[pictured: "Self-portrait with Horn" by Max Beckmann]

Much like impressionism, expressionism is a term that was first used in connection with painting. In many aspects, it is the direct opposite of impressionism. Unlike impressionism, its goals were not to create passive impressions and moods, but to strongly express (hence the name) intense feelings and emotions.

Expression is actually pretty difficult to describe. You could say that it is somewhat like romanticism because they both seek to portray the composer's emotions. The main difference is that expressionism puts the emotional expression above everything else. While romantics (such as Robert Schumann or Johannes Brahms) also showed emotion in their music, they did so while still following traditional methods of writing music. On the other side, expressionists completely ignored tradition and focused on expressing emotions at all costs. For this reason, expressionistic music is often dissonant, fragmented, and densely written.

Audio Clip (MIDI): Pierrot Lunaire by Arnold Schoenberg... journey inside the mind of the composer
Play MIDI
To put it another way, let's compare it once more to impressionism. You could say that an impressionist work portrays what is in the world around the composer: it creates an impression of what is being seen. An expressionist work, on the other hand, portrays what is going on inside the composer's mind: it is an expression of what is being felt. The example we've provided here is the beginning of Pierrot Lunaire, by Arnold Sch&oumlenberg. Notice how it's not like much of the music you're probably used to hearing.

Three major expressionist composers are Sch&oumlenberg, Alban Berg, and Paul Hindemith.


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