# I Think I Will Stop Using The Word "Impressionism"



## millionrainbows

The first use of the term "Impressionism" as a label for a distinctive artistic style was by critic Louis Leroy, who, after viewing an art exhibit in Paris in 1874, published a derogatory article in which he referred to the artists as "Impressionists." The title of one of the paintings contributed to that term - Claude Monet's Impression: soleil levant (Impression: sunrise, 1872).


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## Manxfeeder

Well, there's always Fuzzy Paintings.


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## GreenMamba

If we're going to stop using words that were originally derogatory but later accepted, then we're going to have a smaller and less rich vocabulary.


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## Mahlerian

The problem with atonality is not that the word was originally negative (so was the term Baroque), but that it is entirely misleading and openly false in its implications.

Some of the most harmonically rich and lyrical music ever, fully steeped in tradition, and it gets saddled with a term that implies that it's a negation of what came before and lacks something in the harmonic dimension?

What purpose does the term serve at all?

It fails to denote any aspect of the music to which it is applied.
When it is not taken to mean something false, it is taken to mean something that is not implied by the word itself, and is thus misleading.
The word offers no aid to understanding either how the music is constructed or how to listen to it, so it is not practical for either musicians or listeners.


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## Guest

millionrainbows said:


> I Think I Will Stop Using The Word "Impressionism"


Thank god for that! I was beginning to tire of your endless use, misuse and abuse of the word...

Wait a minute though...what will you do when you want to talk about the critic Louis Leroy, whose use of the term led to ....


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## millionrainbows

GreenMamba said:


> If we're going to stop using words that were originally derogatory but later accepted, then we're going to have a smaller and less rich vocabulary.


That's so true! Besides that, the term is already in common use in many textbooks and art history books, similar to the term "atonal."


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## Che2007

Anxiety about the language you use sometimes gets in the way of expressing what you mean. We all need a common language, otherwise how can we talk?


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## millionrainbows

Mahlerian said:


> The problem with atonality is not that the word was originally negative (so was the term Baroque), but that it is entirely misleading and openly false in its implications.


I don't see it as unclear. It means "not tonal." If you take "tonal" to mean "music having a tonal center" then "not tonal" or "atonal" means "music having no tonal center" or music in which a tonal center is not of primary importance.


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## Mahlerian

millionrainbows said:


> I don't see it as unclear. It means "not tonal." If you take "tonal" to mean "music having a tonal center" then "not tonal" or "atonal" means "music having no tonal center" or music in which a tonal center is not of primary importance.


Which description does not fit most of the music called atonal.


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## Dim7

Whether something is a tonal center or not is just like your opinion, maan.


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## millionrainbows

Mahlerian said:


> Which description does not fit most of the music called atonal.


 Yes it does. Music of the "atonal" and "free atonal" period of late Romanticism circulated all 12 notes continuously. There was constant root movement, and tonality was so weak that it became impossible to analyze it as having a tone center. It was a short step from this "seriously weakened if almost non-existent tonality" of late Romanticism to 12-tone music, which really was, absolutely, "without a tonal center" since it did not use a tonal hierarchy.


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## Mahlerian

millionrainbows said:


> Yes it does. Music of the "atonal" and "free atonal" period of late Romanticism circulated all 12 notes continuously. There was constant root movement, and tonality was so weak that it became impossible to analyze it as having a tone center. It was a short step from this "seriously weakened if almost non-existent tonality" to 12-tone music, which reallt was, absolutely, "without a tonal center" since it did not use a tonal hierarchy.


Most of the 12-tone music I've heard has very clear tonal centers. Certainly everything ever written by the Second Viennese School does.

The use of all 12 pitch classes in frequent circulation does not preclude at all the presence of tonal centers. It's all down to how it's organized.


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## millionrainbows

Dim7 said:


> Whether something is a tonal center or not is just like your opinion, maan.


 No, I think perception of tonal centers is built-in to the way our ear/brain operates (in a normally functioning ear/brain human).


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## Che2007

Mahlerian said:


> Most of the 12-tone music I've heard has very clear tonal centers. Certainly everything ever written by the Second Viennese School does.
> 
> The use of all 12 pitch classes in frequent circulation does not preclude at all the presence of tonal centers. It's all down to how it's organized.


I am interested, do you hear tonal centres in any of this music?





 (Brian Ferneyhough Quartet No. 6)





 (Helmut Lachenmann Pression)





 (Aaron Cassidy The Pleats of Matter)





 (Salvatore Sciarrino String Quartet No. 8)





 (Liza Lim City of Fallen Angels)





 (John Zorn Pandora's Box)

I am not trying to have a dig or anything. I am generally interested.


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## millionrainbows

Che2007 said:


> I am interested, do you hear tonal centres in any of this music?
> 
> I am not trying to have a dig or anything. I am generally interested.


This could easily become an irrelevant issue. "Tonality" needs to be applied to such music in which "tonality or the lack of it" is of primary interest. It's irrelevant when applied to some of John Cage's works, for example.
Unless you think that perception of tonality is something we do reflexively, to all sound, without discrimination.


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## Che2007

millionrainbows said:


> This could easily become an irrelevant issue. "Tonality" needs to be applied to such music in which "tonality or the lack of it" is of primary interest. It's irrelevant when applied to some of John Cage's works, for example.
> Unless you think that perception of tonality is something we do reflexively, to all sound, without discrimination.


I am only interested in Mahlerian's perception of this music. I don't really care what you call tonal, atonal, impressionist or whatever.


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## Mahlerian

Che2007 said:


> I am interested, do you hear tonal centres in any of this music?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> (Brian Ferneyhough Quartet No. 6)
> 
> I am not trying to have a dig or anything. I am generally interested.


Sorry about the slow reply, I've only listened to the Ferneyhough so far. I was surprised to hear some parts that sounded almost diatonic. The whole is of course very chromatic and the use of lots of techniques with non-harmonic spectra makes a very different impression than something based primarily on "purer" timbres.

It's definitely not in a key, or based on harmonies connected by root progressions. If that's what "atonal" means, sure, it's atonal.

If you intend tonal to just mean any kind of relation between harmonies wherein there are points of gravitation and harmonic tendencies which are followed up on to create an ongoing set of relations, then I'd say it's tonal in that sense, if definitely not tonal in the sense of common practice tonality. I do hear centers created by the relations between the harmonies used.


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## Che2007

Very interesting


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## millionrainbows

Tonality is an hierarchical system of relations which produces or induces a sense of a tonal center. The music produced in such a system exhaustively refers back to the precompositional system.


Geometric fragments may produce focal points, but these are more properly classsified as harmonic mechanisms, which result from geometric divisions, not an hierarchy. These may imply tonality in a localized area, in a limited sense, but do not reflect an hierarchy, but only a geometric division.


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## Guest

I thought this thread was about the term 'impressionism'. How did it become another thread about atonality?


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## Mahlerian

MacLeod said:


> I thought this thread was about the term 'impressionism'. How did it become another thread about atonality?


The thread was about Millionrainbows attempting to satirize my position. I explained why his satire misrepresented the reasons for my position.


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## Guest

Ah. Right. Thanks for the explanation.


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## Richannes Wrahms

The only impressionist was Strauss! 

Debussy was a symbolist and Ravel a classicist.


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## millionrainbows

MacLeod said:


> I thought this thread was about the term 'impressionism'. How did it become another thread about atonality?


see post #4, Mahlerian (moderator)


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## millionrainbows

Mahlerian said:


> The thread was about Millionrainbows attempting to satirize my position. I explained why his satire misrepresented the reasons for my position.


 You have said that the term atonal has negative connotations, but I guess you decided that was a stand you decided to abandon.
And in my defense, this thread was started on the principle that the 'censoring' of terms could lead to accepted terms being next in line, not about Mahlerian personally. I still don't know how he defines tonality.


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## millionrainbows

Che2007 said:


> Very interesting


...but, as they used to say on "Laugh-In"...


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## Che2007

To return to the use of the term impressionism, that isn't really a theoretical debate: it is aesthetic. As far as the theoretical side of that words are, I guess it is the use of Fr A+6 chords as floating sonorities, planar harmony, soft glissando strings etc etc. I feel that would be better described in technical terms as a period of music practice.

Or have I missed the point of the thread? Shouldn't it have been a theory topic? Isn't that what this forum is for, Million?


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## millionrainbows

Tonal music: music in which hierarchic relations of tones are important and in which melodies, phrases, periods, and movements have clear tonal centers.


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## Mahlerian

millionrainbows said:


> Tonal music: music in which hierarchic relations of tones are important and in which melodies, phrases, periods, and movements have clear tonal centers.


By this definition, neither Debussy nor Renaissance music are tonal. Unless, of course, you are using some unconventional definition of "hierarchic" by which it means "any relations between any set of tones in any way," in which case once again, I ask "what is _not_ tonal?"



millionrainbows said:


> You have said that the term atonal has negative connotations, but I guess you decided that was a stand you decided to abandon.


It _does_ have negative connotations. That itself is not the problem. The problem is that these negative connotations are based on the term implying something completely false about the music it supposedly describes. The contortions people go through to prove that this is tonal:









And this is not:








Show how much importance people continue to attach to the term as legitimizing something.


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## millionrainbows

Tonal hierarchy: music in which an hierarchy of pitches focusing on a single, central tone (tonic) is used, and also refers to the system of tonal hierarchies that characterize classical European music between the 17th and 19th centuries.


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## Mahlerian

millionrainbows said:


> Tonal hierarchy: music in which an hierarchy of pitches focusing on a single, central tone (tonic) is used, and also refers to the system of tonal hierarchies that characterize classical European music between the 17th and 19th centuries.


But that's not what tonality is in the sense of common practice hierarchy. It is a hierarchy of triadic harmonies, not notes on a scale. A D outside of a triadic context doesn't have a specific tonal function. Neither is a G acting as dominant in an E minor or a C major chord.


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## millionrainbows

*Tonality* is a musical system in which pitches or chords are arranged so as to induce a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, and attractions. The pitch or chord with the greatest stability is called the tonic. The most common use of the term is to designate the arrangement of musical phenomena around a referential tonic in European music from about 1600 to about 1910.


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