Power of Art and Enthusiasm for Inspiration: A Musical Analysis on Debussy’s Firework

Abstract

As the founder of impressionism, Claude Debussy endows his works with new musical language in aspects of melody, harmony, and texture, which functioned as a connection role between tonal and atonal music, and later influenced on the development of atonal music. His program music even exploited a new horizon for western music, and the  innovation in his works was gradually accepted by more and more musicians. In this paper, using a Prelude written for solo piano “Fireworks” as an example, the colorimetric principle was employed to examine how the musicality of the piano works of Debussy is achieved through the applying of impressionism. In addition, its musical form, harmony, texture and other musical features and performing skills were analyzed explicitly. Besides theoretical discussion, the author attempted to reproduce how the musicality of the piano works of Debussy is achieved through the applying the method of impressionism and illustrate Debussy’s innermost emotions in his Fireworks.