Debussy's Musical Language

Debussy is known as the earliest ancestor of the impressionism music in the history of western music. And the period he lived was the one when the classic tonal language was gradually falling apart, and many composers were exploring how to get rid of the limit of the traditional functional harmony, and in order to create new musical language. Debussy is one important representative of them.This dissertation is written from the perspective of Debussy's musical language, elaborating in brief the traditional tonal language, the direct influences to the development of his musical language, as well as the different tonal language developing route. The core of the dissertation is to seek the structural logic of the pitch-organization that hidden under the complicated image through elaborating and analyzing the organizing materials, pitch space , theme, the developing ways of the theme of his musical language and so on.The goal of the dissertation is to explore the structural logics that are different from the traditional ones in Debussy's musical language, and to illustrate his influence to musical languages' development of later generations. His roles, serving as a link between past and future in the transferring from the traditional tonal language to the post-tonal language can not be omitted.