‘Nuages’, the only cloudscape in Debussy’s music, suggests this silent, fluctuating world in gently rocking chord-sequences for woodwind and muted strings; the composer’s note refers to ‘the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white’. Throughout the movement a fragment of melody for solo cor anglais only recurs on the same instrument, at the same unchanging pitch, while the drifting cloud-masses seem to form and re-form around it.