Impressionism is one of the cultural trends popular during the mid-1860s. In essence, the Impressionist style consists of such major techniques as rendering the direct and fleeting Impression; painting in the open air with emphasis upon seizing the effects of light and color; moving around a subject and painting it from several different angles; juxtaposing colors to establish artistic effects; presenting scenes in a hazy atmosphere. Among the Impressionist techniques, perhaps foremost is the dictum that the artist must render the Impression that objects make on the eye. Many critics question impressionism in music, stating that it is impossible to render and transfer these techniques into sounds (Herbert 1991). Thus, works by Ravel and Debussy vividly portray that impressionism was a general movement reflecting in new musical forms and techniques.
Impressionism in music is found in sounds and aesthetic experiences created by a piece of music. While Debussy’s music provides a complete aesthetic experience even when perceived without any extramusical stimuli, there is much more to the composer’s explanatory after-titles than meets the eye. Careful investigations into the metaphors and material components, semantics, and structure, attitude, and perspectives adopted in both the non-musical source alluded to and in the musical miniature alluding to it reveal highly complex relationships. Debussy’s twenty-four Preludes, written between 1909 and 1913, present not so much with a chain of pieces linked in content and demanding to be rendered in the order in which they appear, but rather with a collection of single pieces of very different origin and character. The composer, typically critical of his own creations, remarked that they weren’t all equally good–a judgment that has survived to this day, especially among those who don’t know the Preludes too well. This is one more reason to consider the cycle in its entirety and to juxtapose, in the study as well as in performance, well-established pieces with little known ones (Herbert 1991).
The title of the piano cycle, Miroirs by Ravel, alludes to notions on several levels. As a noun of daily language, the word means, of course, “mirrors.” In a wider sense, both the English word and its French equivalent embrace mirroring surfaces of various kinds: not only the silvered glass but also water, one of the favorite topics of early twentieth-century art. The title of the cycle may also call into play the very process of reflecting and mirroring, both the “reflection” of moods in colors or sounds and a person’s mirroring in social interaction, including feedback and criticism, affirmation and correction (Thompson 2000).
Finally, a piece of music may be understood as a mirror of sorts, particularly in the case of objects and events so elusive that they may otherwise be perceived only in the subconscious, never emerging to the surface of our attention (like, for instance, the play of night moths) (Herbert 1991). Miroirs serves as a collective heading for five works dealing with images as diverse as insects and birds, ocean and valley, dawn song, and bell sound. In his biographical sketches, Ravel writes the following lines, which attest to the composer’s distinctly descriptive intention: With Miroirs, Ravel thus renews a tradition of French secular music which, in stark contrast to Beethoven and generations of composers influenced by him, prefers “painting” to “expressing one’s feelings.” In this concept of art the idea is to paint the object without primarily concerning oneself with the painter’s feelings. The title of the cycle, Mirrors, might then finally be understood to denote an artistic attitude rather than a programmatic title (Orenstein, 1991).
The uniqueness of impressionism is that artists and composers use titles and images (in music) to unveil the symbolic meaning of their pieces. The captions and titles suggest scenes or framed pictures rather than direct, unmediated experiences, but, as the contextual analyses will show, verification is not the main issue here. It seems to matter neither to the composer nor to music lovers whether the Delphic sculptures evoked in Debussy’s first prelude were in fact meant to represent dancers–whether he remembered correctly what he had seen in the Louvre (Thompson 2000). The convincing atmosphere of South-Italian island folklore does not lose any of its charms even if research reveals that accessible records do not contain exactly these tunes, heard in the context of Debussy Les collines Anacapri as though they were real-life quotations. Footprints in the Snow may not exist as a painting, but the composer strongly insinuates that it could; and the music of Sorrowful Birds and of The Valley of the Bells makes us wonder about and long for, the poems whose musical reflections Ravel created in his Miroirs printed underneath illustrations.
Captions typically invite the viewer/ reader into a circular process of reception: in approaching the work, the entire Impression is usually taken in, if only cursorily, before the “meaning” proposed by the artist is known (Jarocinski, 1976). Once the verbal explanation is read, this reading is inflected and enriched by the impressions gained beforehand. In turn, the enriched understanding of the artist’s intention stimulates and focuses the viewer’s next, longer look at the work of art. Captions can allude to generic impressions (a kind of flower or bird, a weather condition, etc.), to specific, widely-known fictive or real persons (protagonists of famous literary works, renowned actors, etc.), or to artifacts and objects of beauty considered the shared heritage in the composer’s culture (a temple, an exquisite part of landscape, etc.). Similar techniques were used by Monet and Edgar Degas (Thompson 2000). Monet’s interest in capturing the personal and direct visual sensation is seen to good advantage in his “Boats at Argenteuil.” (1874). Monet’s choice of water in its momentary appearance as his subject of predilection, indicated that Monet’s originality lay in his rendering of au passage. An interest in seizing instantaneous visual effects runs throughout the work of the leading Impressionists, and perhaps accounts to describe the group (Orenstein, 1991).
Given that an impressionist piece of music is characteristically based on one idiom and vocabulary, one may wonder whether any details mentioned in an analysis are not merely the building blocks of that idiom, rather than carriers of any meaning. Thus a musical detail –a deceptive cadence, a melodic falling tritone, a rhythmic pattern-may represent one metaphor in the context of one piece while referring to an entirely different extramusical aspect in another, a half-sentence or phrasal expression often derives its meaning entirely from its context (Jarocinski, 1976). Such discrepancies can reach a point at which the same string of words, embedded in a different referential reality, evokes strikingly different associations. Thus, while the word group “clotted blood” represents an unambiguous syntactic unit with unambiguous lexical meaning, the connotations conjured up differ dramatically if these words appear in the evening news, a biology lecture, or a love poem.
Impressionists looked back on a tradition in their own country: the close relationship between, and mutual influence of, music and words. What distinguishes their works significantly from their forerunners in the fact that he chose poetic titles. Impressionism in music is reflected in unique techniques and sounds, titles and images used to illustrate a work.
Bibliography
Herbert, R. 1991, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society. Yale University Press; New Ed edition.
Jarocinski, S. 1976, Debussy – Impressionism and Symbolism. London.
Orenstein, A. 1991, Ravel: Man and Musician Dover Publications.
Thompson, B. 2000, Impressionism: Origins, Practice, Reception (World of Art). Thames & Hudson.