chinese Orchestra Conducting Masterclasses hosted by the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra. 

YU has extensive experience teaching undergraduate classes and graduate seminars on music theory and techniques, form and analysis, historical stylistic survey, music repertory and literature, as well as performance research and interpretation. She was the Postgraduate Programme Leader of the School of Music and the Associate Professor of the Department of Academic Studies in Music at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. She has guided and supervised numerous Capstone Music Research projects and theses of undergraduate and postgraduate students respectively. At Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where she completed her Ph.D. in music theory and MM in piano performance, she taught both aural and written music theory to graduate and undergraduate students as an associate instructor. She also received a BA (Hons) in music with a double major specialization in piano performance and composition from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. 

YU performs frequently as both pianist and conductor. She was the collaborative pianist in the opener concert of the "No Limit Series" at the Hong Kong Arts Festival 2023. She served as the orchestral pianist for the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra and the Columbus Indiana Philharmonic in the United States. She conducted J.S. Bach's Passover Cantata Christ lag in Todes Banden, BWV 4 as she curated the performance for crossover with Chinese paintings by Lingnan painting master Wong Chim Yuen in April 2023. She also conducted and curated the performance of J.S. Bach's Easter Cantata Kommt, eilet und laufet, BWV 249 with a special crossover movement presentation in April 2024. She has also led orchestras such as the Hradec Králové Philharmonic Orchestra in the Czech Republic, the Wrocław Philharmonic Orchestra in Poland, the Conductors Institute of South Carolina in the US, and the Hong Kong Children's Symphony Orchestra to perform extensively in North America, Europe, and Asia. She also taught conducting practicum previously for the MA program at the Hong Kong Baptist University. 

In recent years, YU has also actively engaged as a producer, creative director, artist-teacher, performer, conductor, and composer in multimedia music productions, such as Victory in Adversity, Sprout, Hope in Lamentations, Traverse, Splendour, and In Search of Space in a Cramped City, etc. 

YU has received numerous honors and scholarships in the past. Notably, the National Music Honors Society in the USA honored her with the prestigious Pi Kappa Lambda. She was also the past recipient of the Bernard van Zuiden Music Scholarship from the Hong Kong Philharmonic Society and the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Scholarship.