1. Impressionism, Expressionism, and Neoclassicism
20th Century “isms”
Impressionism, Expressionism, and Neoclassicism

2. Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence in the 1870s and 1880s.
The name of the movement is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant),

3. Characteristics of Impressionist paintings include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on the accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles.
The emergence of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous movements in other media which became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature.

4. Claude Monet, Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), 1872, oil on canvas, Musée Marmottan

5. Impressionist Music
The impressionist movement in music was a movement in European classical music, mainly in France, that began in the late nineteenth century and continued into the middle of the twentieth century.
Like its precursor in the visual arts, musical Impressionism focused on suggestion and atmosphere rather than strong emotion or the depiction of a story as in program music.
Musical Impressionism occurred as a reaction to the excesses of the Romantic era. While this era was characterized by a dramatic use of the major and minor scale system, Impressionist music tends to make more use of dissonance and more uncommon scales such as the whole tone scale.
Romantic composers also used long forms of music such as the symphony and concerto, while Impressionist composers favored short forms such as the nocturne, arabesque, and prelude.

6. Musical Impressionism was based in France by the French composer Claude Debussy. He and Maurice Ravel are generally considered to be the two "great" Impressionists.
Musical impressionism is closely related to superior value of impressionist painting: placing the color factor to the foreground strongly influenced shaping new sound effects, by such effects like long, atypical accords, fast move of sounds in piano dynamic, exposing interesting timbre of an instrument or specific articulation.
In a majority of the cases the form is a one-time idea for putting in a kind of order 'the fantasy of sound'. Glimmering sound has become the main feature of the music.

7. Melody Instrumentation
Precedence of timbre induces that the melody is often a mixture of accords' timbre and figurations rather than a clear outline of the theme. It comes that sometimes the melody disappears and only few bizarre accords reads. Impressionist harmonic is also about utilising pentatonic scale, whole-tone scale and modal modes.
Instrumentation
In a comparison with orchestral neoromantic pieces the texture of impressionist ones is much clearer as the composers has abandoned the monumental, rebooted cast of instruments. Even in pieces written for a vast orchestral cast the full tutti does not seem at all like the massive timbre. The new type of orchestration was concentrated on revealing the individual, unusual features of each of the instruments and using rarely applied registers.

8. Dynamics
Sensitization for the quality of the sounds influenced on exposing the subtle dynamic effects – e. g. the variety hues of piano (p, pp, ppp, pppp) which were often complemented by additional written notes. Debussy implemented French definitions that suggest sensual experiences, such as 'similarly to the flute', 'from the distance', 'like a rainbow fog' and many others.
Titles
referring to the poetic pieces informs about a wide range of emotions connected with impressionist music. Among the titles there are a few the most popular subjects: the rain, the ply of the sea waves, unimaginative moon landscapes and others connected with nature.

9. Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century.
Its typical trait is to present the world solely from an subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.
Expressionist artists sought to express meaning or emotional experience rather than physical reality.
Expressionism was developed as an avant-garde style before the First World War. It remained popular during the Weimar Republic, particularly in Berlin.
The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including painting, literature, theatre, dance, film, architecture and music.

10. The term is sometimes suggestive of emotional angst.
The Expressionist emphasis on individual perspective has been characterized as a reaction to positivism and other artistic styles such as naturalism and impressionism.

11. Expressionism as a musical genre is difficult to exactly define
Expressionism as a musical genre is difficult to exactly define. It is, however, one of the most important movements of 20th Century music.
The three central figures of musical expressionism are Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, the so-called Second Viennese School.
Musical expressionism is defined in a narrow sense as embracing most of Schoenberg’s post-tonal but pre-twelve-tone music, which is to say that of his "free atonal" period, roughly from 1908 to 1921.
More broadly, other music from the same period with shared characteristics is also included .

12. In 1909, Schoenberg composed the one act 'monodrama' Erwartung (Expectation).
This is a thirty minute, highly expressionist work in which atonal music accompanies a musical drama centered around a nameless woman. Having stumbled through a disturbing forest, trying to find her lover, she reaches open countryside. She stumbles across the corpse of her lover near the house of another woman, and from that point on the drama is purely psychological: the woman denies what she sees and then worries that it was she who killed him. The plot is entirely played out from the subjective point of view of the woman, and her emotional distress is reflected in the music.

13. Other Expressionist works
Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 19
Music drama Die Glückliche Hand
Webern's music was close in style to Schoenberg's expressionism for only a short while, c His Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 10 ( ) are an example of his expressionist output, and might be compared to Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16, composed 1909
Berg's contribution includes his Op. 1 Piano Sonata, and the Four Songs of Op. 2.
His major contribution to the genre, however, is the opera Wozzeck, composed between , a very late addition to the genre.
The opera is highly expressionist in subject material in that it expresses mental anguish and suffering and is not objective, presented, as it is, largely from Wozzeck's point of view, but it presents this expressionism within a cleverly constructed form.

14. Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire
a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg that profoundly influenced 20th century music.
It is a setting of twenty-one selected poems from Otto Erich Hartleben's German translation of Albert Giraud's cycle of French poems of the same name.
The narrator (voice-type unspecified in the score, but traditionally performed by a soprano) delivers the poems in the Sprechstimme style.
refer to an expressionist vocal technique between singing and speaking.
The work is atonal, but does not use the twelve-tone technique that Schoenberg would devise eight years later.

15. The instrumentation varies with each piece.
It is a cycle of twenty-one songs for female voices and an ensemble of five musicians who play eight instruments: piano, cello, violin/viola, flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet.
The instrumentation varies with each piece.
The cycle divides into three groups of seven songs that evoke a surrealistic night vision.
First group: Pierrot, a poet, dunk on moonlight, becomes increasingly deranged.
Second group: a nightmare filled with images of death and martyrdom.
Pierrot seeks reguge from the nightmare through clowning, sentimentality, and nostalgia.

16. Neoclassicism
Neoclassicism in music was a twentieth-century trend, particularly current in the period between the two World Wars, in which composers sought to return to aesthetic precepts associated with the broadly defined concept of "classicism", namely order, balance, clarity, economy, and emotional restraint.
As such, neoclassicism was a reaction against the unrestrained emotionalism and perceived formlessness of late romanticism, as well as a "call to order" after the experimental ferment of the first two decades of the twentieth century.
The neoclassical impulse found its expression in such features as the use of pared-down performing forces, an emphasis on rhythm and on contrapuntal texture, an updated or expanded tonal harmony, and a concentration on absolute music as opposed to Romantic program music.

17. In form and thematic technique, neoclassical music often drew inspiration from music of the 18th century, though the inspiring canon belonged as frequently to the Baroque and even earlier periods as to the Classical period—for this reason, music which draws inspiration specifically from the Baroque is sometimes termed Neo-Baroque music.
Neoclassicism had two distinct national lines of development, French (proceeding from the influence of Erik Satie and represented by Igor Stravinsky), and German (proceeding from the "New Objectivism" of Ferruccio Busoni and represented by Paul Hindemith.)
Neoclassicism was an aesthetic trend rather than an organized movement; even many composers not usually thought of as "neoclassicists" absorbed elements of the style.

18. People and Works
Sergei Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1 (1917) is sometimes cited as a precursor of neoclassicism (Whittall, 1980), but Prokofiev himself thought that his composition was a 'passing phase' whereas Stravinsky's neoclassicism was by the 1920s 'becoming the basic line of his music’.
Igor Stravinsky's first foray into the style began in 1919–20 when he composed the ballet Pulcinella, using themes which he believed to be by Giovanni Pergolesi (it later came out that many of them were not, though they were by contemporaries). Later examples are the Octet for winds, the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, Symphony in C, and Symphony in Three Movements, as well as the ballets Apollo and Orpheus, in which the neoclassicism took on an explicitly "classical Grecian" aura. Stravinsky's neoclassicism culminated in his opera The Rake's Progress.

19. A German strain of neoclassicism was developed by Paul Hindemith, who produced chamber music, orchestral works, and operas in a heavily contrapuntal, chromatically inflected style, best exemplified by Mathis der Maler. Roman Vlad has contrasted the "classicism" of Stravinsky, which consists in the external forms and patterns of his works, with the "classicality" of Busoni, which represents an internal disposition and attitude of the artist towards works
Neoclassicism found a welcome audience in America, as the school of Nadia Boulanger promulgated ideas about music based on her understanding of Stravinsky's music. Boulanger's American students include Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Darius Milhaud, Ástor Piazzolla and Virgil Thomson.