The Arrival of the Twentieth Century

Impressionism and Symbolism

• Turning away from subjectivity in Romanticism and post-Romanticism

• Emphasis on sensation• Symbolism in literature– evocation of sensual experience – use of phonemes for their sound qualities

• Impressionism in painting– light and color supersede distinct images– irregular surfaces (in subjects and on canvas)– objects in motion

Sensualism in musical style

• Scoring — strongly emphasized for sensual effects

• Rhythm — unmetered rhythms or hypnotic ostinato

• Melody — meandering lines or isolated motives• Harmony — nonfunctional (avoids leading tones)– whole-tone scales– pentatonic scales (influence of exoticism)– modes

• Texture — layers of foreground and background• Form — free or very simple

Primitivism• Based on resistance to decadent overripeness

in fin-de-siècle Romanticism and post-Romanticism

• Draws on exoticist ideas of reenergizing Western music from other cultures

• Style elements drawn from imagined “primitive” music, emphasizing– percussive timbres– irregular rhythmic patterns– narrow-range folklike tunes or improvisatory melody– free use of dissonance– characteristic or programmatic content and form

Expressionism

• Exaggeration of post-Romantic emotionalism to neurosis or psychosis

• Literary style — disruptive, destabilized; stream of consciousness technique

• Painting– exaggeration of forms or abstract shapes– juxtaposition of harsh, unblended color

Expressionism in musical style

• Mysterious or disturbing textual content• Timbral juxtaposition rather than blend; Sprechstimme

• Extreme dynamics• Irregular rhythm• Angular melody, awkward intervals• Atonality — most characteristic feature• Complex texture• Short, idiosyncratic forms

Charles Ives• New England heritage• Influence of nineteenth-century

transcendentalist philosophers — Emerson, Thoreau

• Libertarian spirit – rejection of convention– emphasis on originality, experiment– iconoclasm

• American resources • Eclectic combinations in collage• Free use of dissonance• Programmatic forms

Questions for discussion

• Is a literary model valid for understanding so-called impressionist music? Explain how other arts might be viewed as taking this music as their model.

• Why did ballet become a particularly important genre for composers in the twentieth century?

• Should “beauty” have an essential place in defining art? How is beauty defined? Is expressionist music really not “beautiful”? Not “music”? Not “art”?