Clair de Lune, by Debussy
Every score here is public domain, free to read, print and keep. Open it in the browser and it plays, at whatever tempo you can read it.
Get the practice plan for Clair de Lune
Here it is. Check your inbox for day 1.
- Hear it through at Slow (36 bpm). Open it in the reader, choose Slow, and follow the page with your eyes without playing. As it plays, count 3 big beats to the bar.
- Learn the right hand of bars 1 to 8 on its own, in D♭ major. Say the note names out loud the first time through, then play it three times without stopping.
- Find the chords under it: D♭, G♭dim7, D♭6 and A♭7. Play each one as a block in your left hand and say its name, so you know what the harmony is before the left hand has to move.
- Learn the left hand of the same bars on its own. Keep it quiet and even: it is the floor the tune stands on.
- Put hands together at Slow, 36 bpm. Bars 1 to 8 only. Stop after every wrong note and play that bar again before moving on.
- Move up to Steady (55 bpm) once Slow feels easy three times in a row. Then learn the next 8 bars the same way: right hand, left hand, together.
- Play the whole piece (about 5 minutes) from the start, at whatever speed keeps it going. A steady run with a few slips beats a fast one that stops.
About this piece
Moonlight, from a poem by Verlaine about masked dancers who are almost, but not quite, sad. Debussy wrote it at twenty-eight and it has become the most famous quiet piece in the world: music that seems to arrive from somewhere rather than begin.
How to play it
Never let it become loud, and never let it become strict: the bar lines are suggestions here, and the pedal is half the instrument.
Reading it, and printing it
The score opens in Artform's reader, which shows the music as engraved notation and plays it back so you can hear the line before you try it. You can slow the tempo down, loop a passage that is not working yet, and print the page when you would rather have paper on the stand.
The file itself is MusicXML, which MuseScore, Sibelius, Finale and Dorico all open, so the notes are yours to keep whatever you read them in.
More free Debussy sheet music
Who Debussy was
French composer often filed under Impressionism, a label borrowed from painting that he actually resented, preferring to think of his music as its own thing entirely: harmony built for colour and mood rather than the traditional pull toward resolution. He won the prestigious Prix de Rome, hated the experience, and spent the rest of his career quietly dismantling the rules he'd been trained in. Clair de Lune and the two books of Préludes, with titles like "Footsteps in the Snow" and "The Sunken Cathedral," ask a pianist to think less about hitting the right note and more about the shape of a sound in the air. He died during the First World War, as German shells fell on Paris, still revising h…
Learn the music behind it
Reading a piece and understanding it are different skills. If you want the harmony under this one, the chord trainer teaches chords the way songs use them, and the scale pages cover the fingering for every key, including D♭ major.