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20 Century "Isms": Impressionism, Expressionism, and Neoclassicism

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20 Century “isms”

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Impressionism, Expressionism, and


Neoclassicism
Impressionism
• Impressionism was a 19th-century art
movement that began as a loose association
of Paris-based artists whose independent
exhibitions brought them to prominence in
the 1870s and 1880s.
• The name of the movement is derived from
the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression,
Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant),
• Characteristics of Impressionist paintings include
relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes,
open composition, emphasis on the accurate
depiction of light in its changing qualities (often
accentuating the effects of the passage of time),
ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement
as a crucial element of human perception and
experience, and unusual visual angles.
• The emergence of Impressionism in the visual arts
was soon followed by analogous movements in
other media which became known as Impressionist
music and Impressionist literature.
Claude Monet, Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), 1872, oil on canvas,
Musée Marmottan
Impressionist Music
• The impressionist movement in music was a movement in European
classical music, mainly in France, that began in the late nineteenth
century and continued into the middle of the twentieth century.
• Like its precursor in the visual arts, musical Impressionism focused
on suggestion and atmosphere rather than strong emotion or the
depiction of a story as in program music.
• Musical Impressionism occurred as a reaction to the excesses of
the Romantic era. While this era was characterized by a dramatic
use of the major and minor scale system, Impressionist music tends
to make more use of dissonance and more uncommon scales such
as the whole tone scale.
• Romantic composers also used long forms of music such as the
symphony and concerto, while Impressionist composers favored
short forms such as the nocturne, arabesque, and prelude.
• Musical Impressionism was based in France by the French
composer Claude Debussy. He and Maurice Ravel are
generally considered to be the two "great" Impressionists.
• Musical impressionism is closely related to superior value
of impressionist painting: placing the color factor to the
foreground strongly influenced shaping new sound effects,
by such effects like long, atypical accords, fast move of
sounds in piano dynamic, exposing interesting timbre of
an instrument or specific articulation.
• In a majority of the cases the form is a one-time idea for
putting in a kind of order 'the fantasy of sound'.
Glimmering sound has become the main feature of the
music.
• Melody
– Precedence of timbre induces that the melody is often a mixture
of accords' timbre and figurations rather than a clear outline of
the theme. It comes that sometimes the melody disappears and
only few bizarre accords reads. Impressionist harmonic is also
about utilising pentatonic scale, whole-tone scale and modal
modes.
• Instrumentation
– In a comparison with orchestral neoromantic pieces the texture
of impressionist ones is much clearer as the composers has
abandoned the monumental, rebooted cast of instruments.
Even in pieces written for a vast orchestral cast the full tutti does
not seem at all like the massive timbre. The new type of
orchestration was concentrated on revealing the individual,
unusual features of each of the instruments and using rarely
applied registers.
• Dynamics
– Sensitization for the quality of the sounds influenced on
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
implemented 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 informs about a wide range
of emotions connected with impressionist music. Among
the titles there are a few the most popular subjects: the
rain, the ply of the sea waves, unimaginative moon
landscapes and others connected with nature.
Expressionism
• Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and
painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th
century.
• Its typical trait is to present the world solely from an subjective
perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to
evoke moods or ideas.
• Expressionist artists sought to express meaning or emotional
experience rather than physical reality.
• Expressionism was developed as an avant-garde style before the
First World War. It remained popular during the Weimar Republic,
particularly in Berlin.
• The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including painting,
literature, theatre, dance, film, architecture and music.
• The term is sometimes suggestive of
emotional angst.
• The Expressionist emphasis on individual
perspective has been characterized as a
reaction to positivism and other artistic styles
such as naturalism and impressionism.
• Expressionism as a musical genre is difficult to exactly
define. It is, however, one of the most important
movements of 20th Century music.
• The three central figures of musical expressionism are
Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, Anton Webern and
Alban Berg, the so-called Second Viennese School.
• Musical expressionism is defined in a narrow sense as
embracing most of Schoenberg’s post-tonal but pre-
twelve-tone music, which is to say that of his "free
atonal" period, roughly from 1908 to 1921.
• More broadly, other music from the same period with
shared characteristics is also included .
• In 1909, Schoenberg composed the one act
'monodrama' Erwartung (Expectation).
• This is a thirty minute, highly expressionist work in
which atonal music accompanies a musical drama
centered around a nameless woman. Having
stumbled through a disturbing forest, trying to find
her lover, she reaches open countryside. She
stumbles across the corpse of her lover near the
house of another woman, and from that point on the
drama is purely psychological: the woman denies
what she sees and then worries that it was she who
killed him. The plot is entirely played out from the
subjective point of view of the woman, and her
emotional distress is reflected in the music.
• Other Expressionist works
– Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 19
– Music drama Die Glückliche Hand
• Webern's music was close in style to Schoenberg's expressionism for
only a short while, c. 1909-13. His Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 10
(1911-13) are an example of his expressionist output, and might be
compared to Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16, composed
1909
• Berg's contribution includes his Op. 1 Piano Sonata, and the Four
Songs of Op. 2.
• His major contribution to the genre, however, is the opera Wozzeck,
composed between 1914-25, a very late addition to the genre.
– The opera is highly expressionist in subject material in that it expresses
mental anguish and suffering and is not objective, presented, as it is, largely
from Wozzeck's point of view, but it presents this expressionism within a
cleverly constructed form.
Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire
• a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg that profoundly
influenced 20th century music.
• It is a setting of twenty-one selected poems from Otto Erich
Hartleben's German translation of Albert Giraud's cycle of
French poems of the same name.
• The narrator (voice-type unspecified in the score, but
traditionally performed by a soprano) delivers the poems in
the Sprechstimme style.
– refer to an expressionist vocal technique between singing and
speaking.
• The work is atonal, but does not use the twelve-tone
technique that Schoenberg would devise eight years later.
• It is a cycle of twenty-one songs for female voices
and an ensemble of five musicians who play eight
instruments: piano, cello, violin/viola, flute/piccolo,
clarinet/bass clarinet.
• The instrumentation varies with each piece.
• The cycle divides into three groups of seven songs
that evoke a surrealistic night vision.
– First group: Pierrot, a poet, dunk on moonlight, becomes
increasingly deranged.
– Second group: a nightmare filled with images of death
and martyrdom.
– Pierrot seeks reguge from the nightmare through
clowning, sentimentality, and nostalgia.
Neoclassicism
• Neoclassicism in music was a twentieth-century trend, particularly current in
the period between the two World Wars, in which composers sought to
return to aesthetic precepts associated with the broadly defined concept of
"classicism", namely order, balance, clarity, economy, and emotional
restraint.

• As such, neoclassicism was a reaction against the unrestrained emotionalism


and perceived formlessness of late romanticism, as well as a "call to order"
after the experimental ferment of the first two decades of the twentieth
century.

• The neoclassical impulse found its expression in such features as the use of
pared-down performing forces, an emphasis on rhythm and on contrapuntal
texture, an updated or expanded tonal harmony, and a concentration on
absolute music as opposed to Romantic program music.
• In form and thematic technique, neoclassical music often
drew inspiration from music of the 18th century, though the
inspiring canon belonged as frequently to the Baroque and
even earlier periods as to the Classical period—for this
reason, music which draws inspiration specifically from the
Baroque is sometimes termed Neo-Baroque music.
• Neoclassicism had two distinct national lines of development,
French (proceeding from the influence of Erik Satie and
represented by Igor Stravinsky), and German (proceeding
from the "New Objectivism" of Ferruccio Busoni and
represented by Paul Hindemith.)
• Neoclassicism was an aesthetic trend rather than an
organized movement; even many composers not usually
thought of as "neoclassicists" absorbed elements of the style.
People and Works
• Sergei Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1 (1917) is sometimes cited as a
precursor of neoclassicism (Whittall, 1980), but Prokofiev himself
thought that his composition was a 'passing phase' whereas
Stravinsky's neoclassicism was by the 1920s 'becoming the basic line
of his music’.
• Igor Stravinsky's first foray into the style began in 1919–20 when he
composed the ballet Pulcinella, using themes which he believed to
be by Giovanni Pergolesi (it later came out that many of them were
not, though they were by contemporaries). Later examples are the
Octet for winds, the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, Symphony in C, and
Symphony in Three Movements, as well as the ballets Apollo and
Orpheus, in which the neoclassicism took on an explicitly "classical
Grecian" aura. Stravinsky's neoclassicism culminated in his opera
The Rake's Progress.
• A German strain of neoclassicism was developed by Paul
Hindemith, who produced chamber music, orchestral works,
and operas in a heavily contrapuntal, chromatically inflected
style, best exemplified by Mathis der Maler. Roman Vlad has
contrasted the "classicism" of Stravinsky, which consists in
the external forms and patterns of his works, with the
"classicality" of Busoni, which represents an internal
disposition and attitude of the artist towards works
• Neoclassicism found a welcome audience in America, as the
school of Nadia Boulanger promulgated ideas about music
based on her understanding of Stravinsky's music.
Boulanger's American students include Elliott Carter, Aaron
Copland, Roy Harris, Darius Milhaud, Ástor Piazzolla and
Virgil Thomson.

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