 Now today we're going to be talking about musical impressionism, next time modernism, but today musical impressionism. Impressionism, generally speaking, is a period in the history of music running from 1880 to 1920. It's mostly a French phenomenon, although it did expand, as we will see, to England and to Italy and to the United States, even to some degree. We have the American Impressionist School of Art, for example. Let's turn to the board here and visit some familiar names and faces. You know of the painters, Mane, Monet, Renoir, Alfred Cicely, Camille, Pizarro, and the American, interestingly enough, American woman, Mary Cassatt. Any time an art museum needs to raise cash, what sort of exhibition do they put on? A blockbuster exhibition of Impressionist painting. That's what brings everybody in. It is the locus, somehow, of what art is supposed to be. Everybody loves these Impressionist exhibitions, whether it's Boston, New York, Chicago, wherever it might be. So we have those artists. We also have the poets, though interestingly enough, they're not called so much Impressionist poets, they're called the symbolist poets, and I'm sure in literature classes and in French classes you have studied some of them. Charles Baudelaire, Paul Laverlin, Arthur Humboldt, and Stéphane Malarmé. Turning now to the composers, the most important of these really is Claude Debussy. He sort of started this school of French composition, the Impressionist style. We list others up there. Maurice Ravel, we've bumped into Bolero of Ravel. Gabrielle Fouret wrote some beautiful Impressionist music. You may have heard of parts of the Fouret Requiem from time to time. Autorino Respighi, an Italian suggesting that this also got to Italy, and the American Charles Griffiths, who died of the influenza in New York City, but wrote some Impressionist piano and orchestral music. In terms of the works of these individuals, we've listed more over here for Debussy than anyone else. Clair de Lune that we're going to be talking about today, that's important. Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faune. We'll be hearing some of that, and you have your listening exercise, Forty, on the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faune. Other orchestral pieces, nocturnes, sort of night mood pieces, La Mer, a big orchestral composition, Image, more orchestral works. And then Preludes for Piano, and we'll be foregrounding those Preludes for Piano here today. And a couple of pieces we list on the board, the Ondine from Gaspard de la Nuit, that will be performed for us later in the hour today, and the Bolero that we have mentioned before. So those are the players. Let's take a look now at what this music sounds like. We're going to start with playing some of this piece that you all know. I'm sure you've heard this before, Clair de Lune, 1890. We'll pick it up from there in just a moment. But obviously we've talked a little about this before. This general relaxation caused by the falling down motive only to rise up at this point. But also of interest here is the absence of any kind of clear-cut meter. That's, I think, the big ticket item here. You'll have to be hard-pressed to tap your foot to this to conduct this in any way. So that takes us through all the first twelve, fifteen bars of this piece, now a different kind of music. Let's pause on this for a moment. I'll be emphasizing the phenomenon of parallel motion today, parallelism today, and here's a moment of that. All the voices probably have six different notes in that chord, but the next one, all six are going in the same direction, rather than having going in the opposite direction. We'll continue to elaborate on that as we proceed. Now, another idea comes in here. Lovely, really nice. Could be Chopin, right? That kind of rich sound with that almost guitar-like accompaniment underneath it. But something really neat happens here. This chord, and then we have this chord. Kind of a surprising or shocking, unexpected chord. So that's something else we get here in this Impressionist style, unexpected chords, new chords. We might have normally, then we've good-go Beethoven-type sound. But here we get going to not chords a fourth or a fifth away, but chords just a third away. Well, that's another interesting moment. We've got this sound here to begin with. Well, that's kind of... And then the next chord is... We haven't had those chords before. We've had major triads. We've had minor triads. We've had diminished triads. And now we've got the kind of flip side of the diminished triad, the augmented triad. This is the fourth of our triads. Major, not a major third on the bottom and minor third on top. Minor changes those around. Minor third on the bottom, major on top. Major, minor. Then we've got this sharp biting chord called the diminished, if we have just two minor thirds, it's the most narrow of the triads. But supposing we had two major thirds in this aggregate. Yeah, that kind of sound. Well, it's a little bit weird. So we get, once again, a new chord here with the impressionist, the augmented triad. And they like to kind of pile them up in this fashion. It's a different sound, kind of a strange sound. All right. Well, that's a little bit of Clair de Lune of Claude and that introduces us to the impressionist style. We're going to move on now to the first orchestral piece of Debussy, and that's the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun that's listed on the board there. In 1894 Debussy lamented that he had never created a masterpiece. Well, he sort of did with this piece. It's really a wonderful, wonderful composition. It goes about ten minutes and you've got the full composition there on your CD number five. What can we say about it? Well, first of all Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. Its point of inspiration was a poem by Stéphane Malarmé. Malarmé was an aesthetic mentor of Debussy. They were close friends. Once a week they would meet and talk about aesthetic issues in Paris on the Boulevard Montparnasse area. So he, Malarmé, had written a poem called The Afternoon of a Faun. Now this faun here is not F-A-W-N, the little baby deer type faun, but F-A-U-N, sort of Randy Satter, half man, half beast who spends his afternoon in pursuit of sexual gratification in the heat of the midday sun. So it's a bit more sexually supercharged than the story of Bambi. Let's go on and think about the type of music that we're about to hear here. It's a different kind of music and maybe the best thing to do is just jump into it. For us it's difficult to appreciate how strange this must have sounded. We're kind of used to this sound. We've got, and maybe you've heard, major seventh chords in W-C, sounds a bit like a jazz chord. Yeah, because jazz performers like that sound. They heard it in an impressionist and they drew it into their music. So there are strange chords here, but there's also strange orchestrations. And once again we should remember how unusual this must have sounded at the time it was created. So let's listen to a little bit of the prelude to the afternoon of a fawn, picking it up about the internal reform, or picking it up in return to A. See if you can tell me what the meter is here. Okay, let's just pause it there for a moment. Anybody know what the meter is? No, I don't either. I'd have to look at the score, and I never look at the score for this course. That seems like cheating. I shouldn't have any more advantage than you do. So it's a little hard to know what it is there. I'd really have to go get the music and find out what it is there. You heard kind of little harp glissandos in the background. We'll be talking more about that, the harp playing away their arpeggios periodically. D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d. Just little dabs of color underneath by way of a supporting accompaniment. So let's listen to a little bit more here. Focus on the flute line. That's got the melody, but it's a kind of different melody than the melodies that we have been listening to. The oboe. I'm pausing it there. So that melody... It's kind of like a roulade, ill-formed in a way. It's very beautiful, but it's kind of difficult to sing. It's chromatic. It doesn't have any regular structure to it. And this is typical of the Impressionist approach to melody. Well, as I say, this was somewhat shocking at the time. This is Debussy's response to a poem. And you have the poem there. It's given to you on the sheet for today. Everybody got the sheet? We're not going to read it because we don't have time for it. It's a good example, however. It's a wonderful example of this symbolist poetry where the meaning comes not from any kind of logical semantic, no, syntactical presentation of ideas. One word following the next in a logical fashion, but just sort of placing key words at interesting moments that stimulate our thinking. These words have resonance in and of themselves. And I think that, in some ways, gets to the essence of this symbolist poetry. So you can take a look at that on your own there. So Debussy was not trying to write program music here. He was just trying to use this as a point of inspiration. And here's what he said at the time about his approach to this piece. Quote, the piece is really a sequence of mood paintings, throughout which the desires and dreams of the fawn move in the heat of the afternoon. So Mahler may then went to the first concert of this piece, and here's what he said in turn about Debussy's music. Quote, I never expected anything like it. The music prolongs the emotion of my poem and paints its scenery more passionately than could colors. Paints it, paints it. So music as painting. Well, with this idea of music as painting, because these two artistic disciplines can't be separated really from one another, let's turn to our first slide for today, and we'll see how this works. What's this? Anybody know this? Kind of a classic of Impressionist painting, like Grenouilla, the frog pond, painted by Monet. I don't know the date, probably 1874, 1975, I would guess. And we get kind of this general impression of it. If we look, however, at the brushwork of it, and let's go to that kind of close up, we see, here we are, that it's really made up of a series of individual gestures. There's a mark there, a mark there, and so on. But when we, let's go to the next slide, stand back, we do get this sort of shimmering impression. And there'll be a lot of that, the same kind of effect worked out in music. Yes, you can have a chord, but that chord could be played as an arpeggio, and you could pedal with it and you could play it very rapidly, and you wouldn't notice the individual notes. You would kind of get the effect of the impression of this general wash of sound. So that, in some ways, is a similarity here between these two artistic disciplines. Let's go on to the next, or maybe that makes that point. No, no, this is fine. We're going to go on to a sailboat here now. And we need to mention where this comes from, but this is a picture of sailboats sort of luffing more or less listlessly at anchor here at a harbor, probably out near Argentinia, a few miles to the west of Paris. And with this as something of a visual setup, let's turn to the next piece by Debussy. It's one that you have on your CDs. It's called Voile, or Sails, from these preludes for piano of 1910. And I'm going to start just by playing, and then we'll talk about what it is that I'm playing. Okay, stop there. All of that music, up to that point, is made up out of a new kind of scale, a scale we haven't talked about before, but now's the time. It's called a whole-tone scale. Remember when we have our octave, we take a major scale in there, our octave divided into seven different pitches, five whole steps and two half steps. But supposing we traded in those two half steps for one whole step. So instead of going C to C in that fashion, we would be going, now I've got to do a whole step. So that's a whole-tone scale, all whole tones within the octave for a total of six of them there, just converting two half tones into one whole tone. So all of this business, and so on, just running up and down a whole-tone scale. All right, then at this point where we stop, there, you're listening to the whole-tone scale up above, but underneath we're getting kind of a rocking at anchor. What is this in music? Just repeat something over and over again. AJ, ostinato, thank you very much. So we have ostinatos coming back into music here in the impressionist period. They were there in baroque music. They kind of went out of fashion in the classical period and in the romantic period. Romantic is too expansive for ostinatos, but they come back in here in impressionist period, and they're really important in the modernist period. So it's a harbinger of things to come in the modernist period. All right, now let's go on just a little bit farther. Well, you can hear the ostinato up above, and that's a good example of motion, all the chords going up and going down at the same time. What's that? Well, that's a classic example of a glissando, right? There's that a lot in television and stuff. What's behind curtain number three? Tellos, vena or whatever. So it's simply playing an arpeggio, a very rapid family, kind of a fashion. There'd be another sort of glissando, just playing every white note or every black note. Okay, up on the keyboard. So I have this. Right, now let's talk about the scale we have here, because he's actually changed scales. We did have whole tone, but now we get a pentatonic scale, just using five notes. We've bumped into the pentatonic scale before. Anybody remember when, way back early on, Roger? I didn't hear that, a little bit loud. Yes, to some extent it was in that lecture when we were talking about blues. Blues tends to use more of a six-note scale, but it was at that very point. What kind of music was it, Emily? Chinese music. Good for you. Chinese music. We had the moon reflected in the distant pool, and it was played by an arhu. Well, here we have another five-note scale. They involve whole steps and minor thirds. The simplest way to think of it is just the black notes of the keyboard, and that's kind of what he's using here. Now one other interesting thing going on, and that is the combination of which is what he's doing here, of parallel motion and the pentatonic scale, because that conjure up any... Now, Chris is smiling down here. Why are you smiling, Chris? What does that remind you of? What? All right, the Far East, indeed. But when I was a kid growing up, if I heard... I would be watching Indians coming over the horizon in the West, and the good guys are the bad guys are chasing around. It was a sign of the Indians. What this was, what this became in terms of film music, was a kind of racial stereotyping. We had us, and us went along in major and minor scales, and we had these other people who generally moved in parallel motion and used a lot of pentatonic sounds. So the people in Hollywood were painting here ethnically with a very kind of blunt brush. It was us in Hollywood in major and minor and functional harmonies, and it was them who went around in pentatonic scales and in parallel motions. There's a very interesting kind of moment there in the history of American musical culture in a way. So in any event, that's what we have in this particular piece. W.C. is using this here, and I'll come back to this a little bit later on, because W.C. was very much influenced, and we can document where and why, very much influenced by the Orient, by the East. He was hearing these Eastern sounds in Paris beginning in 1889. All right, well then this thing goes back. It goes back to our whole scale, a whole tone scale, and then finally he instructs the pianist there just to leave the foot on that sustaining pedal there, that rightmost pedal, the sustaining pedal. So we get again this wash of sound. Okay? Now one other point about pedals while I've got the, well I have the, I'm at the keyboard here, my heavens, look what time it is already. And that is the following. We've talked about the rightmost pedal. It gives us this kind of wash sound. What's it called once again? What's the rightmost pedal called on the piano? Yeah? We'll hear it over here. Who's got it? Christian? Okay, who said that please? Okay, thank you. This is the sustaining pedal, right? It gives us the wash of sound. What's the leftmost pedal do? Frederick, that's right. Moves the whole keyboard over so those hammers are only striking two strings rather than striking three strings. It makes it a little softer. The middlemost pedal, however, is a very interesting one. It doesn't get used nearly as much. And I was thinking this morning, I'm looking in my office on my Steinway upright and there is no middle pedal. And that's because it doesn't get used very much. But when it does get used, it's used for sort of special effects. Let me show you a good example in another prelude of Debussy. And this is a bit hokey I suppose, but it's called the La Caterrale Anglutie, the engulfed or sunken cathedral. And of course Monet painted the cathedral over and over again, all sorts of different views of this cathedral in different kinds of lights. Which cathedral was it? Notre Dame de Paris? No? Any folks here? Jacob, which cathedral is it that Monet? Show the next slide, please. Well, we won't tell them. It's an impression of the cathedral of Rouen, which is about a hundred miles or so up river, no, down river toward the mouth of the Seine. So you go, the Seine, toward Harfleur and you come to Rouen. And he painted this. And Debussy also constructed a musical equivalent of it that goes this way. Notice all the parallel motion here? All right. So then the sun comes up on the cathedral. Let's see if we can get the sun to come up here a little bit on our cathedral. There we go, a little bit sunnier. And we get this kind of music and we'll get to our middle pedal here. Well, now Debussy is going to show you what the bells sound like on the cathedral. But as is the case with most of these French cathedral bells, there is one bell. It's called the bourdon, this huge big low bell. And he's trying to give us the impression of the bourdon here. And he instructs that we should use the sostenuto pedal. This is a bit counterintuitive because we have the sustaining pedal to the right. Now we've got this thing called the sostenuto pedal. It also sustains, but it sustains in a different way. It allows you to hit a note and hold that note and then you can play other stuff and clear that other stuff with your sustaining pedal while that note is still sounding down there. And he uses it here to get the effect of this large bell. See, other bells sound above it. So that takes us to the end of this particular prelude. Now I have a lot of other things I'd like to say about Impressionist music. Very interesting stuff. I think I'm going to cut to the chase, however, with just showing you a few slides because we have a guest that we want to talk with, and she is here, and we want to move on to that. In the textbook, and you can read about this in the Impressionist chapter in the textbook, let's go on Jacob to the next slide. And the point here is the association of color. And Linda, if you would, cue the Tchaikovsky, which should be track, I guess, 15, is it? Tchaikovsky is ready? Cool. So we're going to make a point here. And that is that musicians in this western tradition of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart and so on always tie line to color. In a section one day, I think it was Roger. Where's my Roger? Ask me, there he is back there. How do we know it's a melody? Well, one reason we know in all this complex of music that something is a melody is that in orchestrated pieces, when it's melody time, the composer will bring in a new instrument. It's like telling you, holding up a sign again, hey, here's the melody. Instruments are quiet. Then they come in to play the melody. So let's listen to a famous passage of Tchaikovsky here out of Romeo and Juliet where he work up nicely in the strings when we get to melody time, in comes the flute playing the melody and a French horn now enters to play an accompaniment with it. Melody time. All right, so let's stop with that. Now that's one approach, but Debussy starts doing something a little bit different. He's going to start working just with color, just with color. A little bit, if we can get to it, of an orchestral piece by Debussy where he's using a new instrument. It's the human voice. What's the instrument singing here? Okay, stop. Time is short. Not singing much of anything. Just singing ah. It's just what he wants there is the warm sound, the stable warm sound of the human voice. And as Thomas Mann said. And he just brings that in, little dab of color there, little dab of color there. What's interesting him is not line, but just color. He's going to pull in color away from line. And that begins to happen here in the painting of the period. They begin to intensify color and separate color from line. Here we have Matisse, 1909. The dancers. This is version one of this. You may not know that he actually painted this particular scene twice. Version one, notice just the kind of flesh tone colors. Notice the position of the knees. Now we're going to go to version two, two years later, much more intense. The position of the legs and the hamstrings here is much more angular and we have a much more visceral response to this because of the addition of the red color to it. And red becomes a very important color with the painters of this period. And they begin to take this color and just play with the color itself outside of line, which is what Debussy is doing. So let's go on to the next slide here. Here is Matisse's red studio, for example, where the color red begins to overrun everything. Or in musical terms, let's go to Duffie's red violin here, where the red varnish quality of the violin is spilling out outside of the line or normal confines of the instrument. So that's an interesting point, I think, to watch these two arts work in tandem at this particular moment in history. All right. I'm going to stop here and introduce our guest, Naomi Wu. Naomi, come on up. I've never met Naomi, right? But it's nice to see you. Thank you for joining us today. So you're a pianist here at Yale and we'll tell you how we're doing out there. I'm told that when we have guests that sometimes we don't foreground the guests enough. Can you see? Okay? Okay, Jew? Great. So here's Naomi and we're going to turn the lights back on. So tell us about yourself, nice and loud, if you would please. Are you a music major? You're a freshman? Yes, I am. Interesting. So why didn't you go to Juilliard then? Or Eastman? It was a smart move. I did it the wrong way. I went to, and it was a wrenching experience, to go to the Eastman School of Music first and then go to Harvard after that. That, because you really felt like a dummy, at least I did, and rightfully so. So you're doing it the correct way. I think generally whatever your trajectory is in terms of your particular profession, get your broad and liberal arts background first and then focus more and more, more intensely on your specialty and then subspecialty and on it will go. So here you are taking piano lessons. With whom do you study? So he is a faculty member of the School of Music across the street and our most talented undergraduates go over there to get their lessons and they do their practicing. How many hours a day do you get to practice? Okay, well that's hard. That was the thing that was so weird about these conservatories. These kids, you go down there and you go in these practice rooms and six hours later they come out. I mean, they spend their entire time in there. It's like learning to be a great plumber or something like that. It's not a very broadening experience. Okay, so you're practicing two hours a day. Does that annoy the people all around you? Okay, but I thought that was just for the School of Music students. Okay, I see. So you're kind of a special group. If Daniel decides he wants to practice over there, they're not going to let Daniel have a key to the Treasury. Okay, but we are a red course across street. What are we building over there? A new music department building. We're going to have a lot more practice facilities in the basement of that, principally for undergraduates. All right, so this is something that always interests me. We have a little time to talk about it. How good is your, you know, these kids that are good at this music business, they're good for a reason. It's because they have some talent, and oftentimes this is orally perceived talent. So how good an ear do you have? I'm not going to quiz you on this. I like to quiz people on this, but tell me about this. Now, I mean, I have a really good ear, and I don't know how much of that is innate, or whether it's because I've been listening to music since I was a kid. My parents were always playing music. Were they musicians? They're not musicians at all. They play classical music. Okay, so they're into quantitative reasoning in some kind of way. And this is not incidental, folks. Yeah, I knew that it was coming. So you may not have absolute pitch. You probably don't have absolute pitch, right? No, but you probably have a very good sense of relative pitch. What would have happened if you started out, well, was piano your first instrument? It was. It was. Supposing you had started out on, and how old were you when you started? I was five. Five. Okay, so you were a late starter. No. Sometimes, Ken Cho, who was in here, what did he say? He was three when he started with the violin. Had you started with the violin, do you think you would have absolute pitch? You know, definitely. And I started with the violin. Wait a minute. You play violin also? Really? Yeah. You play in the YSO. You know, that's really hard to get in the YSO, folks. That's very competitive. Oh, okay. So how old were you when you took up violin? I started violin when I was my sense of pitch. Didn't develop for the violin. Okay. So what did you learn from that? What do we conclude from that experience? If you wanted to develop absolute pitch, what would have been the sequence in which you would have been exposed to these instruments? Violin first. Violin first, because it forces you to think about pitch constantly, like the eastern languages, or so many of them are tonal languages. You have to think about this issue of pitch early on. And statistically, somebody did a study of violinists of Asian nationality or descent at the Eastman School of Music, and something like 64 percent of them had absolute pitch. And it's a combination, I think, of working with a stringed instrument and working with a tonal language in many cases. So it's a very interesting phenomenon. And it sure is very helpful when you go to play these instruments because you don't have, you know, if you can stream the music, you're not going to have memory lapses and things like that. So now we have a piece, and we're going to have you play this piece, Ondine, for beginning to end. It's based on another poem. We've given you the poem for today, but it's not really relevant, or that relevant. What's this poem about, Naomi? Have you ever looked at the poem? Yes, I have. So what's it do for us? She asks him to sort of come in the light with her, and that's sort of the story that's going on. And it's like very well reflected in the poem. So when you play this, do you think of particular because we do have the text there, do you think of particular moments in the poem? Oh, really? You want to play one? Yes. It's constant running notes in the whole piece. Okay. Interestingly enough, that chord is an augmented triad. I cheated. Are you supposed to recognize an augmented triad? No. I did go get the score on this because I didn't know this piece particularly well. So no, you're not supposed to recognize a whole tone scale from a pentatonic scale. Maybe recognize it's something different. But it is interesting to note it starts right off the bat with an augmented triad. So that's the water that... That's the water. And then near the end, it's really tumultuous when she's getting really passionate about it. Do you want me to play a little bit? Yeah, play a little of that. That'd be great. Does that sound easy or hard to play? There's a reason she's playing this, and I am not. Yeah, because that's a... I took the easy stuff. Big chords, you know? No. You should look at the score. And the other interesting thing is that the core positionings change each time they go up an octave, and that's really hard. Rather than repetition of an arpeggio up an octave, repeated same hand position up an octave, the particular hand positions are changing as you go up octave, octave to octave. Anything else? At the very beginning of this, I did notice if you could play the left hand part, just so we can hear this melody at the beginning. Okay, so we have the outlines of a pentatonic scale at work here. And you're going to hear that at the beginning, and then you'll hear it at the end. So the general form here, as is often true with these impressionist composers, is just ternary form. A, B, A, with the second and final A, slightly modified. So we're going to hear this now from the beginning to Enne Omi Wu playing Ondine by Ravel. As Ondine flies off, you will fly off now to your next class. Thanks very much.