Death Anniversary: Claude Debussy — March 25, 1918

Claude Debussy died in Paris on 25 March 1918, killed by cancer while the city was under bombardment in the Great War. He left a musical language that changed the very idea of harmony, built out of unusual scales, suspensions and shifting timbres. His influence runs through the whole century, from concert music to jazz. The anniversary marks a solitary innovator who could turn the symbolist and decorative sensibility of the Belle Époque into sound.