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*The Little Nigar*
The Little Nigar
Cake Walk
Piano music by Claude Debussy
	Debussy at the piano in 1893
Other name	The Little Negro / Le petit nègre
Key	C major
Catalogue	CD 122; L. 114;
Composed	1909?
Published	1909; c. 1934;

Le Petit Negre

Arranged by Anne DeBlois, Performed by the Advent Chamber Orchestra, Advent Concert November 2007. (1:49)

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The Little Nigar (CD 122, L. 114) is the original title by composer Claude Debussy for a short piece for piano, composed in 1909 for a piano method and published the same year. It was later also published as a single piece, entitled The Little Negro and Le petit nègre. In more recent times, the piece has also been published under the title Le petit noir (The Little Black).^{[citation needed]}

History

Debussy composed The Little Nigar (giving the noun this spelling)^[1] in 1909^[2] on a commission from Théodore Lack, for his piano method Méthode de Piano.^[3]^[4] The subtitle describes it as a cakewalk.^[3] It is reminiscent of Golliwogg's Cakewalk from his Children's Corner, a piano suite that he had composed a year earlier.^[5]

Debussy regularly sought exotic influences. In The Little Nigar, he alluded to banjo chords and drums,^[6] influenced by American minstrel shows.^[4] The piece, marked allegro, begins with a first theme presenting "jazzy" syncopes in ²
₄ time, in the then popular ragtime style.^[7] It is followed by a lyrical passage, marked espressivo and pianissimo (very softly), which leads to a return of the first section. The first theme leans towards pentatonic and is accompanied by a chromatic sequence of broken minor thirds.^[8]

The Little Nigar was first published in 1909 by Éditions Alphonse Leduc in Paris as part of Lack's piano method and again as a single piece in about 1934, now with an added repetition and entitled The Little Negro, with subtitle Le petit nègre.^[3]^[2]

Debussy also used the piece's main theme in his 1913 ballet for children, La boîte à joujoux, in which it characterises an English soldier.^[6]^[5]

Numerous transcriptions have been made of the piece, including an arrangement for woodwinds that has been used for advertising Purina One dog food.^[9]

Literature

Schmitz, E. Robert (1950). The Piano Works of Claude Debussy, foreword by Virgil Thomson. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce.

References

^ McKinley, Ann (1986). "Debussy and American Minstrelsy". The Black Perspective in Music. 14 (3). JSTOR: 249–258. doi:10.2307/1215065. ISSN 0090-7790. JSTOR 1215065.
^ ^a ^b "The little Nigar". Centre de documentation Claude Debussy. Retrieved 4 August 2018.
^ ^a ^b ^c Heinemann, Ernst-Günter. "Postface" (PDF). Henle. Retrieved 4 August 2018.
^ ^a ^b Scheytt, Jochen (2017). "Le petit nègre". jochenscheytt.de. Retrieved 4 August 2018.
^ ^a ^b Smith, Lindy (2008). "Out of Africa: The Cakewalk in Twentieth-Century / French Concert Music". Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology. 1 (1): 75–80. Retrieved 4 August 2018.
^ ^a ^b Andres, Robert (2005). "An introduction to the solo piano music of Debussy and Ravel". BBC. Retrieved 4 August 2018.
^ "The little Negro". Henle. Retrieved 4 August 2018.
^ Eichmann, Andreas, ed. (2014). Kurt Weill und Frankreich (in German). Waxmann Verlag. p. 46. ISBN 978-3-83-098077-3.
^ Brown, Matthew (2012). Debussy Redux: The Impact of His Music on Popular Culture. Indiana University Press. p. 5. ISBN 978-0-25-335716-8.