The Australian aborigine and many other “First Nations “see themselves as part of nature .The land can exist without them but they cannot exist without the land ,

But  for the European , nature is  sort of the   decor , the stage upon which man plays his games.Nature is a commodity which can be exploited, traded , bought or sold..

That of course is putting it simplistically but with the growth of cities and the expansion 

of urban life it was all too easy for  city dwellers to become divorced from nature.

The food they ate was grown somewhere over the horizon and nature became a distant reality to be visited when they went  on vacation .

The great French composer Claude Debussy had hanging on the wall of his study a copy

of a famous Japanese print,”The Great Wave off Kanazawa” by Hokusai . Looking at this 

print you could easily miss seeing that riding those huge waves are two fishing boats.

RIDING is probably the wrong word to use in this instance . Those fishing boats don’t look

too secure.Fishing in these stormy seas would be a risky business , but those fishermen are there by necessity, not by choice .

What has all this to do with Debussy’s composition ?

Debussy often vacationed at the seashore. Being a somewhat difficult man, self centred,

opinionated and morose , he was happier contemplating nature that  being with people. He 

was an aesthete , uninterested in the ordinary life of ordinary people . It was the unusual and  nature which stirred his musical imagination. The dangers of a Japanese fisherman’s life did not concern him and in his superb recreation ,  an “ aural image “ of the sea , LA MER ,humans have no place.

LA MER begins with the quiet lapping of the tide against the shore. The titles of the work’s three separate sections are self explanatory and the listener is presented with  a tonal depiction of the sea in all it’s moods.Debussy finishes the work with an all stops out fortissimo apotheosis , a climax of 

shattering force. It’s as if Debussy is playing to the crowd, a thunderous finale being sure to elicit 

applause.       Does nature play to the crowd?   I think that in this instance Debussy made an aesthetic mistake.

If one thinks of nature being eternal then it would have been better for Debussy to have ended LA MER the same way as he began it, with the soft lapping of the tide against the shore, the sea no longer a menace  and returning to it’s former peaceful state. The  listener would then have come away with a sense of the eternity of nature as opposed to man’s mortality .

Nature does not have moods and acts according to it’s own rules which have nothing to do with man’s needs or reactions to it .Nature is eternal, humans are not.Debussy was not religious  and  his adoration of nature is the attitude of an aesthete whose primary concern is pleasure, a sensual pleasure unrelated to spirituality although for  Debussy his attachment to nature is somewhat spiritual in it’s fervour.

Debussy is Nature’s brilliant observer. He can do that because he is basically a visitor to Nature. His life and

livelihood are not affected by the sea’s “moods”.He reacts to it without physical involvement or fear whereas for the Japanese fishermen in Hokusai’s  print it is different. Their

association with the sea is basic, it can feed them or kill them but it is a danger they must face.

 Whether Debussy was visiting the sea shore ,or looking at the Hokusai print hanging on his studio wall his life was never in danger . He could look at it with admiration and it stirred his imagination  and genius to create a masterpiece.