Abstract
Abstract Roy Howat’s Debussy in Proportion: A MusicaI Analysis is written with rigour, precision and lucidity. From the outset he states the primary purpose for writing the book to be ‘the discovery that much of Debussy’s music contains intricate proportional systems which can account both for the precise nature of the music’s unorthodox forms and for the difficulty in defining them in more familiar terms’. Two aspects of Debussy’s music, not usually highlighted, are brought analytically into the foreground for proportional treatment by Howat: the dynamic shape, and the dramatic shape of the music. Dynamic shape is determined by measuring the distance between dynamic focal points, usually the peaks. Dramatic shape refers to the tonal organisation of the music. It is determined by the distance between the points at which the music changes tonal direction — this includes chromatic and modal changes. A third aspect measures for proportionality is the length of thematic sections. Howat reveals that these thre...
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