The Early 20th Century Composers Toccata

In The Music and Dance Volume of Encyclopedia of China, the entry Toccata saysit is “a musical composition (usually for a keyboard instrument) with compact rhythmand rapid key touching”. Toccata comes from Italian and originally means touchingkeys which is an ancient keyboard music. And at present, it refers to the kind oftechnical music with rapid elaborate runs in a rhythmically free style and compactrhythm, which can well demonstrate the flexibility of the fingers. It also means ingeneral a kind of instrument music style. Toccata has experienced a period of nearly400years when various music styles work together to create the western music history,from the Renaissance, the Baroque, to the Classical, the Romantic period, as well as the19th century, and up to today. Toccata has been favored by many music performers forits strong artistic appealing and has been one of the important styles in teaching for itsfree impromptu and sophisticated skills. Because of its complicate skills, compactrhythm and bright musical images, it is worth of certain studies and art aesthetic.This paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, after generally introducing thedevelopment history of Toccata style as well as the Toccata appliance and developmentcharacteristics created by the composers in the20th century, the author analyses themain features and expression means of Toccata in the early20th century from the viewof piano performance. Subsequently, in the second part, a further study has been madeto analyse the creative features and art values of Toccata through three aspects, namelymusic history, music aesthetics and music analysis theory, with examples of Toccatapieces from Achille-Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Prokofiev.The key part in this paper is the second part, in which representative works of threeimportant composers of the early20th century are studied. They are Toccata-the3rdpiece of Pour le piano by French composer Achille-Claude Debussy, Toccata-the6thpiece of Le Tombeau de Couperin by French composer Maurice Ravel, and the Op11by Russian composer Prokofiev. The creative feature and performance style of the threeworks is studied and compared. Furthermore, the author tries to explore the artisticcharm of Toccata in20th century through several aspects such as musical form structureand style features, harmony flavor and tonality analysis, the fine changes of strength andthe varieties of key touching, as well as rhythm characteristics and the use of soft pedalcombined with the author’s practical study and research and performance. This is alsothe purpose of this paper.