The 8 best Impressionism tracks of all time
Impressionism
Paris around 1900, where French composers stopped treating a chord as a step towards somewhere else and started treating it as a colour worth sitting in. The most direct ancestor ambient music has.
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Claude Debussy / Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
A flute alone, drifting down a tritone with no key and no pulse to speak of. Boulez said modern music begins here, and for once that kind of claim is easy to defend.
Erik Satie / Musique d'ameublement
Furniture music, written to be ignored, and Satie ran around the interval shouting at the audience to keep talking. Eno's ambient manifesto is essentially a restatement of this joke, taken seriously.
Erik Satie / Vexations
A page of music with an instruction to play it 840 times. The first minimalist piece by six decades, and the first to understand that duration is itself the material.
Claude Debussy / La Mer
Three sketches rather than movements, orchestrated so that no section ever quite holds the foreground. Debussy hated being called an impressionist, and then wrote this.
Maurice Ravel / Boléro
One melody, one rhythm, fifteen minutes, one crescendo, no development whatsoever. Ravel called it a piece without music in it; a lot of this site is downstream of that description.
Erik Satie / Gymnopédie No. 1
Three chords rocking gently and a tune that refuses to arrive anywhere. Too familiar to hear properly, and still the template for every piece of music designed to occupy a room quietly.
Claude Debussy / Clair de lune
The most-played piano piece of the century, and the reason a great many people found their way to any of the rest of this. Sentimental only if you play it that way.
Maurice Ravel / Pavane pour une infante défunte
Ravel later dismissed it as poorly written and remarkably indebted to Chabrier. He was wrong, and the horn entry is one of the loveliest moments in French music.