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Lucas Debargue

1 week ago

Friendly moments with the great Gabor Takacs-Nagy after my recital at his Festival de Bellerive in Switzerland! ... Voir plusVoir moins

Lucas Debargue

1 week ago

:::: A response to a comment — and a reflection on freedom in contemporary musical creation ::::

After posting recently a recording of the concluding Gigue from my Suite for Solo Piano, I received this sweet comment:

“Imagine – tonal music in 2025. That would be like Beethoven writing music in the style of Gesualdo all day long. Stop it.”

This type of reaction isn’t new — but I think it deserves a proper personal response.
At its heart lies a persistent idea: that tonal music is outdated, obsolete, or even reactionary. My response is simple: tonal music is alive, relevant, and remains a valid, vibrant language of musical expression — even (and especially) in 2025.

Let’s examine the comment more closely.

-Analysis-

“Imagine – tonal music in 2025”

I don’t have to imagine it — it surrounds us. Whether in concert halls, films, video games or popular music, tonal music is still the dominant language. It is based on a central pitch, a hierarchy of harmonic functions, and a logic of tension and release — and it continues to speak deeply to billions of listeners around the world.
The implication here is that tonality should have been “left behind.” But by whom? And why?
Even Arnold Schoenberg, the father of twelve-tone technique, once admitted:
“There is still much good music to be written in C major.”
This is not a nostalgic statement. It’s an acknowledgment that musical language is a tool — not a dogma.

Most musicians around the world play music that is not written down and do not know how to read a score. They genuinely compose tonal music using their ears. From the perspective suggested by the comment, does this mean they are somehow helplessly uneducated? Personally, I would never dare to feel superior, as a classical musician, to any other musician—regardless of the music they perform—simply because I can read a score, engage with written masterpieces, or understand what atonality means. On the contrary, I am often deeply impressed by the complexity and sensitivity many musicians demonstrate without ever referring to any kind of written music.

“That would be like Beethoven writing in the style of Gesualdo all day long”

Let’s unpack this analogy.
It suggests that writing tonal music today is anachronistic — as if Beethoven were composing Renaissance-style chromatic madrigals (by the way, has the author of the comment ever listened to Beethoven’s lydian “Dankgesang” from his String Quartet opus 132 ?). But this only makes sense if we confuse style with language.
If atonality is merely a style, then its adherents haven’t changed it in over 100 years — which ironically makes them the more conservative party. But if atonality is a distinct musical language, then the analogy fails completely: Gesualdo and Beethoven both composed in a tonal framework, even if their styles differed greatly. They used tonality as a shared grammar — just as contemporary composers may still do today.

“Stop it.”

These two words don’t argue. They command.
Behind them is the voice of an imagined authority — someone declaring what should or should not be composed today. As if freedom of musical thought were something to be policed.
To that, I respond plainly: I will not stop.
I will continue writing the music I love, in the language that moves me. I obey no school nor aesthetic doctrine.
Born in 1990, I never lived under the « dominance » of tonal tradition. I naturally fell in love with it - without even knowing how it’s called -, and as with anyone you fall in love with, I developed my wish to explore this magical garden in detail. On the other hand, even with the very basic musical knowledge I had as a child, I could hear and feel what was not tonal. This kind of music held me hostage, to the point that I felt assaulted by randomly aggressive, unpleasant sounds. It was always jarring to read concert program notes praising the “poetic” and “colourful” qualities of the composer after such an experience.
I still struggle to see the feeling of stupidity as a positive sign of curiosity, so the only aesthetic pressure I may have felt has come from certain academic or ideological circles that insist contemporary tonal music is irrelevant — or worse, even forbidden. Thankfully, that pressure is weakening in institutional spaces — though it still echoes sometimes loudly here or there — like on social media.

-Commentary : supporting coexistence rather than conflict-

In recent years, I thought the controversy between tonality and atonality was over. Most musicians I meet — performers, listeners, composers — are no longer invested in this binary opposition. Composers today work freely in a wide range of idioms. Tonality has not "returned"; it never truly disappeared.
Atonal composers have their audiences and champions. So do those who write tonally. No one needs to dominate — and no one is competing for aesthetic supremacy. This pluralism is a good thing.
Which is why the bitterness of such comments feels out of place. If you love atonality — write it, play it, promote it. But please don’t demand that everyone else abandon their own musical path. The musical world is not going to turn uniformly atonal. It never has, and it never will.
Luigi Nono passionately tried to convince Italian workers that twelve-tone music could be “the language of the masses.” It didn’t take. The wild plant of tonality kept growing back through every attempt to uproot it.

-Conclusion-

I respect composers who write and perform atonal music. I’ve tried, sincerely, to connect with it — by listening, analyzing, reading, even learning to play and performing it. It never gave me joy, nor helped me grow as a musician. That doesn’t make it invalid — it simply doesn’t work on me.
But I would never tell those composers to “stop.” Even if I believe much of atonality defines itself as a reaction to tonal logic, I don’t wish to convert anyone. Writing music is more important than debating ideology.
Atonality has produced many fascinating substyles — serialism, spectralism, aleatoric music, musique concrète among others. I’ve explored each out of curiosity. I found care in sonic organization — but rarely a sense of formal narrative or harmonic direction. Without tonal structure, I found myself relying solely on contrast to guess when a piece might end. At times, I was fascinated by how it looked on paper — but I was never moved by how it sounded to my ears.
Contrast, sound design — these are meaningful tools. But to call them musical “fundamentals” ignores what so many listeners intuitively recognize: harmony (if still meaning the progression of blocks of simultaneous sounds called chords) shapes musical time. The feeling we get when listening to a piece is directly affected by these progressions and by what our ear can expect or not from them. And harmony — even when stretched, obscured, or subverted — still has vast possibilities for surprise, dissonance, color, and depth. Classical, jazz, and folk musicians across cultures know this well.
It’s difficult to believe in the existence of harmony without tonality, because harmony is not only about the chords themselves but also — mostly — about the relationship between them, which depends on tonality. Without tonality, chords can only be considered as separate entities ; thus a big part of what is called “harmony” stops working as a leading musical element. Some minds may be even more adventurous, claiming that music doesn’t need harmony. Why not… What a loss it would be, though, and for the benefit of who and what ?
So no — I won’t “stop”.

Tonal music doesn’t need to prove its relevance. It speaks for itself, every day, to millions. Despising tonal music lovers doesn’t strengthen atonality — it weakens musical dialogue.
My answer to “stop it” is simple:
Let’s rather continue to pursue what one believes to be his/her own way.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll return to the piece I’m writing — in the beautiful, bright key of D major.

PS

I know that atonality, in its many forms, arose from genuine artistic necessity — a response to a supposed collapse of inherited systems, not a calculated rejection of beauty. I also recognize that atonal music can be rich, expressive, and deeply meaningful to some people, just as tonality can become stale or sentimental when handled poorly. Writing tonal music myself, I feel much more hurt and threatened by the dangers of the latter. So my aim isn’t to set up a false dichotomy, but to affirm the legitimacy of choice. Tonality is not a retreat, nor is atonality a threat.
Another question for atonalists: do they perceive tonality (or its “return”) as a serious threat, or do they simply feel ideologically oppressed by what they consider a persisting arbitrary norm?

All in a nutshell, what I resist is any form of aesthetic policing — from either side — that would deny composers the freedom to speak in the voice that feels most true to them. To question is always good — I personally question atonality, having not yet been emotionally or intellectually convinced by it; but to condemn blindly contributes little to any kind of aesthetic debate.

I would rather end with a concluding question that returns to the confusion between style and language: what is the meaning of “novelty” in the arts? Is it necessary to abandon a language and create a new one in order to be called “revolutionary”? If so, Beethoven, Chopin, and Debussy (all three of them writing in the same language of tonal music despite their obvious differences of style) couldn’t be considered revolutionary — which I find somehow quite pitiful.

À bon entendeur !

LD ... Voir plusVoir moins

Lucas Debargue

1 week ago

Honoured to be part of medici.tv 500K SPECIAL with my 2023 year performance from Philharmonie de Paris ! 👇 FULL YOUTUBE link in comments ! 👇 Thank you, Medici.tv to reveal for that in full length my rendition of Charles-Valentin Alkan's Concerto for Solo Piano, first movement.
This is a piece that holds deep personal significance for me - one I dreamed of playing since my teenage years. This movement, the Allegro from Alkan’s Concerto for Solo Piano, is arguably the longest single-movement sonata form in the entire piano repertoire. Beyond its formidable technical challenges, it is an epic, electrifying work - relentless in its drive, yet constantly surprising in its twists and turns, crafted from deceptively minimal thematic material.
Here, the solo piano assumes the roles of both soloist and full orchestra. The piece culminates in a breathtaking cadenza - an exhilarating perpetual-motion passage played with alternating hands - that brings it to a thrilling conclusion.
I hope you enjoy listening as much as I’ve enjoyed performing it ! ... Voir plusVoir moins

Lucas Debargue updated their cover photo.

4 weeks ago

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Lucas Debargue

4 weeks ago

☑️With the greatest joy I start to share with you the videos of all my 2015 Tchaikovsky competition rounds on my YouTube channel. Here is the first round. 👉FULL YOUTUBE link in comments. ⏬
☑️Exactly 10 years ago this mad emotional whirlwind happened. Many things have changed since, for all of us ... For me, this event and its consequences transformed my musical life into a huge and priceless amount of possibilities to share music with audiences all over the world. ... Voir plusVoir moins

Lucas Debargue

4 weeks ago

Happy times in Malaga with Ksenia Knorre, Sergei Babayan and Pablo Amorós ! ... Voir plusVoir moins