The colours of sound: With his Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune of 1894, Claude Debussy found his way to a completely novel and distinctive idiom that has gone down in music history as Impressionism. Influenced more by painting than by late-romantic music, he sought inspiration in shimmering reflections and noiselessly falling snow, in Spanish tinges, Eastern European folk music and the sounds of Asia. All flowed into his music to create iridescent, other-worldly images in works of entrancing beauty.