A philosophical, aesthetic and polemical term borrowed from late 19th-century French painting. It was first used to mock Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, painted in 1873 and shown in the first of eight Impressionist exhibitions (1874–86), and later to categorize the work of such artists as Manet, Degas, Pissaro, Sisley, Renoir, Cézanne and Regnault. ‘Impressionist’ also describes aspects of Turner, Whistler, the English Pre-Raphaelites and certain American painters, as well as the literary style of Poe and the Goncourt brothers, and the free verse and fluidity of reality in symbolist poetry.
1. Aesthetic and scientific principles.
3. Social and political associations.
4. Neo-Impressionism and post-Impressionism.
JANN PASLER
The word ‘Impressionism’ did not appear in conjunction with a specific musical aesthetic until the 1880s (although it had been used earlier in titles of travel pieces and descriptions of 19th-century programme music). Perhaps referring to the Pièces pittoresques of Chabrier, a friend of the painters and collector of their work, Renoir spoke to Wagner in 1882 of ‘the Impressionists in music’. More importantly for historians, the secretary of the Académie des Beaux Arts used the word in 1887 to attack Debussy’s ‘envoi’ from Rome, Printemps. Besides displaying an exaggerated sense of musical colour, the work called into question the authority of academic values, and so its ‘impressionism’ appeared ‘one of the most dangerous enemies of truth in art’.
Several meanings underlie and accompany this concept, each with its own artistic implications. The oldest and in some ways the most important comes from Hume’s Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), in which he describes an impression as the immediate effect of hearing, seeing or feeling on the mind. The word entered discussions about art in the 1860s just as French positivists, echoing Hume’s concerns and interest in physiopsychology, began their studies of perception. Taine and Littré among others focussed on sensations – the effect that objects make on sense organs – as an important area of empirical research. They believed that impressions (a synonym for sensations) were primordial, the embryos of one’s knowledge of self and the world and, significantly, a product of the interaction between subject and object. Critics saw something similar in contemporary painting, particularly that which reflected a new relationship to nature. Jules-Antoine Castagnary, who in 1874 was the first to dub the painters ‘Impressionists’ observed that ‘they render not the landscape but the sensation produced by the landscape’. Although these painters placed more emphasis on personal, subjective experience than did the positivists, they too believed that any art based on impressions had the capacity to synthesize subject and object. Impressions then were not ends in themselves, but the means to new experiences of reality. Responding to the breakdown of the visual spectrum into what was assumed to be characteristic of unreflective vision, that is the vibrations of colour and light, these artists simplified their palettes by using only colours of the prism, replaced light-and-dark oppositions with a new concept of visual harmony, and created mosaics of distinct rather than blended colours and forms. Critics considered this ‘physiological revolution of the human eye’ an attempt to render visual experiences more alive, and viewers more perceptive of nuances. In 1883 Jules Laforgue, one of the first to see an affinity between Wagner and Impressionist art, compared this kind of vision to aural experiences in which ‘the ear easily analyses harmonics like an auditory prism’. As interest in optics and Charles Henry’s ‘chromatic circle’ of colours grew, the more scientifically minded neo-Impressionists of the late 1880s focussed on the physics of coloured vibrations per se, the role of contrasting colours in the creation of visual harmony, and the effect of the artist’s nervous system on the nature of the impressions.
Similar issues were associated with 19th-century music deemed Impressionist. Critics hailed Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony as the first attempt to ‘paint the sensual world’ in sound even though it followed a long tradition of programme music by composers as different as Janequin, Byrd, Marais, Telemann, Rameau and Gluck who used sound to suggest pictures or the composer’s emotion before nature. Wagner’s nature music, especially the Forest Murmurs from Siegfried and vaporous moments in Parsifal and Tristan, also elicited vague references to musical Impressionism. Palmer argues that although Chabrier ‘lacked the intense preoccupation with personal sensation so characteristic of Debussy’, he was the ‘first to translate the Impressionist theories’ into music, his chiaroscuro-like effects predating those of both Debussy and Delius. However, it was Debussy’s extension of these ideas which had a lasting impact on the future of music. Printemps, an evocation of the ‘slow and arduous birth of things in nature’, parallels not only the painters’ turn to ‘open-air’ subjects, but also their exploration of unusual colours and mosaic-like designs. Debussy extended the orchestral palette with harp harmonics, muted cymbals and a wordless chorus singing with closed lips (later Delius did the same in A Song of the High Hills and Ravel in Daphnis et Chlöé). In Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and subsequent pieces he increasingly emphasized distinct sound-colours (those produced by individual instruments, rather than the composite ones of chamber or orchestral ensembles). And, like the Impressionist painters and later the symbolist poets, Debussy wanted music not merely to represent nature, but to reflect ‘the mysterious correspondences between Nature and the Imagination’.
Just as contemporary physics informed new ideas about painting, Helmholtz’s acoustics and developments in the spectral analysis of sound fed composers’ interest in musical resonance and the dissolution of form by vibrations. In much of Debussy’s music, as in Impressionist pieces by Delius, Ravel and others, the composer arrests movement on 9th and other added-note chords, not to produce dissonant tension but, as Dukas put it, to ‘make multiple resonances vibrate’. This attention to distant overtones, particularly generated by gong-like lower bass notes, produces a new sense of musical space, in effect giving a greater sense of the physical reality of sound. The wide dynamic and registral range – a complete scale of nuances – can effect subtle vibrations in the listener’s nervous system. In one of his earliest essays (1899), Emile Vuillermoz reiterated concerns expressed earlier by Laforgue about the problems of line and fixed forms. Sounding like a neo-Impressionist, he suggested that ‘the progressive refinement of our nerves [by this music] leads us to think that this is the path of musical progress’.
The second category of meaning associated with Impressionism, also derived from criticism of the early Impressionist painters, relates to the self-conscious individualism of the artists in the original exhibitions, and to what Shiff calls the ‘technique of originality’. Like the concerts of the Société Nationale which began around the same time, Impressionist exhibitions were not unified by style, but started as an attempt by a diverse and complex group of young painters to show their own work independent of the juried Salons. The word ‘Impressionism’ rapidly became generic, referring to the avant garde of the 1870s and 80s, and later even the symbolists with whom the Impressionists shared more than is often acknowledged. What these artists agreed on was the inversion of conventional hierarchies and values, sometimes by means of influences from the distant past and exotic places. Rejecting the use of imposing forms to project grandeur and promote intellectual reflection, Impressionists favoured delicate sensuality, immediacy and the idea of art as an invitation to pleasure. They sought to renew a sense of the mystery of life and the beauty of the world through perception itself, using art to reveal the deep intuitions of the unconscious. Not incidentally they believed that the way images and sounds are produced affects their perception. Instead of working from line to colour, artists like Cézanne conceived painting in terms of colour relationships, line and form being secondary to juxtapositions of colour and light. Neo-Impressionists like Signac and Seurat, by contrast, returned to more conscious thinking about compositional form and applied systematic principles concerning line and colour to elicit specific ‘correspondences’ for emotional states. These preoccupations paved the way for early experiments with anti-naturalistic flat surfaces by post-Impressionists like Matisse.
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 sketchlike 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.
Two other meanings of Impressionism circulated in the late 19th century. One was an association with women. This came not only from the importance of nature, leisure, sensuality and idealism in the aesthetic, but also from the role painters such as Morisot played in the Impressionist exhibitions. Over time this connotation of the word has been used to discount other meanings, undermining the serious intentions of the aesthetic’s original proponents and their contribution to artistic progress. A less obvious meaning of Impressionism relates to its socio-political implications. Although Impressionist painting was never explicitly political Paul Tucker argues that Alsace and Lorraine were on the minds of Parisians during the first Impressionist exhibition, and that the prevalence of French subjects in the paintings reflected the artists’ patriotism. Castagnary considered their individualist stance a model for French citizens’ emancipation from dogma, essential to the reconstruction of the country after the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. Although Renoir was the only Impressionist painter who came from the working class, Mallarmé saw the new art as an expression of working-class vision and ideology: its pictorial flatness and simplicity mimicked the popular forms favoured by the rising class of workers. He compared the Impressionists with the Intransigeants, a radical and democratic, anti-monarchist and anarchist wing of the Spanish Federalist party which was feared by the French. This analogy was not unfounded: in 1876, as the Impressionists were growing in importance and winning acceptance for their desire to render all colours (and sounds) legitimate in a perpetually changing universe, a group of Intransigeants in Paris – the radicals – took 36 seats in the Chambre des Députés. Later Laforgue drew a similar comparison between art in which ‘our organs are engaged in a vital struggle’ and society as a ‘symphony of the consciousness of races and individuals’. The neo-Impressionist painters were more overtly political. Signac, a staunch socialist-anarchist, equated artistic and social revolution and hoped that harmony in art, particularly that effected by juxtaposing contrasting colours, would be a model for justice in society.
In more general terms, the gradual acceptance of Impressionist art reflected the desire of the middle class to share in the old aristocracy’s way of life. This gave rise to the popular definition of Impressionism as an aesthetic of ‘dreaming and the far away’, of escape – and not just from academic conventions. Herbert suggests that Impressionist paintings, with their emphasis on leisure activities, were agents of social change in that they encouraged the development of vacation resorts for the middle class and helped prop up the illusions of holiday-seekers. In music too there is a vague sense of a desire for middle-class empowerment in composers’ breakdown of tonal hierarchies, incorporation of distant overtones and expanded notion of consonance. Charpentier, who like Debussy was of working-class origins, was among the few to give voice to working-class values and sensations, but it is his Poèmes mystiques, settings of symbolist poems, more than his opera Louise, that shares in the Impressionist aesthetic. Debussy, by contrast, allied himself with upper-class patrons more than anarchists, and Fleury points out that both he and Delius were more aristocratic than anarchic by nature. Many of Debussy’s innovations reflect an attempt to create a specifically French musical style by appropriating materials from earlier times (medieval organum, 16th-century counterpoint).
After 1904, with increasing attempts to debunk Impressionist values, these socio-political associations became even more blatant, especially as they related to music. Those defending the aesthetic argued that the emphasis on vibrations would bring forth new forms of vitality in listeners and aid in the country’s regeneration and repopulation. Others, focussing on issues of class, countered that the nuanced multiplicity of colours and imprecise forms of Impressionist art and music weakened the perceiver’s sensibility by undermining ‘hierarchical thinking’ and the ‘aristocratic language of lines’. As critics advocated a return to ‘classical order’, ‘the science of composition’ and ‘life’ in all the arts, some redefined Cézanne’s painting and Debussy’s music, shifting emphasis on to their abstract qualities. Debussy’s style too changed after 1904 as melody and counterpoint became more important to him and his musical forms became more complex.
It is at this point that one should speak of the emergence of musical post-Impressionism, for in its embrace of line, colour and form from another perspective, and constructions that bring pleasure to the mind as well as the senses, this aesthetic resembles that of post-Impressionist painters like Gauguin and Matisse. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring perhaps best exemplifies this tendency in music. In one sense it extends the Impressionist notion of sound for its own sake; in another, as Jacques Rivière put it, The Rite rejects the ‘sauce’ of its predecessors’ music, with its language of nuance and transitions, in favour of larger-scale juxtapositions of violent emotions, brutal rhythms, robust colours and a more advanced harmonic language that includes polytonality. Both aspects of post-Impressionism laid the foundation for a Franco-Russian form of modernism. Respighi in Italy, Schmitt and Dukas in France, and Bax and Holst in Great Britain also represent this duality, in different ways. Perhaps only Satie, among French composers of the time, rejected Impressionism completely. With humour and irony he attempted to rid music of its literary and painterly associations, setting the stage for the neo-classicism of the 1920s.
During this period and after Debussy’s death in 1918 a large number and wide variety of composers, some of them falsely called post-Impressionists, continued to use Impressionist techniques, albeit sporadically. Among others, in England there were Delius, Vaughan Williams, Scott, Bridge and Ireland; in France, Koechlin, Aubert, Louis Vuillemin, Ropartz, Roger-Ducasse, Ladmirault, Caplet, Lili Boulanger and later Messiaen; in Hungary, Bartók and Kodály; in Poland, Szymanowski; in Italy, Malipiero and Puccini; and in the USA, Griffes. Even at the Schola Cantorum, a Parisian school which inculcated different ideals, Impressionism made an impact on composers. Roussel, Albéniz and Le Flem reconciled the harmonic freedom and timbral nuances of Impressionist music with the solid construction, linear clarity and rigorous logic demanded by d’Indy and his followers. Ravel, who Landormy claims helped discredit Impressionism through his embrace of classical forms, continued to use Impressionist approaches to harmony and timbre even after his style changed around 1908. For a time the aesthetic even appealed to Schoenberg: although the emotional content of Gurrelieder is Expressionist – meaning that its form and language are subordinated to an inner resonance in the composer – its mystical concept of nature is altogether Impressionist.
Despite the pejorative connotations they have acquired since the 1920s (association with vague lines and structure, a style that lacks vitality), and revisionist notions of Debussy in the 1970s as a symbolist by scholars and as a modernist by composers, the Impressionist and neo-Impressionist aesthetics continue to exercise an important influence on music, especially in French- and English-speaking countries. Other traditions have found it fairly easy to assimilate certain elements of Impressionism because of its formal freedom and openness to non-Western philosophies of sound and music. In jazz Impressionism has permeated the harmonies of Duke Ellington, the orchestral textures of Gil Evans, and the piano styles of Art Tatum and Cecil Taylor. In the film music of Korngold, Herrmann and their followers it has affected audiences’ perceptions of images on the screen. In Japan Takemitsu incorporated elements of Impressionism to infuse his music with Western nuances. In the USA Glass and Reich used simple, repeated Impressionist-like figurations, albeit in the service of another aesthetic, to slow down time in their early minimalist music. More recently a generation of French composers born in the mid-1940s – Grisey, Murail, Dufourt and others – have returned to the Impressionist notion of sound as an object of research. Using the computer to study the nature of timbre with scientific precision, they have also renewed attention to harmony as a factor of timbre, and composed ‘spectral’ music based on contrasts of registers, speeds and intensities. Misunderstanding of the term ‘Impressionism’ has thus never kept musicians from the music itself, and in borrowing from various times, places and cultures, the aesthetic can be seen as a precursor to the cross-culturalism of what is marketed as World beat and other contemporary musics.
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