Analysis of Characteristic Fragments of Debussy’s Impressionist Music--Taking “Suite Bergamasque” as an Example

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-541-6_27How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Debussy; Impressionist Music; Suite Bergamasque

Abstract

Achille-Claude Debussy, a French composer and pianist, is one of the representatives of the Impressionist school of music and is hailed as the pioneer of “Impressionist” music. His impressionist music style has long been widely recognized, but there is still a lack of analysis on the characteristic fragments of its impressionist music. Using the “Suite bergamasque” as an example, this paper primarily employs the methods of literature review and score analysis to conduct an in-depth analysis and elaboration from three aspects: mode and tonality, harmony, and sentence structure. This paper analyzes and concludes that Debussy extensively utilized special scales such as the pentatonic scale and the diatonic scale, combined with frequent tonal shifts and modulation. Meanwhile, on the harmonic level, traditional rules are broken by employing techniques, creating a hazy atmosphere and endowing the music with rich artistic expression. Moreover, it breaks through the traditional regularity in sentence structure, adopting a layout of phrases of varying lengths and irregularity, enhancing the flow and instantaneous emotions of the music. Thus, it inspires future generations to use new methods in music creation, making music “colorful” and “fragmented”, while providing a deeper understanding and effective reference for performance practice.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Linjun Huang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/02/26
TI  - Analysis of Characteristic Fragments of Debussy’s Impressionist Music--Taking “Suite Bergamasque” as an Example
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 5th International Conference on Culture, Design and Social Development (CDSD 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 228
EP  - 235
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-541-6_27
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-541-6_27
ID  - Huang2026
ER  -