Alright at the beginning of the Twentieth Century
we have a really significant movement in both the visual arts
and in music called Impressionism. Many people know impressionist visual art
because they've seen all those paintings by Monet that fill up our galleries all
over the world
and are on posters in your houses and wherever.
And here's a painting from Monet. This is one of his impression paintings from
which we get
the name Impressionism. At the time,
sort of like Baroque, it was not a name that was supposed to be
complimentary. These paintings
that Monet and his contemporaries came up with
were submitted to an exhibit.
This is a big exhibit in Paris every year and they were rejected.
The the people who are running the show just thought they were just too
weird and
we're not going to accept these paintings and the
the critics were talking about these paintings
and they picked up on the name "impresson" which was in the name of one
of Monet's paintings
and used that as a negative term to describe this art that they thought wasn't
very
good. So what did they not like about it? Well, you know,
we're looking at people who are used to having paintings that are very clearly
defined. The edges are
edges, we know that that's the end of something. The colors are
in rather broad sorts of swaths. So they had things they were used to seeing.
So here comes Monet and his friends and they're giving us paintings
that are little dabs of color. If you look at one of these paintings really closely
you'll sometimes actually see physical space between colors. So it's not like
I've painted.
I painted instead. Why did they do that?
Well, one of the things that they were really interested in was
in trying to show how things looked at different times of day and in different
lighting conditions.
Now up until this point in time they couldn't do that.
If you were an artist you had to go out into the field, you could do your sketch
with your
chalks or whatever but then you would have to go back to the studio,
mix up all your oil paints and
then you would be able to paint in the studio. So you'd have to try to remember
exactly what that light looked like.
Thanks to an American who invented oil paints in tubes,
painters could now take their whole little box of paints out into the world,
set up their easel in the park or on the street or wherever they wanted to
paint,
look at what they're looking at and paint it as it is,
in the natural light. So this was a big deal, very big deal.
So they were trying to make it look like it was in natural light, make it not
look so sort of artificially constructed
in the studio. So, the edges are blurred,
the colors keep kind of changing, you don't see solid blocks of color generally
in impressionist art.
So how does that work out in music? Interestingly it works out a lot the same way.
So what composers tried to do was to create that same sort of sense of
vagueness
that we see in an impressionist painting. So
how do we accomplish that?
So, we've seen how the painter creates ambiguity, How's the composer going to create the same thing?
So I'm going to use my little glockenspiel here to illustrate a couple of things for you.
So, one of the ways that a composer can create ambiguity
in the tonal structure of a piece
is to avoid major and minor scales.
As we know those send us somewhere. So there are a couple of different ways that a
composer can do that.
One of those is a new type of scale that we've not talked about before called the
whole
tone scale. Remember that major and minor scales have half steps and whole steps so
they are
not whole tone, they are both half and whole. So, a whole tone scale
has no half steps. Let's listen just to remind ourselves, this is what a major scale
sounds like.
(plays scale)
So that's our combination of half steps and whole steps. I want to do a
whole tone scale starting on
the same pitch.
(plays scale)
Listen again!
(plays scale)
Now, if you were keeping an eye on the keyboard, you would have seen that I got off
what would have been...
would have been the white keys so that was a difference between scales.
Might also have noticed that there were only seven notes in that scale instead
of eight. When you take those two half steps and make them one, then
you've lost a pitch so it's a seven tone scale and
it has no half-step so we don't have any places where we can naturally diverge and
go somewhere else.
It leaves us a lot of options about directions that we can move. Another way
that we can change our
tonal structure is to use modes.
Remember we haven't even talked about those since about 1600 when we went to
the equal temperament system.
So those are those old scale type systems that we used in Gregorian
Chant!
So, basically with a mode, if you start on any white note on this keyboard,
then... and you stay on them, then you get a particular mode. So
let's just take this major scale first. (plays scale)
Now let me do the mode that starts
on the same pitch. (plays scale)
Different sets of half steps and whole steps.
If I start on another note, a different note, then I get an entirely different
scale. (plays scale)
That first scale that I did for you was a whole-step,
half-step, whole-step, whole-step whole-step, half-step,
whole-step. The second one I did was half-step, whole-step,
whole-step, whole-step, half-step, whole-step, whole-step. So, the whole-steps and half-steps keep moving around
if you change
into those different modes. So if you're used to hearing major minor tonality
and all of a sudden you have this scale that doesn't have the half-steps and whole-steps where
you expect them,
then you have different directions that you can go and the composer can create more
ambiguity that way.
Another thing that we see composers doing in this period of time
is going beyond our triad. Remember when we did chords way back we had (plays example). There's a
chord.
In the Romantic Period and even a little before that we've extended that
one note by going (plays example)
to make what we call a seventh chord but as we get into this period of time,
the composer can keep going till we can go (plays example)
and now we don't know what key we're in again because we have notes from all sorts of
different chords. These are not our standard
what we would expect from that chord, and now we have
more routes that we can go so it's like every new mode is another door in our
composition
that we can open and go in an entirely new
direction. So those are things that we can do that have to do with
the notes, the pitches, of the
melody and the harmony that create ambiguity. Now let's look at some other ways that we
can create that
through rhythms and the sounds that we use. Another way that they tried to
create that ambiguity in the sound
was to get away from a really steady beat.
A lot of music we listen to (clap, clap) it's there, you can hear it.
As we listen to the impressionist piece that we're going to examine,
you'll find it very hard to tap your foot to it.
Part of it is that there's very little percussion happening so you don't have a
drumbeat to follow anyway,
and the other is that it's very flexible
so there's like speeding up slowing down and sometimes there's just
silence.
And when there's silence and you didn't have a good sense of
where the beat was in the first place, you can't maintain that sense of beat so
you're going... what happened... where's it coming back?
What's happening with the rhythm here? So we hear that
sort of blurred rhythmic construction as well.
Things do not quite what you expect them to do. Another way that composers
tried to copy what their visual art
counterparts were doing is in the use of color. So as I said when you look at
an impressionist painting up close you can see that they're often dots of
color that don't quite connect to each other
or what we perceive as being a
color block is actually several different little colors
right next to each other that our eye has blended into a single color.
So what composers do is take our instrumental colors,
our timbres, and use those to create that same sort of
effect. So instead of say if we imagine that Mozart Clarinet Concerto
that we listened to
and the clarinet plays, clarinet plays, clarinet plays, clarinet plays, clarinet
stops.
Well, in an impressionist piece what we might have is the melodic line
and the clarinet plays but then the flute sort of picks it up
and they cross over for a little bit and then the flute goes on and then maybe the
Oboe come sneaking in with it and they
blend a little bit and then they separate so you don't get that clearly
defined...
"Hey, we're done with that instrument, we're going on to something else."
And a really good composer will choose those timbres so that it's really hard
to tell that it changed and all of a sudden you realize, "Oh, hey look,
that's not oboe anymore, that's a French horn playing now."
So again we get that sense of not quite knowing what sound we're in,
we've blurred our colors just like we've blurred our beat,
and then we've blurred our tonal center. Another thing that composers can do that
has to do with the
tonal center and melodic part is to use a lot of chromatic
notes. We talked about scales as being whole steps and half steps,
there's actually a scale that's nothing but half steps. (plays scale)
So a chromatic scale uses
all the possible notes, and if you're going to use all those notes
it's just like using those odd
chord structures, you can go anywhere. Once you hit any note you can go in any
different direction because you haven't established any sense of key
out of that. So we have chromatics as a way to do that.
Another thing the composers will do is to
create a sense a dissonance so sounds that
are unresolved, not necessarily clashing or ugly, but they just...
they feel like they need to go somewhere and what the composer will do
is
fail to go somewhere. So you're you're hanging there like I-
I-I have to go, I have to go, this has to go somewhere else,
and then they either don't go anywhere at all, or they go somewhere completely
unexpected.
So it upsets your sort of
aural balance because you expect this chord to go in a certain place and all of a sudden
it goes
somewhere else. That's another way of keeping that sort of
ambiguity that we expected that. So
in the pieces of music that we hear in the Impressionist Period
most of them are relatively small, short,
sort of compact kinds of pieces. Probably
maybe because we can't deal with that much ambiguity on a long scale you know, 20
minutes of that kind of ambiguity
would be stressful for you as a listener. So what we tend to see is much smaller
sorts of forms
so the composer can really illustrate all those things that they're trying to do.
So let's look at a composer now who is sort of the king of impressionist music and that is
Claude Debussy
or as some people say Deb-boo-see depends on how snooty you wish to be about
his name.
So he lived from 1862 to 1918. He died
right as Paris was actually being liberated at the end of World
War One. So he was there
during World War One. He wrote
lots and lots of beautiful pieces of music
and we have a certain sound that we tend to associate with Debussy and that
is that
impressionist sort of sound. So we are going to listen to
his Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. And that's an f-a-u-n faun not
not Bambi fawn. In the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun what he has done is
taken a poem
by another -ism this is by a symbolist poet
so this is a symbolist poem. And nobody sings it,
there's no talking, so this is an example of a type of program music
but he's taking this poem and he wants you to get
the sense of the poem. He's not trying to strictly represent the poem, he's not trying
to say here's where this happens here's where that happens
particularly the overall sense
of what this poem is about. So let me read to you
the text of this.
These nymphs I would perpetuate, some light
their gossamer embodiment, floating on the air
inert with heavy slumber,
was it a dream I loved, my doubting harvest of the bygone night
ends in countless tiny branches,
together remaining a whole forest they prove a last
that since I'm alone, my fancy triumph
was but the ideal imperfection of roses.
Let us reflect, were supposed
those women that you idolize were but imaginings
of your fantastic lust?
So you know if you want to interupt poetry there you get a whole big job working on
that because there's a lot of
things going on there. So the faun in this is this half-man-half-goat
who's
you know a horny guy we'll just use that cause that kind of fits nicely with the goat.
But he's taken a very sort of ethereal approach to it here.
Are we dreaming all this? What is this really?
So as you listen to this piece of music, first you can listen for how Debussy
makes things very vague sounding.
Does he go where you think it's going to happen? And then think about,
does it paint a picture in your head of this particular poem?
Not a very literal one, but a general sense
of this afternoon maybe the sun is warm
and the faun is out there in the woods and thinking about things that fauns
think about.
So those are things you can think about as you listen to the piece of music.
If you're really interested in the details and sort of minutiae
of this particular piece of music,
I've also given you a wonderful video featuring Leonard Bernstein who
had done tons of sort of educational videos, who was way ahead of his time in
that respect,
where he talks about this specific piece and he will play for you on the piano
the different things that are done and talk about how
that ambiguity is created and how you get here and watch - it could go here and it
could go there.
So if you really like all the details and you are very interested in that part of it,
you can listen to the music first and then you can go and see what Leonard
Bernstein had to say about how Debussy
and the Impressionists created this wonderful,
wonderful sound.