Casella’s The Evolution of Music Throughout the History of
the Perfect Cadence is an ambitious piece of musical scholarship,
unprecedented in its approach.37 In my own small
amendment to Casella’s study (as it were), I hope to have
demonstrated a pair of peculiar, perhaps unforeseen results:
that Debussy’s pentatonic vocabulary looks backward more
than has been supposed (certainly in its stylistic and semantic
debts, as was shown earlier, but also, as in the case of Pagodes
at least, in its large-scale melodic syntax); and that meanwhile,
Debussy’s ostensibly straightforward, common-practice
vocabulary—what could be more accessible, more tonal,