A grotesque black doll.
For the life of me I can not remember the tune to Golliwog’s Cakewalk, a piano piece by Claude Debussy which I, like any even vaguely respectable pianist, have played through a few times. Debussy’s piano music, while not always virtuoso music of great technical demand, is nevertheless hard to play immediately after a lengthy Beethoven or Chopin set. Debussy’s approach to the instrument is different from that of other composers and to shift directly from another composer to Debussy is jarring. The same could be said of any number of other composer combinations, though for some reason I find piano music of Stravinsky and Bartok to be an easy stylistic segue after late Beethoven sonatas.
