Debussy: Girl With the Flaxen Hair

How do you go about choosing what to listen to? The question makes an assumption that you are the one who gets to choose. That happens less and less often, it seems. If you listen to the radio, or one of those gazillion audio channels in your cable package, someone else chooses for you. That’s fine. At least you have chosen to turn it on and listen.

But we encounter music constantly that we haven’t asked for and that we can’t turn off. Our brains learn to tune it out along with all the other irrelevant and unnecessary background noise.

Let’s talk about those occasions when you actively choose to listen to some specific piece of music. When I was studying music at college, there was a long list of works that I needed to know. Like reading the great books, you plow through them and try to shore up those areas where your knowledge is weak. There were also many times when I chose something that I was in the mood for, probably the way most of choose most of the time. At other times, it was happenstance. Something potentially interesting just happened to be right there in easy reach.

A few days ago, Professor Carol asked me to gather some materials for her Dallas Wind Symphony lecture. (This is just one of my chores at the Professor Carol sweat shop.) The lecture touched only briefly on Debussy’s Girl With the Flaxen Hair. It’s a very short piece from a collection of Préludes (Book I, No. 8), and it seemed like the perfect antidote to the flash and bang of Liszt featured last week. Plus, we have not yet included anything from the Impressionists (a term Debussy rejected). So choosing to feature this Debussy piece in this series now is just happenstance. It was there in front of me. Certainly I have heard it a number of times before, but I don’t know it well and I hadn’t heard it recently. I would not have chosen it for this series had I not stumbled on it for other reasons.

And that’s not such a bad way to get to know music. There is so much good music, you will miss a lot of it if you always rely on your preferences or on some master list of essential works. Sometimes you just need to listen to what’s right in front of you.

One additional note: the work is written for piano solo, but Carol was doing a wind symphony lecture. So I’m going to feature a trumpet arrangement. You can hear the piano solo version here.