Overview
Unlike in visual arts, in music impressionism is not a style or aesthetic but instead a label. Furthermore most of the composers who have been called impressionists reject that label. This skepticism is not limited to composers but also to many notable musicologists and critics: Robert Schmitz said "The public, imbued with Wagnerian aesthetics, quickly exchanged study of these works for a rapid and easy label, which if thoughtfully applied to a limited one percent of Debussy's works, might have been ingenious, but which poured on indiscriminately, has resulted for decades in blurred, vague, sloppy, wrongly pedaled, innocuous performances of Debussy's works." Oscar Thompson also notes: "He is not the slightest bit an impressionist. He is, on the contrary, the musician who makes use everywhere of symbols. For the landscape worthy of music, worthy of poetry, worthy of art in short, is a symbol and only a symbol." In most aspects what some would call impressionist music is indistinguishable from late Romantic music.
Musical impressionism was based in France by the French composer Claude Debussy. He and Maurice Ravel were generally considered to be the two "great" impressionists. However, these days composers are generally not as accurately described by the term "Impressionism" as painters in the genre were. Debussy renounced it, saying: "I am trying to do 'something different' – in a way realities – what the imbeciles call 'impressionism' is a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by art critics."
Musical impressionism is closely related to the superior value of impressionist painting: placing the colour factor to the foreground strongly influenced the shaping of new sound effects. These effects include long, atypical chords, the fast movement of sounds in the piano dynamic, the exploration of interesting timbres of an instrument and specific articulation. On the scope of the form of pieces of music impressionist composers enriched the way of creating musical works. In the majority of cases the form was a one-time idea for putting in the kind of order 'the fantasy of sound'. Glimmering sound has become the main feature of impressionist music. It is conventionally called 'a timbre spot'. This phenomenon is connected with harmonic experiments and with the new meaning of piece's melodics. Precedence of timbre creates the melody from the mixture of accords' timbre and figurations rather than from the clear outline of the theme. It comes that sometimes the melody disappears and only few bizarre accords reads. Impressionist harmonic is also about using pentatonic scale, whole-tone scale and Greek or church modes. Instrumentation. Dynamics. Sensitization for the quality of the sounds influenced exposing the subtle dynamic effects – e.g. the variety hues of piano (p, pp, ppp, pppp) which were often complemented by additional written notes. Debussy has implemented the French definitions that suggest sensual experiences, such as 'similarly to the flute', 'from the distance', 'like a rainbow fog' and many others. Titles referring to the poetic pieces help listeners to trigger of a wide range of emotions connected with the music. The most popular subjects for titles are e.g.: the rain, the play of the sea waves, unimaginative moon landscapes and other natural phenomena. Impressionism is usually connected with the term sensualism.
Maurice Ravel composed many other pieces that are not identified as impressionist and it is unlikely the composer thought of them in those terms. Nonetheless, the term is used today to describe the music seen as a reaction to 19th century Romanticism.
Impressionism also gained a foothold in England, where its traits were assimilated by composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, and Frederick Delius. Vaughan Williams in particular exhibited music infused with impressionistic gestures--this was not coincidence, as he was a student of Maurice Ravel. Vaughan Williams' music utilizes melodies and harmonies found in English folk music, such as the pentatonic scale and modes, making it perfectly suited to the polarity-breaking ideals of the impressionist movement, which began moving away from the Major-minor based tonality of the Romantic composers.
Read more about this topic: Impressionist Music