found: New Grove dict. of mus. online, Nov. 4, 2003(A term applied to prominent artistic trends before, during and after World War I, especially in the visual arts and literature in Austria and Germany. By analogy it may apply to music of that time, or more generally to any music, in which an extravagant and apparently chaotic surface conveys turbulence in the composer's psyche; in a narrow sense embraces most of Schoenberg's post-tonal, pre-12-note output - that his "free atonal" period; often used more broadly to include other music from the same period with shared characteristics; a still broader application of the term, especially in the adjectival forms "expressionistic" and "expressionist," is in common use, often implying dissaproval, denoting music of an era in which intense self-expression appears to override demonstrable coherence and to flout convention)
