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Clair de Lune

C. Debussy

By Mayank Sanganeria

In D-flat major, this piece is 166 chord changes across 72 bars under the notes on the page — a expert-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 95 of 97 in the library, ranked easiest to hardest. Reduced to block chords, that's a progression you can learn in a sitting; the piece you're reading is that progression wearing figuration.

Practice this piece → Practice chords → Learn it section by section → Hear the harmony → Sight-read something new →

What's inside the harmony

Reducing the piece to block chords and labeling every change turns up harmonic phenomena that are easy to miss reading the figuration straight — each one below is also its own corpus-wide census.

• Secondary dominants 13× bar 2: viio7/vi (Gb) · bar 6: V7/vi (A) · bar 13: V7/IV (Ab)
• Borrowed chords 5× bar 28: bIII (Ab) · bar 67: bIII (Ab) · bar 69: bIII (Ab)
• Color chords 19× bar 33: IV+7 (D) · bar 34: IV+ (D) · bar 34: V+
• Chord inversions 40× bar 1: I (F) (first inversion, bass F4) · bar 2: viio7/vi (Gb) (third inversion, bass G-4) · bar 3: vi7 (F) (second inversion, bass F4)
• Seventh chords 40× bar 2: viio7/vi (Gb) — A-diminished seventh chord · bar 3: vi7 (F) — Bb-minor seventh chord · bar 4: V7 (Eb) — Ab-dominant seventh chord
• Modulation 4× bar 1: bars 1–8: C# major (r=0.93) · bar 25: bars 25–36: C# major (r=0.97) · bar 40: bars 40–43: c# minor (r=0.87)
• Pedal points 4× bar 45: E-2 held bars 45–46 under ii7, V7 (Eb) · bar 49: G-4 held bars 49–50 under ii7 (Gb), ii (Gb) · bar 51: F4 held bars 51–53 under iii, V7/vi, iii7, vi (F)

Free scores

• Blocked-chord reduction (MusicXML) — the harmony skeleton the player performs
• The piece as written (compressed MusicXML)