Cacophonous shrieking, monstrous dissonances and dark, apocalyptic subject matter are all things that characterise Expressionism. This movement is extremely chromatic; avoidance of all things that create a nice melody and generally a pleasant listening experience such as cadences, repetition, defined phrases, consonant harmonies, stable rhythms and sequences are avoided at all costs. You would not find yourself casually humming an Expressionist tune: it's not meant to be nice. It’s meant to shock; and shock it certainly did.

Born out of the dramatic chromaticism and intense dissonances of Wagner’s later work such as Parsifal, Expressionism was concerned with truth to expression rather than beauty. The music was an act of personal catharsis for its composers, and inspiration was drawn from deep in the unconscious mind. Mastery of compositional techniques didn’t matter – Expressionism was about expressing your deepest darkest emotions in the most dramatic way possible. Hence why Schoenberg’s lack of painterly technique seemed not to deter him in the paintings he did as a sideline to his music.

Like Impressionism (see here: http://www.varsity.co.uk/culture/4236), the term was originally applied to art. This time it was coined by Roger Fry, who used it to describe the contrast between it and the passivity of Impressionism, which focuses on mood rather than emotion, on gentle evocations of nature rather than exploring the deepest, darkest depths of the human psyche.

Composers such as Schoenberg, Berg, Mahler and Strauss illustrated these emotions using dramatic musical material. In Schoenberg’s Erwartung, a descent from a top B to a low C sharp spanning nearly two octaves is heard from the singer at the climactic moment, while in Mahler’s 10th Symphony, monstrous nine and ten note chords are used to portray his suffering over his wife Alma’s desertion.

Another typically Expressionist technique was to use popular, everyday melodies and rhythms such as waltzes and marches, expanding them to epic, horror-show style proportions: there is the story of how one day a young Mahler ran crying out of his house to escape his parents shouting, and heard a barrel organ playing some popular kitsch tune. From then on he was fascinated by this juxtaposition of the everyday and the nightmarish. Examples of this can be found in Mahler’s first symphony, where he uses a dramatic canon of Frère Jaques, and in Strauss’s Salome, where ugly, vulgar chords and thumping rhythms are used to accompany Salome’s dance.

Expressionist operas often dealt with horrifying subject matter. Here are some examples:

This is a clip from Schoenberg’s Ewartung composed in 1909. It is a one act monodrama, in which a woman searches a forest at night for her husband. She finds his dead body after some time spent looking; then, in her madness, she confesses to his murder. Madness and death were two favourite topics of the Expressionist movement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rErXOMu7DW8

 

Similarly, this is a clip from the end of Strauss’s opera, Elektra, where she dances triumphantly in a pool of her own blood (skip to nine minutes in for this) and then drops dead.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCAnzAxkhRU

 

In short, if you want to relax at the end of a long day, or to have something nice on in the background, then Expressionism isn’t for you. If, however, you want something intense, cataclysmic and emotionally draining then you’ve found the perfect movement. Expressionism is certainly very effective, but listening is not to be undertaken lightly!

 

The top five:

Schoenberg’s Erwartung

Strauss’s Salome

Berg’s Wozzeck

Mahler’s 10th Symphony

Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet – one of his first Expressionist pieces.

 

If you like Expressionism, then have a listen to Krenek, Finnissy, Bartok and Maxwell Davies who were all influenced by Expressionism.