The artistic conception which themes on “Water” is omnipresent, water is an easy-drawn element because its type could be various: water can exist as rain, sea, fog, snow, cloud, ice… it can appear in our daily life in many different kinds of material, and it’s so plentiful that many painters, poets and composers take water as artistic conception for their works.

Achille-Claude Debussy(1862- 1918) and Joseph-Maurice Ravel(1875- 1937) are impressionist composers, they appreciated pieces of one another. Both of them took water as an important artistic conception for their music works, and their ways of composing are quite familiar, while they had utterly different opinions of composing, and we can see the differences between their works by the differences of styles. Take the way of using chords for examples, Debussy took dominant ninth chord and dominant eleventh chord, while Ravel took major seventh chord and Supertonic ninth chord; the forms of Debussy and Ravel are also different, Debussy focused on free pattern, and Ravel focused on classical form.

There are five chapters in this thesis : Chapter 1 is the introduction, it contains the research motivation, methods and literature review; Chapter 2 is the introduction of the Impressionism, and it contains the origin and development of the Impressionism, the impact of Exoticism on the Impressionism, the main feature of the Impressionism. Chapter 3 is the biography and the style of piano pieces of Debussy, the analysis and the interpretation of Jardins sous la pluie and Reflets dans l'eau. Chapter 4 is the biography and the style of piano pieces of Ravel, the analysis and the interpretation of Jeux d'eau and Une barque sur l'ocean. Chapter 5 is the conclusion.