ABSTRACT
In the early 1960s, significantly in Tombeau de Claude Debussy, Maurice Ohana began to explore symmetrical form as a means of imposing external shape on material that might otherwise appear meandering. While proportional structures, notably those associated with the Golden Section are by definition organic, symmetrical structures are associated with inorganic nature. This is not as contradictory of Ohana’s organic processes as may first appear; there are many precedents in Debussy for organic, proportional structures co-existing with inorganic, symmetrical structures, even within the same work. During the 1960s and 1970s, Ohana showed a predilection for constructing symmetrical movement plans. Although this interest can be traced back to one of his earliest works, the Suite pour piano, he began to explore the approach more thoroughly during the transitional period of the early 1960s, developing the principle further in several mature works before abandoning it in the middle 1970s.
