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Arabesque No. 2

C. Debussy

By Mayank Sanganeria

In G major, this piece is 182 chord changes across 110 bars under the notes on the page — a advanced-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 94 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 22× bar 11: V7/V (C#) · bar 12: V7/V (C#) · bar 19: V7/IV (D)
• Borrowed chords 9× bar 38: bVII (E) · bar 39: bVII (G) · bar 47: bVII (G)
• Color chords 12× bar 27: V+ · bar 32: #i7 · bar 33: #i7
• Chord inversions 40× bar 1: iii7 (D) (first inversion, bass D4) · bar 3: V7 (A) (second inversion, bass A3) · bar 5: vi7 (G) (first inversion, bass G2)
• Seventh chords 40× bar 1: iii7 (D) — B-minor seventh chord · bar 3: V7 (A) — D-dominant seventh chord · bar 5: vi7 (G) — E-minor seventh chord
• Modulation 1× bar 39: bars 39–46: C major (r=0.85)
• Pedal points 3× bar 19: D4 held bars 19–20 under V7/IV (D), iiiø7 (D) · bar 97: D4 held bars 97–97 under V, vi7 (D), V7 · bar 108: G1 held bars 108–110 under I, i

Free scores

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