13 Of The Greatest And Most Famous Impressionist Composers

Start with: “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune”

Debussy disliked the label Impressionist, but he is the movement’s central figure. His music is often called dreamlike, and his piano piece Clair de lune, from the Suite bergamasque, lives up to the description.

His Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894), inspired by Mallarmé’s poem, opens with a languid flute solo and drifts through harmonies that never quite settle. By freeing chords from their traditional duty to resolve, and using whole-tone and pentatonic scales, he broke with Romantic music and influenced generations of composers, as well as later jazz musicians.

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Start with: “Boléro”

Ravel was a fine pianist, but he is best known as one of the greatest orchestrators who ever lived. His ballet Daphnis et Chloé and the piano works Jeux d’eau and Gaspard de la nuit show the shimmering side of his style, combined with a precision and love of clear form that set him apart from Debussy.

Boléro, commissioned by the dancer Ida Rubinstein and premiered at the Paris Opéra in 1928, repeats one melody over a snare-drum rhythm in a single long crescendo. Ravel called it orchestral tissue without music, yet it became his most famous work. It was one of the last pieces he completed before illness stopped him composing.

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Start with: “The Holy Boy”

Ireland developed what has been called English Impressionism, drawing more on Debussy, Ravel and early Stravinsky than on English folk song. He studied composition with Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music and taught there from 1923. His pupils included Benjamin Britten.

He preferred smaller forms to symphonies and operas, writing piano music, songs, chamber and organ works, often inspired by landscape. Among his best-known pieces are the piano prelude The Holy Boy, the song Sea Fever, the Piano Concerto in E-flat and the hymn tune Love Unknown. His only film score was for The Overlanders (1946).

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Start with: “Comptine d’un autre été, l’après-midi”🏆 César Award

Tiersen, born in Brest in 1970, isn’t an Impressionist in the historical sense, and he says himself that he doesn’t have a classical background, despite studying piano and violin as a child. But the atmospheric, melancholy quality of his music leads many listeners to hear echoes of the style.

He is best known for his score for the 2001 film Amélie, which won him a César Award, and for the 2003 film Good Bye Lenin. He plays most of the instruments on his recordings himself, from piano, violin and accordion to toy piano and typewriter, and has recorded several albums on the island of Ushant off the coast of Brittany.

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Start with: “Iberia: Evocación”

Albéniz was a touring piano virtuoso before he became a major force in Spanish classical music, and most of his music is for the piano. He drew on the rhythms and melodies of Spanish folk music, from flamenco and the fandango to the jota.

His masterpiece, the piano suite Iberia (1905 to 1909), is a set of 12 pieces in four books that paint Spanish cities and traditions, with an Impressionist richness of harmony and texture. It is fiendishly difficult. Debussy championed it, and Messiaen called it the wonder of the piano.

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Start with: “Stars”

Mary Howe was a pianist and one of the first successful American women composers, writing more than 200 works. In 1931 she helped found the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., raising the money needed to launch it at the request of its conductor, Hans Kindler.

Her orchestral tone poem Stars (1927) evokes the night sky with delicate, Impressionist colors, and companion pieces such as Sand followed. She studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in 1933, and her chamber works include Three Pieces after Emily Dickinson for string quartet.

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Start with: “D’un matin de printemps”🏆 First woman to win the Prix de Rome

The younger sister of the great teacher Nadia Boulanger, Lili came from a musical family: her father won the Prix de Rome in 1835, her grandfather was a cellist and her grandmother a famous mezzo-soprano. In 1913, at 19, she became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome for composition, with her cantata Faust et Hélène.

Chronic illness dogged her from childhood, and she died in 1918 at just 24. In that short time she wrote music of real emotional depth, including three psalm settings, the song cycle Clairières dans le ciel and the paired orchestral pieces D’un soir triste and D’un matin de printemps.

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Start with: “Emily”

Newsom is a singer-songwriter and harpist from California whose music is usually filed under folk or chamber pop. Her long, intricate songs, built around the harp and her distinctive voice, have an atmospheric, painterly quality that links her to the Impressionist tradition.

Her 2006 album Ys set her harp and voice against orchestral arrangements by Van Dyke Parks, and songs such as Emily and Sawdust & Diamonds have harp writing that recalls the French harp music of the early 20th century. She has also acted, narrating Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice (2014).

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Start with: “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”

Dukas was a respected music critic and, from 1927, professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire, where his pupils included Olivier Messiaen and Maurice Duruflé. He was a severe perfectionist who destroyed many of his own pieces, so only a handful survive.

His orchestral scherzo The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1897), based on Goethe’s poem, became so famous that it overshadowed everything else he wrote, to his irritation, and later reached millions through Disney’s Fantasia. His other major works are the opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue, his only completed opera, and the ballet La Péri (1912).

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Start with: “Sonatine No. 1, Bourguignonne”

Emmanuel was a composer and scholar who wrote a doctoral thesis on the music of ancient Greece. At the Paris Conservatoire he fell out with his teacher Léo Delibes over his use of the old modes, and studied with Ernest Guiraud instead.

From 1909 to 1936 he was professor of music history at the Conservatoire, where his students included Olivier Messiaen and Henri Dutilleux. His own music draws on folk song, Greek and Asian modes, as in his six piano sonatines. He destroyed much of his output, and his music is rarely performed.

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Start with: “Requiem for strings”

Largely self-taught, Takemitsu called Debussy his great mentor and also learned much from Messiaen. In the 1950s he co-founded the experimental group Jikken Kōbō and worked with musique concrète, music made from recorded sounds. His Requiem for string orchestra (1957) won praise from Stravinsky when he heard it in Japan.

His music is admired for its subtle colors and use of silence. November Steps (1967), for the New York Philharmonic, sets the Japanese biwa and shakuhachi against a Western orchestra. He also wrote more than 100 film scores, including Akira Kurosawa’s Ran.

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Start with: “The White Peacock”

Griffes is the best-known American Impressionist. He studied piano in Berlin, with some lessons from Engelbert Humperdinck, and his early music is German Romantic in style. After returning to the United States in 1907 he taught music at the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, for the rest of his life.

Influenced by the French Impressionists and Scriabin, he wrote The White Peacock, the tone poem The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan and the Poem for flute and orchestra. He also worked with the Japanese dancer Michio Ito and was among the first American composers to draw directly on Japanese music. He died of influenza in 1920, aged 35.

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Start with: “Concertino for Harp and Orchestra”Only woman in Les Six

Tailleferre was the only woman in Les Six, the group of young French composers of the 1920s that included Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc, and she outlived all the others. She changed her surname from Taillefesse to spite her father, who refused to support her musical studies.

Her music is light, clear and elegant, closer to the Neoclassicism of Les Six than to Debussy, but with Impressionist colors. Highlights include her First Piano Concerto, the Concertino for harp and orchestra and the ballet Le marchand d’oiseaux. She also wrote more than 30 film scores and kept composing into old age.

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