Technique Studies Of Debussy's Five Preludes

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, Romantic music in Europe was superseded by impressionistic musics. Debussy, the father of impressionistic music, drewed inspirations from paintings literatures and other art forms in the world, and then composed a lot of famous impressionistic music words, such as art songs, piano and orchestral pieces and operas and so on. Piano pieces had made a key role from all Debussy's impressionistic music, especially for the"24 Preludes"which were considered to be the most famous piece in Debussy's music. From the"24 Preludes", many tunes were composed to pentatonic style, the typical pieces include that "Delphi's dancer," "sails", "fields on the Wind", "brown hair girl" and "shrub".In this thesis, we analysized and compared their common and individual characteristics of these five preludes to leran more about of the backguround of Debussy's impressionistic music, and then concluded Debussy's music style.For technical analysis, we discussed in two main aspects. One aspect focused on motivation evolution, treatment of thematic, form featrure, other special composition techniques, and so on. The other aspect talked about tonality, harmony, parallel chord, sustained note, tension, harmonic fluctuation and degree-progression by using of traditional analysis method and Hindemith theory. In this section, we focused on pentatonic scale and relationship between pentatonic and other mode. Finally, we conclued the music styles of Debussy's five preludes in difference fields, which will give us some inspirations on composition.