Tonalitet och harmonisk artikulation i Claude Debussys verk : Om reception, harmonikteori och analys

Sammanfattning: This dissertation is a study of ways to analyze some harmonic features of the music of Claude Debussy. It begins with a critical survey of the discussion of tonality and dissolution of tonality in Debussy's works, as it did manifest itself in contemporary French criticism and in the Germanspeaking countries after World War I. It tries to clarify the notion of 'tonality' involved in this discussion. It comes to a critical conclusion concerning the characterization of Debussy's music as embodying dissolution of tonality, which is found to be either rather trivial or speculative, i.e. unproven and difficult to test. A conceptual clarification is suggested, which gives a slightly different, at once more general and more precise, meaning to the trivial version of the discussed characterization.Next we turn to a discussion of the use of different scale-forms found in Debussy's music. We show that, in spite of the absence of tonality at the chord level, and in spite of the presence of a wide variety of different scale-forms, a scale-based conception of keys can be used to analyze at least some works of Debussy as embodying an articulation of keys. We then turn to ways to analyze the scale-form variation in itself. Lastly, we note that key-articulation in Debussy's music is due to two factors: transposition and scale-form variation. We present a simple method to single out the contributions of these two factors.