Expressionist music often features:

• a high level of dissonance.
• extreme contrasts of dynamics.
• constantly changing textures.
• ‘distorted’ melodies and harmonies.
• angular melodies with wide leaps.
• extremes of pitch.
• no cadences.

Expressionism, artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person.

Expressionism can be considered a reaction to the ethereal sweetness of impressionism. Instead of gauzy impressions of natural beauty, expressionism looks inward to the angst and fear lurking in the subconscious mind. In music, expressionism is manifest in the full embrace of jarring dissonance.

Artists began to look at the world much more subjectively, often distorting its depictions to achieve an emotional effect. For these creators, personal experiences and feelings became more important than physical reality, and the art inspired by expressionism still holds a power to move and challenge viewers.

Abstract Expressionism in the Philippines Increased access to Western state grants and educational opportunities in the Philippines’ former colonizing power, the United States, brought the American movement to the Philippines where many of the country’s artists returned after receiving an American education.

Impressionism in art is fairly easy to describe: thin brush strokes, obscured edges, the play of light. Impressionism in music is harder to articulate. Composer Claude Debussy translated visual ambiguity to music by unrooting time. There are no hard edges.

Impressionism was a movement that was quite similar to Realism, in that they rejected the idea that paintings needed to be of “history” and instead chose to capture modern times.

His “Expression Theory” centered on the idea that art elicits and provokes emotion in the viewer. Tolstoy believed that the role of the artist was to provide the viewer with something that would bring out these effects. Abstract Expressionism achieves this by letting the medium and composition communicate for itself.

Expressionist painters, writers, and composers explored inner feelings rather than depicting outward appearances. They used deliberate distortions to assault and shock their audience, to communicate tension and anguish. In a reaction against impressionism, they rejected conventional prettiness.

The Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement was influenced by the highly emotional tenets of Expressionism, while the Neo-Expressionists emerged in Germany and then in the United States reprising the earlier Expressionist style.

In this way, Expressionism can be seen as a rejection of the Impressionism movement that came before it and a precursor to Abstract art.

Expressionism: in art, refused the direct representation of reality, or even impressions of it (as in Impressionism), in favor of expressing an inner emotion, vision, or spiritual reality; in literature, the effort to subordinate conventional (rational) style and let emotion dictate the structure of the works, emphasizing rhythm, disruptive