Impressionism in music was a movement among various composers in Western classical music, mainly during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, whose music focuses on mood and atmosphere, "conveying the moods and emotions aroused by the subject rather than a detailed tone‐picture". The term "Impressionism" is borrowed from the painting style gaining influence in France during the late 1800s, first used to describe French painter Monets work Impression, Sunrise. Composers were labeled Impressionists by analogy to the Impressionist painters who use starkly contrasting colors, the effect of light on an object, blurry foreground and background, flattening perspective, etc. to make the observer focus their attention on the overall impression.
The most prominent feature in musical Impressionism is the use of "color," or in musical terms, timbre, which can be achieved through orchestration, harmonic usage, texture, etc. . Impressionist music focuses more on evoking mood and emotions than detailed progressions and traditional rhythms and progressions like impressionist paintings of the time. Elements often termed impressionistic include static harmony, emphasis on instrumental timbres that create a shimmering interplay of "colors," melodies that lack directed motion, surface ornamentation that obscures or substitutes for melody, and an avoidance of traditional musical form.
The purpose of Impressionist music is to evoke a feeling or convey a mood and to achieve that, the genre explores mood and atmosphere above distinct melody lines. Impressionism in music can be seen as a reaction against the rhetoric of Romanticism, disrupting the forward motion of standard harmonic progressions. The other composer most often associated with Impressionism is Maurice Ravel. Impressionistic passages are common in earlier music by Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Richard Wagner, and in music by later composers such as Charles Ives, Béla Bartók, and George Gershwin.
