It’s sometimes hard to appreciate classical music as it moves into the twentieth century. It helps to know the music’s background, and what the composer was trying to accomplish. Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy were the Impressionistic composers for the piano, and their compositions furthered ideas of musical tonality and what music represented.
The Goal of Impressionistic Music
Impressionistic music does not dictate a musical idea to the listener. In Baroque music, each piece is meant to express a specific feeling or emotion. Nothing other than that one feeling or emotion is meant to be conveyed to listeners.
Classical composers were daring enough to incorporate more than feeling into a single piece. Romantics furthered this by using music to convey not only more than one feeling, but using these feelings to portray epic musical stories.
Impressionistic music scaled back somewhat. It conveys emotions, but the emotion conveyed is based on a reaction to a scene or atmosphere the composer creates. It’s usually about something in the tangible world; for example, how a fish looks swimming in the water.
Not everyone would have the same thoughts and feelings about this scene, so it is plausible and in fact desirable to the composer that people listening to the same piece are emotionally affected in different ways.
Impressionistic music is all about musical glimpses of life, either landscape or living. Through music, an image is created and it’s up to the listener to determine how they feel about that image. There are a variety of compositional techniques used to convey certain images the composer wishes to convey. Debussy and Ravel exemplify Impressionism in music, and each uses the following techniques in their music.
- Arpeggios
- Glissandos
- Whole-tone scales
Ravel’s Gaspard is made up of 3 pieces: Ondine, Le Gibet, and Scarbo.
- Ondine – Ravel uses susurrating 3-note chords in the right hand to represent the water nymph’s smooth words that lead sailors to their doom. Rapid arpeggios spanning the piano later in the piece suggest water or ships crashing against rocks.
- Le Gibet – The poem of the same name describes a scene at the edge of town, bells tolling and a man hanging from a gibbet. In Ravel’s piece, wonderfully morose, a low Bb is heard 153 times throughout Le Gibet, reminiscent of a death knell.
- Scarbo – One of the hardest pieces in piano literature, Scarbo uses chromatic clusters to represent the evil dwarf the piece is named after. Chromatic-infused arpeggios race across the keys to instill an atmosphere of horror.
Debussy’s two books of Preludes are probably one of the best examples of Impressionism in music. Each Prelude is given a name and Debussy creates the atmosphere or impressionism of each title. Titles such as “What the West Wind Saw” is very open to musical interpretation. In an exemplary show of impressionism, Debussy titles one of the Preludes “Voiles”, which can mean either “sails” or “veils.” It’s up to the listener to decide which he/she hears.
Most of the above-mentioned pieces contain arpeggios and glissandos, bread and butter for Impressionistic composers. Water, or things associated with water, is often represented by one of these techniques. Listen for whole-tone scales, which are often favored over major or minor. For more standout examples of Impressionism, listen to Ravel’s Miroirs or Jeux d’eau and Debussy’s Estampes and Images, to name a few. To read more about Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit, click here.
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