music

1. 20th Century “isms”
Impressionism, Expressionism, and
Neoclassicism

2. 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),

3. • 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.

4. Claude Monet, Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), 1872, oil on canvas,
Musée Marmottan

5. 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.

6. • 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.

7. • 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.

8. • 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.

9. 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.

10. • 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.

11. • 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 .

12. • 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.

13. • 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.

14. 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.

15. • 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.

16. 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.

17. • 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.

18. 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.

19. • 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.