Expressionist music is a modernist movement that emerged in Germany and Austria in the early 20th century, and it shares many of modernisms key characteristics. Expressionist music reflects the artistic movement that adopted the same title, which involved the distortion of shapes, images, and colors to create wildly unrealistic works of art. The aim was to enable new forms of emotional content and expression in the work, often resulting in disturbing, otherworldly, and nightmarish representations of the darker side of human nature.
Key characteristics of expressionist music include:
- Dissonance: Expressionistic music is dominated by dissonance rather than consonance, and can create an "unsettling" feeling among its listeners. Composers achieved this by composing music with really dissonant harmonies, so much so that it is often very difficult to work out what key their pieces are in. This sort of composing was subsequently labeled "atonal": music that lacks a key or a tonal center.
- Extreme contrasts: Expressionist music often employs extreme contrasts in both dynamics and the pitch range of their instruments. This generates outrageous sounds from instrumentalists who often struggled to find their way through these difficult scores.
- Changing textures: Expressionist music frequently changes texture throughout the work.
- Melodic and harmonic distortion: Expressionist music often features "distorted" melodies and harmonies, and angular melodies with wide leaps.
- Absence of cadence: Expressionist music often lacks a clear cadence.
- Twelve-tone composition: The composers associated with expressionism developed an almost scientific method of composing called "twelve-tone composition". This is one of the most famous examples of an expressionist or atonal compositional technique.
Expressionist music is neither warmly romantic nor dissonantly angular and is often very unpleasant to hear.
