La mer
Trezise writes that "for much of "La Mer," Debussy spurns the more obvious devices associated with the sea, wind, and concomitant storm in favour of his own, highly individual vocabulary". Caroline Potter, in "The Cambridge Companion to Debussy", comments that Debussy's depiction of the sea "avoids monotony by using a multitude of water figurations that could be classified as musical onomatopoeia: they evoke the sensation of swaying movement of waves and suggest the pitter-patter of falling droplets of spray" (and so forth), and – significantly – avoid the arpeggiated triads used by Schubert and Wagner to evoke the movement of water. In "The Cambridge Companion to Debussy", Mark DeVoto describes "La mer" as "much more complex than anything Debussy had written earlier", particularly the "Nocturnes":