We can make an analogy between music and architecture. The structural parts of music can either be hidden behind the facade or the structural parts can be part of the facade itself. For the most part, the musical structure of Impressionism is hidden. The fugue of the Baroque era is a good example. The whole point of the fugue is the intricacy of the theme's staggared variations.
Attention is drawn to the structure.
The fugue represents the clockwork of the universe, the machine of knowable laws. Don't get me wrong, I do like some of the music from the earlier periods though. But the entire history of music has been the incorporation of more and more dissonance, the place where all the color mixtures really explode. Impressionist music has always intrigued me. Of course the music does have a great deal of structure, but it is not the focal point.