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