Expressionism
Artistic movement of about 1910–1925 expressing inner experience by extreme means.
What it means
Expressionism is the name for the artistic movement of roughly the years 1910 to 1925 that seeks to portray not outward appearance but inner experience – fear, ecstasy, despair – and does so by deliberately heightened, often harsh means.
Musical use
In music the term is linked above all with Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Around 1908 they left the ties of key and wrote atonal music with extreme gestures of expression, wide leaps, and dissonances of equal standing. Examples are Schoenberg's monodrama Erwartung (1909) and Pierrot lunaire (1912).
Expressionism should be distinguished from impressionism, which suggests mood and tone color instead of expressing inner pressure, and from the later twelve-tone technique, which replaced free atonal writing with a system of order. The term is drawn more or less widely in music and remains debated.
Performance practice
First listen to expressionist works for their gestures: outbursts, silence, sudden changes. Play or sing them with full readiness to express and exactly according to the note values, since the extreme effect arises precisely from precise execution of the notated contrasts.