The main characteristics of impressionist music are as follows:
The creative principles and style of classical music are rigorous and regular, while romantic music focuses on emotional expression and passion.
In contrast, impressionistic music does not directly depict pictures in real life through music, but more describes the feelings or impressions those pictures give us, rendering a mysterious, hazy, The looming atmosphere and tones. In the form of music, short and irregular forms are mostly used in order to better reflect the freer characteristics of Impressionist music.
Impressionist music did not flourish for very long and was soon replaced by more radical and varied modern music. However, Impressionist music is a very important stage in the history of music development. From then on, the art of music began a fundamental transformation. Because of this, Impressionist music has received great attention, and its artistry and importance have been understood and recognized by more and more people.
Impressionist music works mostly use natural scenery or poetry and painting as themes, highlighting the subjective impression or feeling of the moment; breaking through the major and minor system in musical language, paying attention to the color of harmony, texture and orchestration; He is good at expressing quiet, hazy, erratic and illusory artistic conception.
It was deeply influenced by the Impressionist paintings and Symbolist poetry of the time, and pursued the pursuit of depicting the blurred changes in color, light and shadow surrounding objects in an instant. Therefore, in Impressionist music, color-rich harmony is far more important than melody.
Because the piano has the functions of harmony and exquisite changes in timbre, it can also produce wonderful overtone effects through the ingenious combination of hammers, strings and pedals, which can best express the agility of the cloud and water-based sound. sense, so it is very suitable for expressing the impressionistic style. Not only that, Impressionist music surpassed tradition in all-round updates in terms of auditory experience, conceptual awareness and spiritual experience.
As the founder of Impressionist music, Debussy’s creative characteristics have a direct inheritance relationship with Romanticism. Judging from the titles of his piano works, Debussy likes to place his creations in a dream world, which is a major feature of romantic music.
Although Debussy depicts natural themes everywhere, he does not use scenes to express emotions like romantic music. Instead, he is detached from things, and his spirit travels among the water, light and mountains, and in the ethereal artistic conception. Enter a state of selflessness. Debussy was another master after Chopin who explored the inner sound of the piano. He broke the shackles of tonality and opened up the microscopic world of piano timbre.
Compared with Debussy, the composer Ravel has a very different style of piano music creation. He is gradually getting rid of the constraints of Impressionist aesthetics and returning to the older and pure French tradition. . Ravel enjoys a reputation as a master of orchestral orchestration, and his keen sense of color greatly influenced his piano creations.
If Debussy mainly explores the performance potential and sound level from the piano itself, Ravel pays more attention to the color of piano sound from the perspective of orchestra orchestration. His piano works are most famous for his suite "Mirror", "Ghost of the Night" and two piano concertos.