Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

El confiteor del artista or The Confiteor of the Artist was commissioned by Rodolfo Fischer (Basel, Switzerland) for performance as part of the '12 Estudios de dirección: Material formativo para directores' ('12 Conducting Studies: Training Material for Conductors') international project, and represents a 'Study of Harmonics' within the context of a Hommage à Claude Debussy (1862-1918). The title has been derived from the prose poem Le confiteor de l'artiste - the third offering from Charles Baudelaire's (1821-1867) 'Petits Poèmes en prose' (1869), where the "artist, whether a painter, a poet, a novelist, or a musician, meets both its powerful inspiration and victorious rival in nature." Baudelaire was a "French poet, essayist, art critic, and translator for Edgar Allan Poe" - credited with "coining the term 'modernity' to describe the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis and the responsibility art has to capture that experience." In "Debussy: A Painter in Sound" (2018), Stephen Walsh writes: "Debussy was that rare creature, a composer who reinvented the language of music without alienating the majority of music lovers. The creator of such classics as "La Mer" and "Clair de Lune", of "Pelléas et Mélisande" and his magnificent, delicate piano works, he is the modernist everybody loves, the man who drove French music into entirely new regions of beauty and excitement at a time when old traditions - and the overbearing influence of Wagner - threatened to stifle it. As a central figure at the birth of modernism, Debussy's influence on French culture was profound. El confiteor del artista attempts to capture some of the essence that constitutes what could be stated as alluding to a characteristically Debussian musical language and aesthetic, but rejects any rationale that frames a calculated attempt to imitate, and so any direct connection to the composer is simply a result of informed intuition.