Art & Music - Impressionism...2/4

A radical break with tradition...

The French impressionist painters who emerged in the 1860s believed in depicting the impression of an object; they wanted to paint what was before them, without contextualizing the object within popular 19^th century romantic ideals.  They rejected emotion as a basis for art and instead turned to nature for inspiration.  Taking art out of the studio, they painted outside, rendering their impressions of landscapes while eschewing the intellectual role of imagination in art; they sought truth and authenticity through colour choice and application: they used pure colour and broken brushstrokes as they struggled to objectively record their experience of visual reality in terms of the transient effects of light.

The artists were asking their audiences to see in a new way and, not surprisingly, this new style of painting was not particularly well received.  Most of us, when faced with appreciation of a revolutionary aesthetic, find it hard work to make the shift.

A far-reaching influence

Despite the public’s lukewarm reaction to the new impressionistic style, the painters’ influence was not limited to an effect on the contemporary visual aesthetic. The French composer, Claude Debussy, is perhaps the most famous example of a contemporary musician who was affected and galvanized by the new visual style.  While he never embraced the term ‘impressionistic’ it characterizes the style in which he began to compose.  Along with Ravel, Dukas, Respighi, Albéniz, de Falla, Delius, C. T. Griffes, and J. A. Carpenter, Debussy’s new style of composition reacted against the same contemporary traditions of emotion and romanticism eschewed by the impressionist painters. 

A new musical language

Like Monet who painted the ephemeral qualities of light, Debussy wrote music that created a mood or evoked an atmosphere.  He divorced music from personal emotion instead of relying on the narrative of program music and chose nature as his inspiration.  In creating these evocative scenes, Debussy explored new chord combinations, the use of chromaticism, and incorporated exotic rhythms and scales. 

While painters played with pure colour, Debussy explored timbre – colour’s musical equivalent; he valued notes and chords for their individual sonorities rather than for traditional harmonic relationships and he embraced dissonances that were unprepared and unresolved.  The resulting music was, to the 19^th century ear, like nothing ever heard before: colour, nuance and subtlety drew the listener into a musically unique and atmospheric world. 

An immediate success

Unlike the impressionistic painters, Debussy and his contemporaries who wrote in the revolutionary style were immediately popular. His seminal orchestral piece, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the afternoon of a faun), was the biggest thing to hit European classical music since Wagner 30 years earlier – the audience was so enamoured of the piece that at its début it was performed twice.

Today, however, while impressionist art is extremely popular, the art music of Debussy is considered by many to be esoteric and challenging.  Why, over time, have our responses to the movement changed so drastically?

(This is the next in a series created for the Fuschia Tree's art magazine, Artitude, exploring the inter-relatedness of art and music.)