musical Impressionism--next time modernism, but today musical

impressionism.

Impressionism, generally speaking,

is a period in the history of music running from 1880 to 1920.

It's mostly a French phenomenon although it did expand,

as we will see, to England and to Italy and to

the United States even to some degree.

We have the American Impressionist School of Art,

for example.

Let's turn to the board here and visit some familiar names

and faces.

You know of the painters: Manet, Monet,

Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro,

and the American--interesting enough--American woman,

Mary Cassatt.

Any time an art museum needs to raise cash, what sort of

exhibition do they put on?

A blockbuster exhibition of Impressionist painting.

That's what brings everybody in.

It is the locus, somehow, of what art is

supposed to be.

Everybody loves these Impressionist exhibitions

whether it's Boston, New York, Chicago,

wherever it might be.

So we have those artists.

We also have the poets--though interestingly enough they're not

called so much Impressionist poets.

They're called the Symbolist poets,

and I'm sure in literature classes and in French classes

you have studied some of them: Charles Baudelaire,

Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud,

and Stephane Mallarmé.

Turning now to the composers, the most important of these,

really, is Claude Debussy.

He sort of started this school of French composition,

the Impressionist style.

We list others up there--Maurice Ravel.

We've bumped into Bolero of Ravel;

Gabriel Fauré wrote some beautiful

Impressionist music.

You may have heard of parts of the Fauré

"Requiem" from time to time;

Ottorino Respighi, an Italian, suggesting that

this also got to Italy; and the American,

Charles Griffes, who died of the influenza in

New York City but wrote some Impressionist piano and

orchestral music.

In terms of the works of these individuals,

we've listed more over here for Debussy than any one else--

Clair de Lune, that we're going to be talking

about today, that's important,

Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.--

we'll be hearing some of that and you have your Listening

Exercise 40 on Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,

other orchestral pieces, Nocturnes--

sort of night mood pieces, La Mer,

a big orchestral composition, Images,

more orchestral works, and then preludes for piano.

And we'll be foregrounding those preludes for piano here

today and a couple of pieces that we listed on the board:

the "Ondine" from Gaspar de la Nuit

that will be performed for us later in the hour today,

and the Bolero that we have mentioned before.

So those are the players.

Let's take a look now at what this music sounds like.

I'm going to start with playing some of this piece that you all

know.

I'm sure you've heard this before: Clair de Lune

(1890) <<plays piano>>

And we'll pick it up from there in just a moment.

But obviously-- <<plays piano>>

we've talked a little about this before--this general

relaxation caused by the falling down motive only to rise up

>

at this point.

But also of interest here is the absence of any kind of

clear-cut meter.

That's, I think, the big-ticket item here.

You'd be hard pressed to tap your foot to this,

to conduct this in any way.

So that takes us through, oh, the first twelve,

fifteen bars of this piece.

Now a different kind of music.

>

Let's pause on this for a moment.

I'll be emphasizing the phenomenon of parallel motion

today--parallelism today--and here is a moment of that.

>

, all the voices.

They probably have six different notes <<plays

piano>>

in that chord, but the next one <<plays

piano>>

all six are going in the same direction rather than

having--going in the opposite direction.

We'll continue to elaborate on that as we proceed.

>

Okay.

Now another idea comes in here, >

lovely, really nice, >

could be Chopin, right, that kind of rich sound

with the <<plays piano>>

almost guitar-like accompaniment underneath it,

but something really neat happens here.

>

We have this chord >

and then we have this chord >

--kind of a surprising or shocking, unexpected chord.

So that's something else we get here with this impressionist

style: unexpected chords, new chords.

We might have normally >.

Then we could go <<plays piano>>

and that kind of Beethoven-type sound, but here we get

>

, going to, not chords a fourth or a fifth away,

but chords just a third away.

>

Okay.

>

Now that's another interesting moment.

We've had--we've got this sound here to begin with <<plays

piano>>.

Well, that's kind of-- >

And then the next chord is >.

We haven't had those chords before.

We've had major triads, we've had minor triads,

we've had diminished triads and now we've got the kind of flip

side of the diminished triad-- the augmented triad.

This is the fourth of our triads.

Major <<plays piano>>

--we've got a major third on the bottom and minor third on

top.

Minor, <<plays piano>>

changes those around, >

a minor third on the bottom, major on top,

major, <<plays piano>>

minor.

Then we could have--we have got this sharp, biting chord called

>

the diminished if we just two minor thirds.

It's the most narrow of the triads, <<plays

piano>>

but supposing we had two major thirds in this aggregate,

>

yeah, that kind of sound.

Well, it's a little bit weird >

so we get once again a new chord here with the

Impressionist--the augmented triad, <<plays

piano>>

--and we might kind of pile them up <<plays

piano>>

in this fashion.

>

It's a different sound, kind of a strange sound.

All right.

Well, that's a little bit of Clair de Lune of Claude

Debussy and that introduces us to the Impressionist style.

We're going to move on now to first--

the first orchestral piece of Debussy and that's the

Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun that's listed on the

board there.

In 1894, Debussy lamented that he had never created a

masterpiece.

Well, he sort of did with this piece.

It's really a wonderful, wonderful composition.

It goes about ten minutes and you've got the full composition

there on your CD No.

5..

What can we say about it?

Well, first of all, Prelude to the Afternoon of

a Faun: its point of inspiration was a poem by

Stephane Mallarmé.

Mallarmé was an aesthetic mentor of

Debussy.

They were close friends.

Once a week they would meet and talk about aesthetic issues in

Paris in the Boulevard Montparnasse area.

So he--Mallarmé--had written a poem called "The

Afternoon of a Faun."

Now this faun here is not f-a-w-n, the little baby

deer-type fawn, but f-a-u-n,

a sort of randy satyr, half man, half beast,

who spends his afternoon in pursuit of sexual gratification

in the heat of the midday sun-- so it's a bit more sexually

supercharged than the story of Bambi.

Let's go on and think about the type of music that we're about

to hear here.

It's a different kind of music, and maybe the best thing to do

is just jump into it.

For us, it's difficult to appreciate how strange this must

have sounded.

We're kind of used to this sound.

We've gotten--and maybe you've heard <<plays

piano>>

augmented triads and there are a lot of <<plays

piano>>

major seventh chords in Debussy, sounds a bit like a

jazz chord, yeah, because jazz <<plays

piano>>

performers like that sound.

They heard it in the Impressionists and they drew it

into their music.

So there are strange chords here, but there's also strange

orchestration, and once again we should

remember how unusual this must have sounded at the time it was

created.

So let's listen to a little bit of the Prelude to the

Afternoon of a Faun, picking it up about-- it's in

ternary form.

We're picking it up in returned A.

See if you can tell me what the meter is here.

>

Okay.

Let's just pause it there for a moment.

Anybody know what the meter is?

No. I don't either.

I'd have to look at the score and I never look at the score

for this course.

That seems like cheating.

I shouldn't have any more advantage than you do.

So it's a little hard to know what it is there.

We--I'd really have to go get the music and find out what it

is there.

You heard kind of little harp glissandos in the background.

We'll be talking more about that--the harp playing away

there, arpeggios periodically, >

or >

, just little dabs of color underneath by way of a

supporting accompaniment.

So let's listen to a little bit more here.

Focus on the flute line.

That's got the melody but it's a kind of different melody than

the melodies that we have been listening to.

>

Passed it to the oboe, >

, okay, pausing it there.

So that melody, >

is kind of like a roulade, kind of ill-formed in a way.

It's very beautiful, but it's difficult to sing.

It's chromatic, it doesn't have any regular

structure to it, and this is typical of the

Impressionists' approach to melody.

Well, as I say, this was somewhat shocking at

the time.

This is Debussy's response to a poem, and you have the poem

there.

It's given to you on the sheet for today.

Everybody got the sheet?

We're not going to read it because we don't have time for

it.

It's a good example, however.

It's a wonderful example of the Symbolist poetry,

where the meaning comes not from any kind of logical

semantic-- no--syntactical presentation of

ideas, one word following the next in

a logical fashion, but just sort of placing key

words at interesting moments that stimulate our thinking.

These words have resonance in and of themselves.

And I think that in some ways gets to the essence of this

Symbolist poetry, so you can take a look at that

on your own there.

So Debussy was not trying to write program music here.