I opted for a simple orchestration for the first 11 bars, mainly focused on the mixture of timbres,without adding new musical material. The next section, from bar 12, in contrast with the still and calm ambience of the beginning, is full of energy and forward movement, in a three voice counterpoint that makes a three against two polyrhythm. For this passage, and this recurrent theme, I imagine a brief sighting of an energetic magical creature, like for example Puck, from Debussy’s La Danse de Puck, who is a mischievous fairy, sprite or jester from William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For this reason, I felt comfortable for the first time to play around and slightly change the musical material, more specifically with the motive of the note B with the appoggiaturas, first with the glockenspiel and then by creating new motives with the two vibraphones. The end result, when rehearsing the piece with the musicians, was exactly what I intended. The material from the two vibraphones really felt like the continuation of the piano’s resonance box, and not as new material standing in the way of Debussy’s writing. Furthermore, putting the material that Debussy actually wrote in two completely different instruments both in terms of register and colour (the marimba and the glockenspiel) really opened the soundscape of this passage. The octave B’s in the marimba’s left hand also provide a lot of energy and resonance to this part.
One of the main struggles I found in the rehearsals with the percussionists was my attempt at making the arrangement sound as free and natural as the original version, and for that we had to define cues and important lines to follow. In this last section for example, the instrument responsible for the Cèdez and the consequent arrival to au Mouvt is the marimba. As you might see in the following video the eight notes in the marimba start to spread in bar 14 and the other musicians followed that line to enter together in bar 16, with a beautiful and tense harmony played by the vibraphones and the piano.
In bar 41 we arrive at a section that is spacious, bright and super wide in register. This is the moment when the character sees the full light of the moon over the temple and is able to notice every little aspect of that building with his heart racing. It is, I feel, a moment that is not too rigid in metre, giving the performer space and freedom to broaden the material and connect it to bar 43, where the previous section is reiterated. The single notes in the crotales and the gong dictate the extension of the register, while the freeness in textural development and movement is achieved through the use of bows in the vibraphone. In the score I wrote rhythms, but I told the performs to play ad libitum, since my goal was mainly sound and getting the right colour and timbre.
When the vertical chords section returns, the orchestration is again, slightly different, expanding the left-hand motif with the use of the gongs and the chords returning to the vibraphones.
Bars 45 and 46 were the first places that I changed the piano part to create a dialogue between the piano and percussion instruments. I took the second and fourth beat from the piano and put them in the vibraphones, then on glockenspiel and marimba, and finally the re-exposition of the first theme is played only by the percussion instruments.
For the beginning section, two words were key: space and resonance. Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut(And the Moon sets over the temple that was) evokes images of East Asia and Indonesian gamelan music, which famously influenced Debussy. Having this in mind, I thought of two instruments (completely different in register) with high resonance and long duration of sound, the gong and the crotales, creating a continuous ambiance that seems to have started long before. I chose vibraphones and the glockenspiel to function as a continuation of the piano, where the different timbers and registers would find each other and mingle in that ethereal and highly resonant wave of sound of the first bars. This soundscape gains a new colour with the addition of marimba in bar 4, that, in the following bar, mingles with the piano’s left hand to embody and reinforce the reverberation of the bass. For the big parallel chords, I looked for unity in colour and articulation, so I spread the chord through the vibraphones and the glockenspiel.
CHAPTER III
The Arrangement
As I said before, the motivation I found for doing an arrangement came from my desire to turn imagery elements that I use in my piano practice into something more concrete. Aligned with this idea of making imagery concrete, I decided to keep the piano part and add musical layers with percussion instruments.
In a general sense, the piece changes constantly between opened and closed soundscapes, and I try to translate that to the arrangement. For example, in bar 16 the piece moves from a very open phrase with three distinct voices happening at the same time to a very closed and tense chord that descends into a chromatic motive in octaves played in unison by both hands of the piano, possibly to describe the movement of the moon descending to the temple, as the title suggests. In bar 20, with the return of big parallel chords, the sound opens up again. These chords are supported with a fifth in the bass as a bourdon, stretching the register. In my arrangement, the descending lines of the bars 16 and 17 are shared between the vibraphones until the unison in bar 18, where the marimba and glockenspiel join them.
I decided that the Cèdez should stay written only for piano, to make a bridge to the next section with the help of the cymbal, which is played for the first time. The bourdon is played firstly by the gongs, with a short but resonant attack, and then is continued and expanded in the low register of the marimba. The interesting thing about this choice of instrument is that the image I constantly created in my solo practice to achieve the desirable sound of this chord in the left hand was to imagine that I was playing a gong. I would even try to emulate it with my touch, as it is written with a staccato whole note, i.e., a note with vivid articulation but with long and present resonance. The vertical chords are spread through the vibraphones keeping the movement until bar 22 where the chords are dilated in a calm and still landscape that provides space to a small dialogue between gongs and crotales. It is very interesting to notice how Debussy plays around with the articulation of these big vertical chords, shifting from short to long notes, always under big slurs, as if, and this my interpretation, the energetic magical creature is getting tired and it’s looking for a place to rest or contemplate. This is when we arrive to one of the more spacious and stretched sections of the piece.
These two bars really feel like a pause in which to contemplate and recover energy for what is coming next. Perhaps the time when the creature notices the light of the moon over the temple and becomes aware of its motion. The passage contains the big block of still chords of the beginning section and the melody of the second, Puck’s melody, in my imagination. The melody is played in the glockenspiel supported by warm tremolos of the marimba that are stopped by a short attack in two notes by the gongs on the upbeats. In this passage I also used one technique that will appear in other moments of the arrangement: the use of a bow in both vibraphones, generating sound without attack. The sound is born as a crescendo, creating a wavy sound effect, that resembles beams of light coming from the reflection of the moon’s light on the temple.
The next section is more agitated and anxious, with long melody lines of six notes in a polyrhythm with the four beats of the bar. To achieve this anxious feeling I imagine that the main character of our narrative loses the light of the moon and is eagerly looking for it. In the 31st bar I leave the piano alone to make the connection to a more contrapuntal passage from 32 to 34. In the 32nd a 33rd bar we reach what is, probably, the longest melody line in the whole movement, and to make that clearer, I decided to extend that line by making a canon with the melody in the glockenspiel and the vibraphone 2. In 33 and 34, with the dynamic change, the music demanded also a change in colour, so I placed the melody in the marimba, while the glockenspiel timidly recovers the first theme of the piece, leading to the Cèdez that arrives in 35.
The next four bars are a repetition of bars 14-18 but transposed one tone higher, so the orchestration is also similar. The descending lines reach a powerful unison played by the two vibraphones, the glockenspiel and the marimba, followed by the chords played only in the piano that bring the register up again stretching into bar 39. The next two bars are also reminiscences of the past but in a different, warmer key. Comparing this material with that in bars 6 to 9, I felt that the chords in this key were not supposed to sound as brilliant and sharp as in the beginning, but rather a warmer, more contained version of it. The motive in the left hand is also different: not only is the pedal in B flat (instead of E), but the intervals in the descending motive until the pedal are different, starting with a 4th (F-C) instead of a 5th (B-E), making it more restrained. For this reason, I decided to make slight alterations in the orchestration, putting the vertical chords of the piano the marimba as tremolos to prolong the resonance, and the bass line in the vibraphones.
The theme returns to the piano (solo) at bar 49 making the connection to 51, where Puck’s melody appears one last time, again doubled by the glockenspiel, with the first vibraphone holding the chord.
The last four measures resolve the piece with the appearance of the remaining themes developed within it, as if the main character looks back on this magical night as it comes to a close. In the first 2 measures we have the motif of the left hand of the piano expanded by the marimba and the gong, but the last two call for higher pitches, achieved using bows in the vibraphone and in the glockenspiel, ending the piece in a reverberation that seems to last forever.
This short two bar phrase is interrupted by another two bars that work as a long bridge to the next section. As I said in the introduction of this chapter, these bars work both as a climax to the texture of the first two bars and as a bridge to the next short phrase, and also demarcates two very expressive features: the movement of the two extreme lines in contrary motion, and the decrescendo in the bass line, which moves up in register, going against our normal performative instinct.
These two lines, descending and ascending, are written respectively for vibraphone and marimba, with the second vibraphone holding a D# minor chord. After this we reach, again, a new colour, in a passage that is much shorter in register but more contrapuntal, with 4 individual voices moving together. This was another part where I dared to add a musical layer, by recovering a recurrent melody in the marimba in bar 30.
Rui Braga Simões' Arrangement of Claude Debussy's Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut, from the second book of Images. Performed by Rui Braga Simões (piano), Miguel Varela (Vibraphone 1), Porter Ellerman (Vibraphone 2), João Borralho (Marimba and Gongs) and Ricardo Mendes (Glockenspiel, Crotales and Cymbal).
Rui Braga Simões' Arrangement of Claude Debussy's Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut: From the beginning until bar 16.
Rui Braga Simões' Arrangement of Claude Debussy's Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut: Bars 31 to 46.
Rui Braga Simões' Arrangement of Claude Debussy's Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut: Bars 16 to 30.
Bars 45 and 46 of Claude Debussy's Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (original version for piano solo).
Rui Braga Simões' Arrangement of Claude Debussy's Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut: First 3 bars.
Rui Braga Simões' Arrangement of Claude Debussy's Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut: Bars 31 to 45.
Rui Braga Simões' Arrangement of Claude Debussy's Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut: From bar 46 until the end of the piece.
Rui Braga Simões' Arrangement of Claude Debussy's Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut: Bars 17 to 30.
Rui Braga Simões' Arrangement of Claude Debussy's Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut: Bars 10 to 16.
