Impressionism.

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.

2. Stylistic innovation.

3. Social and political associations.

4. Neo-Impressionism and post-Impressionism.

JANN PASLER

Impressionism

1. Aesthetic and scientific principles.

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’.

Impressionism

2. Stylistic innovation.

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.

Impressionism

3. Social and political associations.

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.

Impressionism

4. Neo-Impressionism and post-Impressionism.

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.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and other resources

S. Mallarmé: ‘The Impressionists and Edouard Manet’, Art Monthly Review and
Photographic Portfolio, (1876), 117–22

E. Vuillermoz: ‘L’impressionisme en musique’, Revue jeune, 24–5 (1899), 1–6

R. Bouyer: ‘Petites notes sans portée. XLVII: “Impressionisme” en musique’, Le

ménestrel, lxviii (1902), 156–7

C. Mauclair: ‘La peinture musicienne et la fusion des arts’, Revue bleue (6 Sept
1902)

F. Caussy: ‘Psychologie de l’impressionisme’, Mercure de France (December

1904), 622–47

R. Bouyer: ‘L’impressionisme en musique et le culte de Beethoven’, Revue bleue (3

May 1905)

R. Hamann: Der Impressionismus in Leben und Kunst (Cologne, 1907)

V. Tommasini: ‘Claude Debussy et l’Impressionismo nella musica’ RMI, xiv (1907),

157–67

J.-A. Georges: ‘Claude Debussy et la musique française moderne en Angleterre

(1907–08)’, BSIM, v (1909), 262–85

L. Laloy: ‘Claude Debussy et le Debussysme’, BSIM, vi (1910), 507–19

A. Mortier: ‘Le snobisme musicale et la nouvelle école’ [Concerts Rouges; unpubd

lecture, c1910–12]

R. Cahn-Speyer: ‘Sull’Impressionismo musicale’, RMI, xx (1913), 145–67

P. Huvelin: ‘Symbolistes et impressionistes’, in J. Bach-Sisley and others: Pour la

musique française: douze causeries (Paris, 1917), 299–328 [with preface by C.
Debussy]

E. Kroher: Impressionismus in der Musik (Leipzig, 1957)

P. Landormy: ‘Le déclin de l’impressionisme’, ReM, ii (1 February 1921), 97–113

P. Landormy: ‘Debussy est-il un impressioniste?’, Le ménestrel (28 January 1927),
33–5

C. Koechlin: ‘De l’impressionisme chez Debussy’, Monde musical, xxxviii [January]

(1927), 91–4

H.-G. Schultz: Musikalischer Impressionismus und impressionistischer Klavierstil

(Würzburg, 1938)

D. Schjelderup-Ebbe: A Study of Grieg’s Harmony with Special Reference to his

Contributions to Musical Impressionism (thesis, U. of California, Berkeley, 1950)

R. Moser: L’Impressionisme français (Geneva, 1952)

S. Jarocinski: Debussy: a impresjonizm i symbolizm (Kraków, 1966; Eng. trans.

[from French] 1976)

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Documents (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966)

Impressionism in Art and Music, videotape, Insight Media QX212 (New York, 1970)

E. Lockspeiser: Music and Painting (London, 1973)

C. Palmer: Impressionism in Music (London, 1973)

W.-A. Schultz: Die freien formen in der Musik des Expressionismus und
Impressionismus (Hamburg, 1974)

E.V. Boyd: Paul Dukas and the Impressionist Milieu: Stylistic Assimilation in Three
Orchestral Works (diss. U. of Rochester, 1980)

R. Byrnside: ‘Musical Impressionism: the Early History of the Term’, MQ, lxvi
(1980), 522–37

F. Gervais and D. Pistone, eds.: ’L’impressionisme musical, Revue internationale de

musique française, no.5 (Geneva, 1981)

P. Tucker: Monet at Argenteuil (New Haven, CT, 1982)

R. Shiff: Cézanne and the End of Impressionism (Chicago, 1984)

The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874–1886, National Gallery of Art, Washington

DC 19 Jan – 6 Apr 1986, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, 19 Apr – 6 July 1986
(Washington DC, 1986) [exhibition catalogue]

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1988)
J.-B. Barrière, ed: Le timbre, métaphore pour la composition (Paris, 1991)

A.L. Milliman: ‘Teaching Impressionist Music’, Clavier, xxxii/10 (1993), 11–12

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France, Contemporary Music Review, viii (1993), 71–94

M. Fleury: L’impressionisme et la musique (

Expressionism.

A term applied to prominent artistic trends before, during and after World War I,
especially in the visual arts and literature in Austria and Germany. By analogy it may
apply to music of that time, or more generally to any music, in which an extravagant
and apparently chaotic surface conveys turbulence in the composer’s psyche.

1. Definitions.

2. The term.

3. Meaning.

4. Application.

5. The end of Expressionism?

DAVID FANNING

Expressionism

1. Definitions.

In a narrow sense Expressionism in music embraces most of Schoenberg’s post-tonal,

pre-12-note output – that of his ‘free atonal’ period, roughly from 1908 to 1921.
Certain works from this time by his pupils Berg and Webern also qualify. This ‘pure’
Expressionism communicates as a kind of psychogram (Einstein, 1926); its musical
language takes Wagner’s chromatic melos and harmony as its starting-point (notably
Kundry’s music in Parsifal) but largely avoids cadence, repetition, sequence,
balanced phrases and reference to formal or procedural models.

The term is often used more broadly to include other music from the same period
with shared characteristics. Indeed, it is almost impossible to frame a definition of
musical Expressionism in terms of style or aesthetic which would include the
‘central’ free-atonal music of the Second Viennese School and exclude near
contemporary works by Mahler, Skryabin, Hauer, Stravinsky, Szymanowski, Bartók,
Hindemith, Ives, Krenek and others. Furthermore, a number of important stage works
of the 1920s, especially some by Weill, Hindemith and Krenek, have proved
problematic to commentators because they retain strongly expressionistic textual and
visual aspects while their musical language has moved on to different aesthetic
principles.

A still broader application of the term, especially in the adjectival forms

‘expressionistic’ and ‘expressionist’, is in common journalistic use, often implying
disapproval, denoting music of almost any era in which intense self-expression
appears to override demonstrable coherence and to flout convention.

Expressionism

2. The term.

The word ‘Expressionism’ appears sporadically in late 19th-century English

commentaries on the visual arts, but in its current art-historical and aesthetic sense it
was coined in 1909 by the English art critic Roger Eliot Fry, to form a contrast with
the passivity of Impressionism (Werenskiold, 1981). By 1911 it was established in
Germany and applied to the French fauves, headed by Matisse. Almost immediately
its application widened to include virtually all contemporary non-traditional painting.
In the same year it appeared in discussions of contemporary German literature,
especially poetry, again in explicit contrast to Impressionism. From 1914 it gained a
more restricted application to contemporary Austro-German visual art, and it became
retrospectively attached to the communities Die Brücke (Dresden, 1905–13) and Der
Blaue Reiter (Munich, 1911–14).

Although isolated, less formal, early uses have been traced (Troschke, 1987), it was
not until 1918 that the term was applied in discussions of music, in the first instance
by Heinz Tiessen (published 1920), and a little later by Arnold Schering (1919). This
came about through lectures given in German literary societies, though at this stage
analogies with painting were just as important as those with literature. Initially the
word was coined in a general sense to supplant its German near equivalent
‘Ausdrucksmusik’, and emerged in discussions about the aspiration of all the arts to
the supposedly non-referential, purely expressive, condition of music, an aspiration
reinforced by a concurrent upsurge of interest in the psychology of the unconscious.
Some writers on music used the concept of Expressionism as a reminder that music
too should, in effect, aspire to its own condition, by throwing off extraneous
impulses, whether from the other arts or the humanities, which were threatening to
debase it. Soon Expressionism became co-opted as a slogan for or against modern
music in general, and a war of words was waged around it in 1920–21 in the
periodicals Allgemeine Musikzeitung and Melos – the first of many debates about its
‘healthiness’. Paradoxically, most of the now accepted classics of expressionistic
music were hardly known until the late 1920s, nearly 20 years after their
composition, by which time the intellectual drive that had given rise to them had
already been supplanted by less individualistic impulses. Though many composers
continued to write occasionally in something resembling an expressionist manner, the
eruptive immediacy of pre-war Expressionism was never recaptured.

Attempts to define Expressionism in music have always thrown up more questions

than answers. But this slipperiness may be salutary if it reminds us that the terms of
musical aesthetics are necessarily fluid and ill-defined. At least Expressionism is a
term never likely to be used over-confidently.

Expressionism

3. Meaning.

In 1933 the main section of the Oxford English Dictionary did not include
‘Expressionism’, though it gave the noun ‘expressionist’, defined as ‘an artist whose
work aims chiefly at “expression” ’. The supplement defined Expressionism as ‘the
methods, style, or attitude of expressionists, esp. in artistic technique’, citing a
succinct and resonant definition: ‘Expressionism … is a violent storm of emotion
beating up from the unconscious mind’ (MacGowan and Jones, 1923). Practically
every early discussion of Expressionism has stressed its provenance in the world of
the unconscious, and the word seems to have met the need for a neat epithet for the
new spiritual and artistic freedom so ardently acclaimed by artists and critics from the
turn of the century on.

This ‘inner reality’, as Kandinsky was fond of calling it, was associated in the
expressionists’ minds with ‘truth’, a truth that demanded emancipation from the ‘lie’
of convention and tradition. Schoenberg’s version of the same fundamental idea, with
its roots in Greek philosophy and a prolific flowering in 19th-century German
idealism, set ‘truth’ as a principle opposed to the cult of ‘beauty’ in post-Wagnerian
music. It was in this sense that Schoenberg claimed his 1908–9 song cycle Das Buch
der hängenden Gärten broke with previous aesthetic norms: the work is one of his
earliest commonly regarded as expressionist.

An important corollary of this attitude to ‘truth’ was the emphasis on inner

compulsion, which supposedly rendered redundant any criticism on grounds of
professional skill, beauty or indeed traditionally accepted values of any kind.
Schoenberg could thus justify his amateur paintings, many of them from his years of
personal crisis in 1908–11, which communicate by virtue of strength of inner vision
rather than refinement of painterly technique. In his music he could already take
technical accomplishment more or less for granted, but, in parallel fashion, he now
felt emboldened by his inner vision to cast off most means of support from traditional
musical language. He summed up his attitude in 1910 with the maxim ‘Art comes not
from ability but from necessity’, which was something of a commonplace at the time,
and which was influentially promulgated by Paul Fechter in the first book-length
study of Expressionism (1914).
Musical Expressionism was fostered by the intense intellectual atmosphere in turn-
of-the-century Vienna, a city summed up by Karl Kraus as ‘an isolation cell in which
one was allowed to scream’ (quoted in A. Comini: Gustav Klimt, New York, 1975,
p.13). Indeed, the scream was a central expressionist topos, the outer manifestation of
inner suffering: ‘Man cries for his soul, the whole era becomes a single cry of pain.
Art too cries, into the deep darkness, it cries for help, it cries for spirit: that is
Expressionism’ (Bahr, 1916). Essential to the artistic projection of such experience
was the shunning of inherited conventions as false comforters. Precisely where the
border lies between extensions of tradition and its destruction can never be defined,
and Expressionism’s distinctive features of distortion and exaltation can also be
identified in much Austro-German late Romantic art. Nevertheless it is widely agreed
that expressionists crossed this border, whereas Jugendstil artists such as Klimt and
late Romantic composers such as Strauss, Schreker, Zemlinsky and Rudi Stephan
turned back.

This crossing of borders is inevitably perceived, though it may not always have been
so intended, as anti-establishment in tone, in particular anti-bourgeois. The
expressionists ‘proclaim the universality of suffering in transcendent negation of the
professed values of their society’ (Schorske, 1980). As such, musical Expressionism
was either celebrated for its truthfulness to inner realities, by Hegelian, sociologically
minded commentators such as Adorno, or stigmatized as ‘unhealthy’, generally by
lesser-known critics. The anti-bourgeois element and the emphasis on inner
transformation could lead expressionists to either political extreme in the
ideologically charged world of the 1920s. Most inclined to the left, but Paul Joseph
Goebbels, later to become Hitler’s propaganda minister, was also a self-proclaimed
expressionist. At the same time, however, the overt politicization of the arts was
supplanting the individualism which had been at the heart of pre-war Expressionism.

In literature, Expressionism’s disdain for concrete meaning and narrative meant that
it flourished in poetry and theatre rather than in the novel (Sokel, 1959). This disdain
came naturally to music. Indeed, many composers and writers recognized the broad
aesthetic problem that music by most definitions was already expressionist in its
essence, and that expressionist music was therefore something of a tautology. Not
surprisingly, then, composers rarely used the word and almost never proclaimed
themselves expressionists. In music, even more than in literature and the visual arts,
Expressionism was ‘not a school, … [but] a state of mind which … has affected
everything, in the same way as an epidemic’ (Richard, 1978). In 1919 Schoenberg
had wondered whether he should devise an expressionistic programme (Troschke,
1987). But in 1928 he noted that while works of his like Die glückliche Hand were
called expressionistic, he himself preferred to refer to the ‘Art of representing inner
occurrences’. In 1932 he essayed a more elaborate definition in his Frankfurt Radio
talk on his Four Orchestral Songs op.22: ‘Thus, and not otherwise, did so-called
Expressionism arise: that a piece of music does not come into being out of the logic
of its own material but guided by the feeling for internal or external processes,
bringing these to expression, supporting itself on their logic and building on this’.

Expressionism

4. Application.
Though surface elements of Expressionism are traceable in much of Schoenberg’s
early work, it was a long time before he was composing in such a way as to
exemplify his own definition. A watershed in his output is the Second String Quartet
of 1907–8, whose four movements become progressively more emancipated from
traditional late Romantic language and form. The introduction to the finale, in free-
floating chromaticism representative of the soprano’s words ‘I feel the air of another
planet’, is sometimes taken as the first true atonal music, though the coda eventually
resolves, somewhat factitiously, to an F major tonic. The voice-writing in the
preceding slow movement is expressionist at a gestural level, in its extended range,
angular contours and chromatic freedom; yet this movement is strictly constructed
using five thematic cells, themselves all focussed on notes of the E minor triad. Here
is an early example of the symbiosis of anarchy and control, and of atonality and late
Romantic harmony in expressionist music. The anguished tone of this quartet is
generally assumed to reflect Schoenberg’s state of mind following his wife’s
elopement with the painter Richard Gerstl and the latter’s subsequent suicide when
Mathilde returned to Schoenberg. In fact much expressionistic music can be shown to
have arisen in response to overwhelming personal crises (Crawford and Crawford,
1993).

1909 was Schoenberg’s expressionist annus mirabilis, the highpoint being

Erwartung. The story of this one-act monodrama – that of a woman searching for her
lover in a forest at night, finding his dead body, and in the course of her dementia
virtually confessing to his murder – is again understandable on one level as a kind of
personal catharsis. Schoenberg composed the music in a torrent of inspiration in 17
days, barely enough time to write down the notes of the extremely dense and refined
score. The musical language is quintessentially expressionist in its avoidance of
repetition and denial of stability in all parameters, including tempo. Harmony is
chromaticized to the point where it forms a more or less static backdrop, in a constant
state of flux and only occasionally falling back on more tonally reminiscent
formations when the woman is in a state of emotional regression. By contrast, more
immediately active elements are to be found in the texture, which is polarized
between paralysis and anxious hyperactivity (Adorno, 1949). Initially the texture
closely shadows the text in its flux between relatively impressionist and expressionist
styles; later it takes on more autonomous, form-shaping power.

Further central expressionist compositions from the same year are Schoenberg’s
violently eruptive Piano Piece op.11 no.3 and the first and last of his Five Orchestral
Pieces op.16. These co-exist, however, with more euphonious late Romantic lyrical
studies and more strictly composed or impressionist ones, confirming that even in
this arch-expressionist phase Schoenberg was never far removed from late Romantic
instincts.

The alienated figure of the artist becomes the subject of his next stage work, Die
glückliche Hand. The tableaux that symbolize the central character’s inner turmoil
are influenced by the expressionist dramas of Kokoschka and Strindberg. However,
the large-scale structural framework represents a significant move away from the
stream-of-consciousness style of Erwartung.

Although Berg was fanatically devoted to Erwartung and heavily influenced by its
musical language, expressionist impulses in his music had to compete with his
instincts for a sensuously beautiful surface and a selfconsciously concealed
constructivist core. His comparatively aphoristic and atypical Clarinet Pieces op.5 are
cited by Adorno (1982) as his only true expressionist work, though the surrounding
works (the Altenberglieder op.4 and the Three Orchestral Pieces op.6) also have
strong claims. The success of his first opera, Wozzeck, from 1925 on helped
popularize Expressionism; but that very success was a symptom of the opera’s
sensational and ultimately consoling aspects, which fall outside the stricter definition
of Expressionism.

Webern’s music, by contrast, having been close to the spirit of Schoenbergian

expressionism around 1909–13, became increasingly constructivist on the surface
and increasingly concealed its passionate expressive core. This represented one of
several possible routes away from Expressionism.

Expressionism

5. The end of Expressionism?

Expressionism flourished at the end of an era that had systematically emancipated

itself from patronage. ‘The idea that the true purpose of art was to express personality
could only gain ground when art has lost every other purpose’ (Gombrich, 1950,
p.398). By the same token the movement tottered as soon as artists began to realize
that their autonomy had been bought at the cost of their own impotence and their
audience’s indifference. Exhilaration in freedom gradually gave way to a bad
conscience over relevance.

Kandinsky had noted the socio-political dimension in the rise of Expressionism:

‘When outer supports threaten to fall, man turns his gaze from externals in onto
himself’. When, however, the outer supports actually did fall, with the calamity of
World War I, the overriding priority seemed to be to create new, more reliable
supports. The inner psychic processes of alienated, suffering, hypersensitive artists
hardly seemed to qualify.

There was a more banal reason for the demise of Expressionism. As Georges Braque
put it, ‘you cannot remain in a perpetual paroxysm’ (Richard, 1978). Moreover, each
of the arts found itself in a crisis of technique. In music the effective taboos on
inherited form and on the bases of formal construction (not only tonality but
repetition, sequence, homogenous timbres, patterning of any kind) left Schoenberg
without musical means for creating large pieces. He was temporarily confined either
to aphoristic outbursts (the incomplete chamber orchestra pieces of 1910 being the
most extreme example) or to structures predicated on texts. The way out of this
impasse was necessarily a way out of Expressionism. More subtly, as Adorno noted,
the conscious negation of traditional means and of confinement to any style involved
principles of selection which paradoxically led back to style and thus again to self-
destruction; hence his characterization of musical Expressionism as an ‘unstable
chemical element’.

Schoenberg’s quest was increasingly for a musical language that would re-establish
elements of comprehensibility to replace the abandoned props of tonality. Pierrot
lunaire had already combined examples of classically expressionist eruptive anarchy
(no.14) with pieces whose expressionist gestures concealed tightly controlled motivic
proliferation (nos.8, 17 and 18), and thereby pointed forward to 12-note technique.
As Schoenberg moved in that direction he was moving too beyond the psychological
truths of Expressionism to transcendent religious truths (notably in Die Jakobsleiter).

Some of the textural features and the violent discontinuity of Schoenberg’s

expressionist music survived in his initial 12-note works (for instance the very first,
the Prelude of op.25) and returned from time to time in later works, such as the String
Trio of 1946. The psyche and the intellect were never wholly incompatible to
expressionists, because their central tenet was the exploration of inner processes at
the expense of the senses and of any reference to the outside world: ‘The World is
out there … it would be absurd to reproduce it’ (Kasimir Edschmid, cited in Richard,
1978, p.187).

By 1922 a growing number of voices could be heard claiming that Expressionism

was more part of the problem than the solution. Former supporters of musical
Expressionism, such as the young but already influential critic Hans Heinz
Stuckenschmidt, were lamenting its excesses, which seemed the more egregious for
the new modesty of means favoured by the postwar Zeitgeist. Alongside Germany’s
revulsion against rampant individualism, other forces were gathering. Parisian
intellectuals, spearheaded by Cocteau in his Rappel à l’ordre, had been advocating a
return to Apollonian order and a wholesale rejection of Romanticism and its satellite
movements. The German variety of this trend crystallized into Neue Sachlichkeit, a
form of neo-classicism that retained a squared-off version of expressionist
mannerisms within a more sober aesthetic outlook.

One outward sign of the new ethos was the cultivation of parody. Here again Pierrot
lunaire was an early example, but in the 1920s not even the once-sacrosanct suffering
artist was immune. In Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf, the first words sung by Max, an
effete composer, are ‘Du schöner Berg’. This one phrase neatly sends up all three
members of the Second Viennese School, including the mountain-loving Webern.

After World War II it was the neo-classicism of the 1920s and 30s that in turn fell
under a taboo, this time pronounced by the shrillest voices of the central European
avant garde; on the other hand any art movement that had been stigmatized by the
Nazis, such as Expressionism, was sympathetically reconsidered. Expressionist music
was reincarnated, either in fairly pure post-Schoenbergian guise (Henze) or fused
with post-Webernian serial controls (Boulez). Maxwell Davies showed the
continuing potential of expressionist gestures to revitalize music theatre, as did Rihm
and Zimmermann in German opera. Now even more than before, however,
Expressionism was only one among many competing trends and could hardly claim
to be a leading force.

In its least intellectualized form Expressionism from the mid-1950s on has supplied
many composers east of the former Iron Curtain with a non-élitist, ready-to-serve
musical dissidence, which has allowed audiences to read their own social agony into
the music; but with few exceptions (such as the best works of Schnittke) it has been
applied in these countries with a naivety of technique which makes it difficult for
Western audiences to respond without embarrassment. At the other intellectual
extreme Expressionism lives on in the work of, for example, Finnissy. Perhaps its
most valuable legacy has been as a vital ingredient in an internationally
communicative, progressive style, less militantly dehumanized than the 1950s avant
garde yet still untainted by proximity to the entertainment industry. In this sense
Expressionism has been embraced by countless composers. As an onomatopoeia of
the emotions, as a subversive corrective force to complacency or academicism,
musical Expressionism seems likely to live on and reappear in limitless,
unforeseeable new guises.

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