Chapter 26 – Impressionism

Illustration 1: "Jerusalem Artichoke Flowers", Claude Monet 1880

At the end of the Romantic Era, the entire zeitgeist of the music—the tradition, style, the musical rules—began to disintegrate into a period of upheaval marked by experimentation. The expressive usefulness of tonal harmony, the foundation for the music of the previous 200 years, was no longer adequate for what composers wanted to express. The forms it had spawned—the symphony and the sonata cycle—were less useful to the composers of the new era, even if their spirit of creating and resolving drama were still needed.

One of the artistic movements from this era is known as Impressionism and takes its name from a style of painting that appeared in France in the late 1800s.

The music of the Impressionists owes a great deal to the movement of Nationalism and, by the numbers, wasn't actually that broad of a movement. There were only two major French composers associated with it: Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy (who hated the label). A third composer, American Charles Griffes, also composed in the style early in his life but moved away from it before his very untimely death at age 35 in a worldwide flu pandemic. One reason it probably didn’t become as wide reaching of a momevent is that if you follow Debussy's musical rules, you end up sounding. . . like Debussy. Most composers want to create their own unique sound and be known as originators—this is not a good way to achieve that goal.

The label Impressionism came from a specific painting by Claude Monet—Impression, Sunrise. First exhibited in 1874, Monet chose to avoid hard lines and shapes, instead creating an image that captured the essence of the image without capturing the details.

Monet and a number of other painters—Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne—adopted this style in spite of it not always being well received by critics. To describe them, one annoyed critic coined the term “Impressionists” that was intended to have a derogatory meaning. The painters rebelliously adopted the label.

Illustration 2: "Still Life with Apples and Peaches", Paul Cezanne, 1905

Impressionist paintings often convey the diffusion of light in reflections on the surface of water or diffused through warm air. In addition to the appearance, the subject matter of many Impressionist paintings is more ephemeral—focusing on the fleeting moment that quickly goes by (very similar to the work of the great 20th century photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who was also French). Many of them experimented with vivid pure colors in place of the usual mixing.

With the same cultural influences, the desire for their own distinct French sound (during the era of Nationalism), musicians took inspiration from the painters and created a style of music that also became known as Impressionism. There are parallels to painting in the music of the Impressionist composers. Like their visual counterparts, they avoided hard lines and distinct shapes—in musical terms, the great soaring melodies of Romantic music and the traditional structures such as sonata form and the sonata cycles.

Subject matters also strikingly paralleled the painting such as nature, water, and ephemeral scenes that capture a fleeting moment. The orchestral music—especially that of Maurice Ravel—boldly uses exotic tone colors in the same way as his visual art counterparts would on a canvas. Exotic non-European music was a source of inspiration for Debussy and Ravel (just as Eastern art inspired their counterparts)i.

While this musical movement lasted only a few decades and was mainly associated with two composers from one country (France) , it is far more than just a footnote in music history.

This text has talked about the use of tonal harmony as being a very powerful way to create a piece of music and a sense of dramatic flow. Harmonies are assembled in a very distinct way that pulls the piece forward.

A “home base” is established at the beginning. We get away from that foundation, creating a sense of tension and anticipation. The composer will eventually lead us back to that (after taking a few deceptive twists and turns) until we reach the home base and feel a sense of satisfaction and gratification.

This tonal harmony also comes with a very elaborate set of rules in part writing (the lines that different voices or instruments sound) that dictate how different voice lines must behave relative to each other and what NOT to do. Illustration 3: "Rouen Cathedral, West Facade, Sunlight", Claude Monet 1894

One characteristic of much Impressionist music is the use of parallel chords. Without getting into a technically involved explanation here--in traditional harmony, all parts of a chord are expected to act independently. Deliberately breaking that rule by having the parts move parallel to each other in a particular interval known as a fifth created a drastically different sound and undercut the tonal harmonic sense of a home baseii.

Much of the music written by Debussy and Ravel was for piano. They were both excellent pianists who understood the subtleties they could create. While breaking some early rules, the music is nevertheless HIGHLY dependent on well tempered tuning. Additionally, the complex sonorities of the harmonies require extremely precise tuning in order to blend properly. Earlier pianos would not have had the richness and clarity available to properly achieve all of the effects.

Impressionism was one of a number of experiments in the general area that went outside of the boundaries of tonal harmony. However, it is one of the few that created music that is strikingly beautiful—as long as you're not a critic expecting to find traditional harmonic practices.

One final note on Impressionism and the sometimes unexpected impact that technology has on artists.

Up through the early 1800s, most Western painting was realist, i.e. depicting a scene as accurately as an artist could (or if he chose to embellish, it still looked like it could have been real).

Where did this come from? How did artists get the ideas and impetus for abstract art, surrealism, and expressionism?

Monet was not the first to break away from this (English painter J.M.W. Turner, 1775- 1851 is an earlier example), but in the spectrum of history, this trend of eliminating details to convey a scene seems to have come out of nowhere.

Well. . . maybe not exactly out of nowhere. This is an era where art historians cite a new innovation that deeply worried many painters—the invention of photography.

Photography: a mechanical process that, with a little training, could be created by almost anyone.

The oldest surviving photo, taken by French innovator Nicephore Niepsce, dates from 1826. While it was a very primitive image and took a full day’s exposure to capture the image, it was a technological breakthrough that had been coveted for centuries. Within a few years, his later partner Louis Daguerre refined photography to where it became practical to capture portraits and landscapes very easily, very accurately, and comparatively quickly.

Around 1840 on seeing one of Daguerre's “Daguerreotypes”, French painter Paul Delaroche, is quoted as saying, “From today, painting is dead.”

So, what then would one do when a mechanical device capable of reproduction (and a few years later the ability to mass produce an unlimited number of copies) comes along?

The dilemma wasn’t entirely without precedent. During the Renaissance in the Netherlands, demand for religious art dropped thanks in part to the effects of the Reformation and some of the more austere Protestant denominations. A more affluent middle class became a market for art showing off their possessions. Painters were more than happy to move in that direction, and we see the genre known as the still life becoming a popular medium.

A few centuries later, painters changed styles as a simple matter of survival – painters began doing things the camera couldn't do.

Impressionism is one of the first times in modern art when we see technology displacing older practices. However, this was far from the last time when technology would affect art and artists.

One of the limitations of the early Daguerreotypes was the fact that they could not be reproduced with available technology. Each one was unique.

Reproduction of images eventually changed the dynamics of the situation as well. Early photographers began to see that it was far more financially lucrative to sell the reproduction rights to an image as opposed to selling the physical image.

And of course, when there is a large sum of money involved, we can expect protective copyright laws to follow, with all of the ripple effects from that as well.

So. . . let's challenge the imagination for a few seconds. What would be some of the changes in music if there was a parallel invention and reproduction of sound?

Of course, we know exactly what was set in motion when a young inventor by the name of Thomas Edison was awarded US Patent number 200,521 in 1878 for a machine that could record and playback sound.

And as a consequence, we have a complex web of copyright laws protecting a performance captured on recording—something completely abstract and ephemeral throughout all of human history up to that time.

It was noted earlier in this text that many musicians freely copied and arranged the work of other musicians. In those eras, it was considered a tribute. When music (both printed and recorded, although the latter happened almost immediately following the invention of sound storage) became a salable commodity, laws were soon to follow. The first copyright law was the Statute of Anne, enacted in England in 1709, covering printed text. We see the need for international agreement in the late 1800s (the Berne Convention of 1886). In 1831 we see U.S. laws expanding to include musiciii.

As art had been profoundly changed by technology in the 19th century, a similar revolution in music would not be far behind. Illustration 4: Claude Monet, "The Artist's Garden at Vethiel" (1880)

REPRESENTATIVE COMPOSERS AND MUSIC OF THE IMPRESSIONISTIC ERA

CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862 – 1918)

Debussy is regarded as the father of Impressionistic music. While thoroughly skilled in the traditional way of writing music, Debussy began to break a lot of the old rules governing the way music is written. Many musical experiments were performed in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but of all of the movements that took off in their own directions, Debussy's is one of the few that are quite listenable. One of his devices is the use of dissonance as a stable structural sound ("structural dissonance") instead of something to be avoided or used as a weak point (not unlike the treatment in jazz).

Debussy was a highly skilled pianist who instinctively understood its potential as an instrument with many different colors and effects available. While he composed a lot of music, much of his orchestral music started off as piano music and was orchestrated by someone else.

Compared to Romanticism, much of his music almost seems minimalist.

RECOMMENDED COMPOSITIONS: La Mer; Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun; Three Nocturnes; Preludes for the Piano; The Children's Corner; Violin Sonata; Sacred and Profane Dances for Harp and String Orchestra; String Quartet in G minor.

MAURICE RAVEL (1875 – 1937)

Maurice Ravel was another composer associated with Impressionism, and he was also a close friend of Debussy. Although he really wasn't an Impressionist in the same sense as Debussy, his music shares many of the same characteristics and both composers are usually linked together.

Ravel composed a moderate amount of music for solo piano, much orhestral music, chamber music, and several ballets. He was the most skilled orchestrator of his time, showing masterly control over the many tone colors of an orchestra.

One of his ballets was based on a Spanish dance rhythm called a “bolero” that he simply called Bolero. It consists of fifteen minutes of doing little but repeating the same melody (and a slight variation) over and over, only getting louder and adding more instruments. This description sounds as if it should have been laughed out of the concert hall, but to Ravel's chagrin (the composer himself didn't think much of the piece), he found that it quickly became his most popular piece of music. Decades later when it was used in a popular movie, record stores couldn't keep recordings of it in stock.

He also composed two piano concertos, one of them for Paul Wittgenstein, a pianist who had his right arm amputated during World War I. Performed with the left hand only, it is so ingeniously composed that it is nearly impossible to tell that the soloist is using only one hand!

RECOMMENDED COMPOSITIONS: Bolero; Rhapsodie Espagnol; Two Piano Concerti; Mother Goose; Daphnis and Chloe; Le Tombeau de Couperin and Gaspard de la Nuit for piano. Illustration 5: "Roses", Vincent van Gogh, 1890 i It may also be a little surprising to know that both Debussy and Ravel loved American Jazz. Ravel spent a few months in the US and dearly loved the jazz he heard there, as well as the jazz clubs in Paris. ii For the record, those parallel chords—which were so forbidden in the Baroque, Classical and Romantic Eras (known to music theoreticians as the “common practice era”), are the essence of what rock/metal guitarists call “power chords”. They were also commonly heard in Medieval Music in a primitive type of polyphony known as organum. iii Very surprisingly, there were no Federal Copyright laws in the U.S. before 1972 that covered sound recordings. Many were protected by local and state laws. Because of this, there are no sound recordings in the U.S. that are in public domain—with the obvious exception of those that are deliberately declared public domain and others in similar cases.