Impressionism

Impressionism in Visual Art

The term impressionism came from French painter Claude Monet's 1872 oil painting Impression, soleil levant. The work is an example of a style of painting which was controversial in the art community at the time for eschewing realism, and instead portraying a scene with broad strokes, muted colors and a focus on light, reflections and less-defined silhouettes rather than actual objects or people.

(Musée Marmottan Monet | Public Domain)

The impressionist movement first began and thrived in France. While styles varied from artist to artist, impressionistic painters generally favored using short, thick strokes of heavy paint applied to the canvas quickly, contrasting adjacent colors rather than blending them together, and completing entire paintings in one setting, without allowing time for paint to dry before adding new layers. Many impressionists preferred painting outside, so outdoor scenes — both cityscapes and pastoral views — are common.

Other well-known impressionist painters included French painters Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne and Danish-French painter Camille Pissarro.

Impressionist Composers

The two composers most famously linked with the impressionist movement in music were French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Though their music embraced many of the same aesthetic ideals as Monet and Renoir, they were not comfortable with their music being labelled impressionistic.

While Debussy's works are centered very clearly on the impressionistic style, may other compoers made use of impressionistic techniques amidst other musical languages in their work. These included French composers Lili Boulanger and Paul Dukas, Spanish composers Isaac Albéniz and Manuel de Falla, Russian composer Alexander Scriabin and Italian composer Ottorino Respighi.

Musical Techniques

Though impressionism's defining characteristic is the portrayal of a scene's mood or feeling rather than it's explicit details, impressionistic music tends to atmospheric in nature, avoiding strong dissonances and traditional formal structures. In fact, the use of certain specific musical techniques — and especially their combination — is present in a large majority of works considered to be impressionistic.

Irregular Harmonic Rhythm

Impressionism tends to avoid consistent harmonic rhythm. Passages often have a very static harmony, with a single chord lasting several measures while the melody explores the tonal space. When they do occur, chord changes are often sporadic or clustered together.

Anhemitonic Scales

Composers writing in an impressionistic style avoid leading-tones, tri-tones, and other melodic elements to either avoid traditional harmonic tensions, or to embrace and explore the dissonances rather than resolve them in traditional ways.

As such, impressionist composers embrace scales which are anhemitonic — free of half-steps — such as the whole-tone scale or the major pentatonic scale.

Harmonic Language

Composers in the Romantic era primarily used major, minor and diminished triads and seventh chords, and used extended harmonies — ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth chords — sparingly and generally only on dominant harmonies. Impressionist composers use a much more open harmonic vocabulary, including extended harmonies on any scale degree, augmented triads, and tertial chords with added seconds, fourths, or sixths. Composers will sometimes use planing as a means of pandiatonically reinforcing a melodic line.

Pantriadicism

Impressionist composers tend to avoid functional harmony, especially tritone chords like diminished triads and major-minor, half-diminished or fully diminished seventh chords. They did not, however avoid chromaticism, and in fact sometimes would make use of pantriadicism to vary a piece's texture while avoiding traditional resolutions of dissonance.

Intersections with Jazz

While jazz encompasses a much larger set of styles and techniques, many of the music characteristics of impressionism are regularly found across many jazz styles, including the use of whole-tone and pentatonic scales, a harmonic language which embraces extended harmonies, and a near-pantriadic level of chromatic color.

Exercises