Artists: Marc Romboy & Dortmund Philharmonic Orchestra
Title: Reconstructing Debussy
Label: Hyperharmonic
Release Date: July 7th 2017
Formats: Double vinyl, CD and digital
Tracklist
1 Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Reconstructing Debussy)
2 La mer I – De l’aube à midi sur la mer – très lent (Reconstructing Debussy)
3 La mer II – Jeux de vague – allegro (Reconstructing Debussy)
4 La mer III – Animé et tumultueux(Reconstructing Debussy)
Recorded live at Konzerthaus, Dortmund, Germany, December 12th 2016
Claude Debussy was one of the most popular composers associated with impressionist music. His innovative and, at this time, new way to compose music with non traditional scales and chromaticism inspired countless artists from the likes of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock.
Remarkable attributes of his music were i.e. the usage of parallel chords, bitonality and many compositions of whole-tone and pentatonic scales, and all this surely reminds us of contemporary electronic music, where you hardly find limits or boundaries when it comes to traditional, harmonic sounding scale tone music.
After studying countless composers of the last centuries, the German composer, DJ and producer of electronic music, Marc Romboy, decided to accept the challenge to edit, remix and reconstruct several works of his favorite French composer, ranging from “La mer” to “Prélude à l´après-midi d´un faune”.
“One sentence of Claude Debussy has impressed me a lot. And this is when he said that he was always curious and keen to explore new and unheard compositions and sounds. When Debussy visited the World Expo in Paris in 1889 he was fascinated by the pentatonic scaled Gamelan music from Java which was presented at the pavilion of Indonesia. Inspired by this he included a lot of influences into his own music notations.
And this reflects exactly my philosophy when it comes to making my own music. As soon as I have begun to focus on Debussy’s music I instantly realized how different he was compared to other famous composers of the history. Also the usage of parallel chord figures and bitonality were remarkable attributes of Debussy’s music and this, let’s call it freedom of musical expression was the aspect which brought me to the conclusion that I have found a soul mate. And when I jammed with sound samples, notations and fragments of “La mer” I could step by step anticipate his urge to push the boundaries of musical rules. At some point I was aware of the fact that I could be able to create a bow between his original work and my conteporary style.” – Marc Romboy
On the album Romboy performs together with the Dortmund Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor Ingo-Martin Stadtmüller, the concert master Miki Kekenj, keyboarder Ali Khalaj. The album was recorded live in one take at Konzerthaus, Dortmund, Germany, December 12th 2016
