The big break with the tonal tradition came with the French composer Claude Debussy, whose music grew from the French language’s proclivity for color, nuance, and blurred sound. Debussy was a stunningly original composer for whom timbre was as important as melody, rhythm, and harmony. His extraordinary Nuages illustrates his conception of timbre as a thematic element, his rejection of conventional major/minor modes in favor of non-traditional pitch collections, and his studied disregard for conventional harmonic practice in favor of a sense of suspended time.