L'isle joyeuse

Debussy in 1905
L'isle Joyeuse begins with a chromatically descending whole tone cadenza.[citation needed] Play
Whole tone Play, lydian Play, and major scales Play on A.

L'isle joyeuse, L. 106 (The Joyful Island) is a piece for solo piano by Claude Debussy composed in 1904. It is assumed that the painting The Embarkation for Cythera by Jean-Antoine Watteau served as inspiration for the piece, with Debussy reimagining a group's journey to the island considered Aphrodite's birthplace, and their subsequent ecstatic unions of love upon arrival.[1] According to Jim Samson (1977), the "central relationship in the work is that between material based on the whole-tone scale, the lydian mode and the diatonic scale, the lydian mode functioning as an effective mediator between the other two."

  1. ^ Schmitz, E. Robert (1950), The Piano Works of Claude Debussy, Toronto: Dover, p. 94, LCCN 66-20423