Sara Barbee
December 2, 2014
String Chamber Music Literature

Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, both French composers, are two of the most prominent figures associated with Impressionist music. Impressionism was an art movement in the nineteenth century that started with a group of artists in Paris, France. Before Musical Impressionism, there was the Romantic era that was all about superfluous expression of emotions. Impressionist did away with that way of thinking and focused on “conveying the moods and emotions aroused by the subject rather than a detailed tone-picture”. Debussy experimented most drastically with traditional forms in his chamber works, and they are distinct by their compactness and colors. Tchaikovsky wrote about his composition Danse bohemienne, "It is a very pretty piece, but it is much too short. Not a single idea is expressed fully, the form is terribly shriveled, and it lacks unity". I believe that this summarizes the way Debussy used form; he doesn’t concentrate on the direction of the music but the feeling of smaller sections independent of one another. In 1889, Debussy heard Javanese gamelan music at the Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair) in Paris, and began integrating gamelan scales, melodies, rhythms, and ensemble texture into his works. Gamelan instruments are at fixed pitches, they are made out of various metals and woods. Debussy explored these sounds by incorporating whole tone and pentatonic scales, bi-tonality and absence of tonality, and parallel motion. His innovative harmonies paved the way for almost every major twentieth century composer, including Ravel. Ravel had also attended the Exposition Universelle in 1889 and took interest in Rimsky-Korsakov and foreign music. His music cannot be categorized into one genre even though he labeled as an Impressionistic composer. Ravel uses elements from various styles of music, jazz to virtuosic, and has still remained distinct. Unlike Debussy, he uses classical forms but disguises them with the use of inventive harmonies. The music of Debussy and Ravel relates to Impressionistic paintings because like painters who wanted to accurately and objectively record visual reality in terms of transient effects of light and color instead of depicting textbook-like historical and mythological pieces; music was trying to convey an idea or affect through a wash of sound rather than a strict formal structure. Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer and leader of the Second Viennese School. The Second Viennese School is a group of composer that consisted of Schoenberg, his students, and colleagues; but the most well known are Alban Berg and Anton Webern. The school’s teaching followed Schoenberg’s musical development, starting with late-Romantic expanded tonality, total chromatics with no tonal center, and finally Schoenberg’s serial twelve-tone technique. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, and after 1923 only composed music using this technique. He believed that his development of this practice was natural to the progression of music. In the twelve-tone method, the twelve pitches of the octave are thought of as equal, compared to classical harmony where each note has its own function. All twelve pitches are sounded as often as the