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Claude Debussy's Impact On Society

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From the year 1890 to around the year 1940, there became a variety of new changes to communities and the artists within communities across Europe and America. During this time, artists found a heightened sense of self-awareness and as a result, they created new developments. This era became known as modernism. The role of musicians and music during this era was different than it was in the previous Romantic era. Famous composers such as Bach and Beethoven whose pieces were based on principle and logic inspired the musicians during the modernism period to abandon these standards. This led to a development of the tone color and rhythm in the music of avant-garde modernist. Music increasingly became a form of expressing creativity and serving …show more content…

A musician named Claude Debussy was famous for the rich harmonies, soft tonality, and fragmented melodies and motives within his music. His orchestra often had a subtle pulsing tonality with occasional contributions of sound or “color” from instruments. For this reason, many people compare his orchestra to an impressionist picture which contained small, separate areas of color close up that merge into a unified whole as an observer moves further away from it. While Debussy’s compositions were classified as impressionism, Maurice Ravel’s pieces were both a part of impressionism and neoclassicism. Neoclassicism is a movement which involved returning to the style and form of music from previous centuries, typically the eighteenth century. Another famous musician who rejected music from romantic and modernist composers was Igor Stravinsky. For many years, Stravinsky was considered the leading neoclassical composer in the French orbit. Even though some composers associated with the neoclassical movement were against the sentiment of romantic music, other composers worked to increase the emotions and complexity of music during the modernist period. Some musicians even extended their emotional states to hysteria, nightmares, and even insanity. This was known as expressionism. Arnold Schoenberg was considered the leader of the expressionist movement regarding music because he was an essential factor in the emancipation of dissonance and he helped to break down tonality. Schoenberg met two young men named Anton Webern and Alban Berg who he taught as students and partook in his innovations, such as the twelve-tone system technique which ensured that all twelve notes of the chromatic scale were uniquely used. The three became referred to as the Second Viennese

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