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Arabesque No. 1

C. Debussy

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In A major, this piece is 167 chord changes across 107 bars under the notes on the page — a advanced-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 36 of 40 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 → Learn it section by section → Hear the harmony →

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 37× bar 2: viiø7/V (A) · bar 4: viiø7/V · bar 5: viiø7/V (F#)
  • Borrowed chords 6× bar 65: bVI · bar 65: bIII (E) · bar 67: bIII (E)
  • Chord inversions 40× bar 1: vi7 (C#) (second inversion, bass C#4) · bar 1: vii (B) (first inversion, bass B3) · bar 2: viiø7/V (A) (second inversion, bass A3)
  • Seventh chords 40× bar 1: vi7 (C#) — F#-minor seventh chord · bar 2: viiø7/V (A) — D#-half-diminished seventh chord · bar 3: vi7 (E) — F#-minor seventh chord
  • Modulation 4× bar 8: bars 8–23: c# minor (r=0.94) · bar 65: bars 65–69: C major (r=0.92) · bar 89: bars 89–95: f# minor (r=0.94)
  • Pedal points 3× bar 6: E2 held bars 6–9 under iii7 (E), iii (E) · bar 76: E2 held bars 76–79 under iii7 (E), iii (E) · bar 99: E2 held bars 99–103 under iii7 (E), iii (E)

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