by Hoc Trinh

Created on: March 15, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

The Impressionist movement was set between the late nineteenth century, up to the middle of the twentieth century. Impressionists focused on mood and atmosphere rather than strong emotion or the story in program music. Musical impressionism occurred as a reaction to the excesses of the Romantic era. While the Romantic era was characterized by a dramatic use of the major and minor scale system, Impressionist music tends to make more use of dissonance and more uncommon scales such as the whole tone scale. Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel are the two most well known impressionist composers. Other impressionists include Karol Szymanowski, Charles Griffes, Erik Satie, Paul Dukas, and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Expressionists distorted reality for an emotional effect in their works. This was around the time of war and people were feeling emotions of fear, anger, death and isolation. Edvard Munch was a Norwegian painter whose works were a major influence on the development of Expressionism. These elements are distinct in Edvard Munch's "The Scream", one of his most famous works. Expressionist composers expressed their emotion in music and ignored the traditional methods of writing music, [they ignored using the traditional chord progressions of I, IV, and V (tonic, subdominant, and dominant) as the tonal center]. I think expressionist music sounds yucky and weird. Three major expressionist composers are Schenberg, Alban Berg, and Paul Hindemith.

Neoclassicism was a 20th century development, set between the two World Wars. Neoclassacism composers drew inspiration from music of the 18th century; the Classical period. The style of music was a response to World War I, and the emotionalism which many felt for the people at war. Neo-classicism combined musical elements from the Classical Period with the newer trends that were emerging early in the twentieth century. These classical elements included tonal centers, clarity of form, and melodic shape. To these classical elements, neoclassicists added such modern flavorings such as quirky rhythms, spiky dissonances, and large amounts of chromatics. Some of the most recognized neoclassical composers are Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, and Aaron Copland.

Jazz is an original American musical art form that originated around the start of the 20th century in New Orleans, rooted in African American musical styles blended with Western music technique and theory. Jazz uses blue notes, syncopation, swing, call and response, polyrhythms, and improvisation. One of the greatest Jazz musicians was Loui Armstrong. I tried learning Jazz once, gave up after a term. I'm too classical bounded and I intend to try and become a Jazz-Elite some day in the near future.

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