In the words of the critic Louis Gillet, Water Lilies is “an astonishing painting, without pattern, without borders…there is no sky, no horizon, hardly any perspective or stable points of reference enabling the viewer to orient himself, just completely arbitrary boundaries between actual space and pictorial space.” Like many Impressionist works, Water Lilies does not communicate a set of carefully documented details allowing one to understand the subject with precision or objectivity, but rather a general idea of the subject, a feeling of it.
Impressionism in the musical sense can have a similar effect. The work of French composers Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) is most closely associated with musical Impressionism (despite the fact that neither of them liked to describe their music as such – Debussy once wrote that “imbeciles call [my work] ‘impressionism,’ a term employed with the utmost inaccuracy”). Like the Impressionist painters, Debussy and Ravel forged a compositional style that was, in the context of its time, unconventional. In the music of the mid-late 19th century and prior, there is almost always a narrative quality. That is to say that if you listen to something by Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin or any of their contemporaries, one has a sense that the music is telling a story. We start in one place at the beginning of a piece but by the end, we’re in another place entirely, and the music takes us on a journey in between. The Impressionist music of Debussy and Ravel, on the other hand, is often less concerned with narrative than it is with conveying the feeling of one moment in time or describing a given subject.
