Impressionism in music is an artistic movement that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, largely influenced by the French Impressionist painters who sought to capture the essence of a subject through light and color. In the musical realm, Impressionism is characterized by a focus on atmosphere, texture, and mood rather than on traditional harmonic progression and form. Composers like Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel championed this style, emphasizing timbre, unconventional scales such as the whole tone, modal, and pentatonic scales, and complex chords to evoke specific images or moods. The music often exhibits a sense of fluidity, with an emphasis on lyrical melodies, ambiguous tonality, extended harmonic language, and inventive orchestration to conjure scenes of nature, dreams, and exotic locales.
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