Impressionism
Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.
- University of Puget Sound - Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom - Impressionism
- Academia - What is Impressionism
- Lumen Learning - Music 101 - Impressionism
- LOUIS Pressbooks - Exploring the Arts - Music of the 20th Century
- Humanities LibreTexts - Introduction, Historical Context, and Impressionism
- Related Artists:
- Claude Debussy
- Maurice Ravel
Recent News
Impressionism, in music, a style initiated by French composer Claude Debussy at the end of the 19th century. The term, which is somewhat vague in reference to music, was introduced by analogy with contemporaneous French painting; it was disliked by Debussy himself. Elements often termed impressionistic include static harmony, emphasis on instrumental timbres that creates a shimmering interplay of “colours,” melodies that lack directed motion, surface ornamentation that obscures or substitutes for melody, and an avoidance of traditional musical form. Impressionism can be seen as a reaction against the rhetoric of Romanticism, disrupting the forward motion of standard harmonic progressions. The other composer most often associated with Impressionism is Maurice Ravel. Impressionistic passages are common in earlier music by Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Richard Wagner, and in music by later composers such as Charles Ives, Béla Bartók, and George Gershwin.