Impressionism in Music & Art

The impressionist style of painting is characterized chiefly by concentration on the general impression produced by a scene or object and the use of unmixed primary colors and small strokes to simulate actual reflected light.

Impressionism, French Impressionnisme, a major movement, first in painting and later in music, that developed chiefly in France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Impressionist painting comprises the work produced between about 1867 and 1886 by a group of artists who shared a set of related approaches and techniques. The most conspicuous characteristic of Impressionism was an attempt to accurately and objectively record visual reality in terms of transient effects of light and colour. The principal Impressionist painters were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Armand Guillaumin, and Frédéric Bazille, who worked together, influenced each other, and exhibited together independently. Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne also painted in an Impressionist style for a time in the early 1870s. The established painter Édouard Manet, whose work in the 1860s greatly influenced Monet and others of the group, himself adopted the Impressionist approach about 1873.

The word ``impressionniste'' was printed for the first time in the Charivari on the 25 April 1874 by Louis Leroy, after Claude Monet's landscape entitled Impressions: soleil levant [Impressions]. This word was used to call Exposition des Impressionnistes an exhibit hold in the salons of the photographer Nadar and organized by the ``Société anonyme des peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs'' [``Anonymous society of painters, sculptors and engravers''], composed of Pissarro, Monet, Sisley, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Guillaumin and Berthe Morisot.

The Founders

The founders of this society were animated by the will to break with the official art. The official theory that the color should be dropped pure on the canvas instead of getting mixed on the palette will only be respected by a few of them and only for a couple of years. In fact, the Impressionism is a lot more a state of the mind than a technique; thus artists other than painters have also been qualified of impressionists. Many of these painters ignore the law of simultaneous contrast as established by Chevreul in 1823. The expressions ``independants'' or ``open air painters'' may be more appropriate than ``impressionists'' to qualify those artists continuing a tradition inherited from Eugène Delacroix, who thought that the drawing and colors were a whole, and English landscape painters, Constable, Bonington and especially William Turner, whose first law was the observation of nature, as for landscape painters working in Barbizon and in the Fontainebleau forest.

Eugène Boudin, Stanislas Lépine and the Dutch Jongkind were among the forerunners of the movement. In 1858,
Eugène Boudin met in Honfleur Claude Monet, aged about 15 years. He brought him to the seashore, gave him colors and taught him how to observe the changing lights on the Seine estuary. In those years, Boudin is still the minor painter of the Pardon de Sainte-Anne-la-Palud, but is on the process of getting installed on the Normandy coast to paint the beaches of Trouville and Le Havre. On the Côte de Grâce, in the Saint-Siméon farm, he attracts many painters including Courbet, Bazille, Monet, Sisley. The last three will meet in Paris in the free Gleyre studio, and in 1863 they will discover a porcelain painter, Auguste Renoir.

At the same time, other artists wanted to bypass the limitations attached to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and were working quai des Orfèvres in the Swiss Academy; the eldest, from the Danish West Indies, was Camille Pissarro; the other two were Paul Cézanne and Armand Guillaumin.

Le ``Salon des Refusés''

These people were highly impressed by the works of Edouard Manet, and became outraged when they learned that he was refused for the 1863 Salon. The indignation was so high among the artistic population that Napoleon III allowed the opening of a ``Salon des Refusés'', where Manet, Pissarro, Jongkind, Cals, Chintreuil, Fantin-Latour, etc. showed their works. Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe provoked a great enthusiasm among the young painters, who saw represented in Manet's painting many of their concerns. They started meeting around him in the café Guerbois, 9, avenue de Clichy, and thus creating l'école des Batignolles.

The 1866 Salon accepted the works of some of them: Degas, Bazille, Berthe Morisot, Sisley; Monet exposed the portrait of Camille, Pissarro, les Bords de la Marne en hiver; Manet, Cézanne, Renoir were refused, and Emile Zola wrote in l'Evenement a diatribe which made him the official upholder of those newcomers bearing an more revolutionary attitude in the conception than in the still traditional painting. The main distinction lies in the attraction for color and the liking of light; but Berthe Morisot remained faithful to Manet's teaching; Degas was mixed between his admiration of Ingres and the Italian Renaissance painters; Cézanne attempted to ``faire du Poussin sur nature''; Claude Monet himself, in la Terrasse au Havre and les Femmes au jardin (1866, Louvre, salles du Jeu de Paume), is far from announcing his future audacity.

The 1870 war

The 1870 war split those beginners. Frédéric Bazille was killed in Beaune-la-Rolande; Renoir was mobilized; Degas volunteered; Cézanne retired in Provence; Pissarro, Monet and Sisley moved to London, where they met Paul Durand-Ruel. This stay in London is a major step in the evolution of Impressionism, both because these young artists met there their first merchant, and because they discovered Turner's paintings, whose light analysis will mark them.   Back in Paris, most of these painters went to work in Argenteuil (Monet, Renoir), Chatou (Renoir), Marly (Sisley), or on the banks of the river Oise (Pissarro, Guillaumin, Cézanne). Edouard Manet painted the Seine with Claude Monet and, under his influence, adopted the open air work.

Public Opinion

Durand-Ruel was unable to sell the works of the future impressionists and had to cease buying in 1873; thus, next year, they decided to expose in Nadar's (15 April-15 May 1874), where they displayed the works that the Salon had refused. They invited with no success Manet, but Lépine, Boudin, Bracquemond the engraver, Astruc the sculptor, and the painters Cals, de Nittis, Henri Rouart, etc. joined them. Many artists became then conscious of the public and critics incomprehension, but the solidarity didn't last long. Cézanne didn't participate in the group second exhibit, galerie Durand-Ruel, rue Le Peletier, in 1876, which hold 24 Degas and works from Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley and Frédéric Bazille. They met some upholders, such as Duranty, Armand Silvestre, Philippe Burty, Emile Blémond, Georges Rivière, soon with Théodore Duret. The disappearance of Cézanne, Renoir, Sisley, Berthe Morisot in the 1879 exhibit proved that the group was splitting apart. Renoir preferred to send to the official Salon Mme Charpentier et ses enfants and the Portrait of Jeanne Samary; yet only few people admired his artworks and of those of his friends, and the artists'life was uneasy, if not miserable. Degas tried, with Pissarro, to maintain the unity of the group, but his attempt failed since Monet, Sisley and Renoir were missing for the fifth exhibit, opened in April 1880; however, artworks from Gauguin appeared there for the first time. In 1881, the some of the Impressionists went back to Nadar's: Pissarro, Degas, Guillaumin, Berthe Morisot. The ``seventh exhibition of independant artists'' was the become the ``Salon des indépendants'' two years later.

Only Monet and Sisley went always deeper into the analysis of light changings and their effects on appearances. Degas, Renoir and Cézanne headed towards opposite directions, whereas Pissarro was interested by the researches of Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac. If, at this stage, Impressionists were becoming appreciated, their situation was still harsh; the Salon was still refusing their paintings, and in 1894, 25 out of 65 artworks donated by Caillebotte to the Luxembourg museum were rejected.

Yet, when Camille Pissarro, the Impressionist patriarch, died in 1903, everybody agreed that this movement was the main XIXth century artistic revolution, and that all its members were among the finest painters. The influence of the Impressionists was great out of France, especially in Germany, with Liebermann, Corinth, and in Belgium.

Impressionism in Music

Throughout history, art and music have developed in parallel with each other. The impressionist movement is no exception. Impressionism in art began in France near the end of the 19th century.   Impressionist painters did not seek to show reality in the classical sense of a picture-perfect image; instead, they emphasized light and color to give an overall "impression" of their subjects.

Much in the same way, impressionism in music aims to create descriptive impressions, not necessarily to draw clear pictures. The music is not designed to explicitly describe anything, but rather to create a mood or atmosphere. This is done through almost every aspect of music: melody, harmony, color, rhythm, and form.  Melodies tend to be short in nature, often repeated in different contexts to give different moods.  In terms of color (see also chromaticism), notes are often drawn from scale systems other than the traditional major and minor. These include pentatonic, whole-tone, or other exotic scales (for example, Debussy, a major figure of impressionism, was influenced by Asian music).

The use (or misuse, as some critics might say) of harmony
was a major part of impressionism. Impressionists did not use
chords in the traditional way. For nearly the entire history of Western music, chords had been used to build and relieve tension, thus giving the music a sense of direction. A nice example to use here is Mozart's famous Sonata in A, K.331. You can definitely hear the harmonies constantly leading the music forward until it finally reaches resolution on the final note.

The term was applied to early 20th-century French music that was similarly concerned with the representation of landscape or natural phenomena, particularly the water and light imagery dear to Impressionists, through subtle textures suffused with instrumental colour. Debussy has traditionally been described as an ‘Impressionist’ (he himself disapproved of the term); he wrote many piano pieces with titles evocative of nature, for example Reflets dans l'eau (‘Reflections in the Water’, 1905), Les Sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir (‘Sounds and Perfumes Swirl in the Evening Air’, 1910), and Brouillards (‘Mists’, 1913). The Impressionists' use of brush-strokes or dots (‘pointillism’) is also reflected in the music of Debussy and Ravel, for example in Ravel's ballet Daphnis et Chloé (1912), in which static sections are built up from slow-moving harmonies arpeggiated with fast-moving ‘dots’ of sound, akin to the broad washes of colour in the paintings. ‘Impressionist’ has been applied loosely to several later composers, notably Bartók, Delius, and Szymanowski.

Now to provide an example of impressionism, we have "L'îsle Joyeuse" ("The Island of Joy") by Claude Debussy. This is actually a musical interpretation of the painting "The Embarkation for Cythera" by Jean-Antoine Watteau.   “Embarkation for Cythera” achieved a notable place in Music History in 1904 when composer Claude Debussy wrote a piece for solo piano titled "L'Isle Joyeuse," inspired by the painting. The colorful and brilliant piano writing vividly depicts the ecstasy of the lovers in the painting. Both the painting and the piece tell the story of a journey to the mythical island of Cythera, an ideal place of love and beauty. The opening trills suggest the excited anticipation of the travelers; a middle section depicts them floating over the water; their arrival is heralded by jubilant trumpeting; and their ecstatic joy in realizing their destination provides a climactic finish. The chords in this piece sometimes serve no harmonic purpose in the traditional sense; these chords set the joyful "color" and mood of the piece, and are no longer exclusively used to build and release tension. Sometimes the melody isn't very clear, but rather implied... we only get an impression of it.

Impressionism marked the first major steps into the Debussy and Maurice Ravel. An especially noteworthy aspect of impressionism was the weakening of the concept of tonality. Even though impressionist music was still tonal in nature, the "non-functional" chords paved the way for the later likes of Schoenberg, and others to do away with tonality altogether (this is discussed further on the page dealing with atonalism.)

In music the association between Impressionism and innovation was more short-lived and more narrowly restricted to Debussy and those whose music resembled or was influenced by him. These composers’ attempt to explore the fleeting moment and the mystery of life led them to seek musical equivalents for water, fountains, fog, clouds and the night, and to substitute sequences of major 2nds, unresolved chords and other sound-colours for precise designs, solid, clear forms, and logical developments. To convey a sense of the intangible flux of time, they used extended tremolos and other kinds of ostinatos, as well as a variety of rhythmic densities. But, like the painters who stressed not new realities but new perceptions of it, Debussy explained that this music’s ‘unexpected charm’ came not so much from the chords or timbres themselves – already found in the vocabularies of composers such as Field, Chopin, Liszt, Grieg, Franck, Balakirev, Borodin and Wagner – but from their ‘mise en place’, ‘the rigorous choice of what precedes and what follows’. For Debussy form was the result of a succession of colours and rhythms ‘de couleurs et de temps rythmés’ or, as Dukas put it, ‘a series of sensations rather than the deductions of a musical thought’. This concept in turn demanded new approaches to performance. In interpreting Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, the pianist Ricardo Viñes used the pedals liberally when playing fast-moving passages in the high registers ‘to bring out the hazy impression of vibrations in the air’.

Yet to describe Debussy’s aesthetic as Impressionist is not entirely accurate, for his notion of musical line was as neo-Impressionist as it was Impressionist, and his musical innovations owed much to his predecessors. Like the Impressionist painters, who responded to Haussmann’s transformation of Paris and sought to disguise the banality of its forms, Debussy gave the musical line a decorative function. Eschewing conventional melodies, he fragmented themes into short motives and used repetitive figurations resembling those of Liszt and in Russia, The Five. Quickly moving passages wherein overall direction and texture are more audible than individual notes and rhythms give the effect of quasi-improvisation. At other moments in his and other Impressionist music, two kinds of line interact. As in Monet’s and Renoir’s paintings where sketch like images of people vibrating with the rhythms of nature are juxtaposed with the straight lines of Haussmann’s gardens and avenues or industrial railroads and bridges, sinuous arabesques in this music, liberated from their dependence on functional harmony and sometimes incorporating medieval, whole-tone or pentatonic scales, give a sense of timelessness, of a hypnotic turning in place, while clearly etched tunes focus the listener’s attention. Here, however, the resemblance to Impressionist painting breaks down. While the straight lines of Impressionist painting came from modern life, Debussy’s melodies were often derived from folksongs, as in music by The Five. Reflecting the return of traditional values more characteristic of neo-Impressionist art, they are simple and hark back to earlier times or pastoral settings, often with a nationalist subtext. This is also the case in music imitating or incorporating Spanish popular song (such as that of Ravel, Albéniz, and Falla), or the Celtic traditions of Brittany or western Ireland. The strongly melodic character of Ravel’s music likewise places him outside the purely Impressionist style.

http://library.thinkquest.org/27110/periods/impressionism.html to listen to audio clips on your computer and explore other links annotated in this article.