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As The Romantic Composers Had Used Long Forms Of Music In Which To Convey ...

As the romantic composers had used long forms of music in which to convey vastness and the sublime to exemplify greatness which culminated in symphonies and concertos, the impressionist composers explored much shorter forms of music, such as nocturnes and preludes. The role of dissonance was crucial to the musical impressionists and the French composer Claude Debussy declared that his use of dissonance was simply a case the he was ‘trying to do something different'- in a way realities- what the imbeciles call `impressionism' is a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by art critics."
Achille-Claude Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel he was considered to be the most prominent figure working within the new style of music that would be come to commonly known as the impressionist movement, though he himself was known to intensely dislike the term when it came to be applied to his own compositions. Debussy came to be a central figure throughout European music at the beginning of the twentieth century and due to his change of direction and scope, virtually defined the transition from late-Romantic music to twentieth century modernist music. The stark change in style and move away from the romantic notion of the sublime was due to the use of Symbolism. This was a significant movement that inspired Debussy and the impressionists as composers. However, it also gave a new emphasis on consonance and dissonance in relation to cultural significance. The idea behind the impressionist movement was to turn from the musical object entirely and, like the artistic movement of the same genre, turn the musicians / composers attention to the manipulation of the structure of music itself.
Like his artistic inspiration, Debussy's music was concerned with the depiction of mood and colour. He typically used and manipulated a structural model based upon mathematic formula, which incorporated dissonance and complexity arouse this depiction. Musical critics have suggested that some of Debussy's pieces can be divided into sections that reflect such sub structures such as the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence. These divisions have been suggested to follow the standard divisions of the overall structure which was the source of creativity and experiment that lay at the heart of his enquiry. In many of his other pieces the manipulation of these sub structures appears to mark out other significant features of the music. For example, the 55 bar-long introduction to 'Dialogue du vent et la mer' in La Mer, breaks into 5 sub sections of 21, 8, 8, 5 and 13 bars in length, which opposes the sublime qualities of the romantic use of consonance and dissonance.

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