Ravel String quartet Mvmt 2

• Impressionism


  A style of French painting at the end of the 19th century that aimed to capture an impression of a scene, particularly through the subtle interplay of colours and light, characterized by vague, blurred outlines, and often capturing a particular mood or atmosphere
• Neither Debussy nor Ravel liked the term 'Impressionism' but there are some similarities between the ambiguous harmonies and blurred structures of this music and impressionist painting
• Impressionist music


  • Colourful and often lush instrumentation
  • Rich harmonies with added notes
  • Exotic harmonies such as those based on whole-tone scales
  • Traditional harmony, rhythm and melody is often quite blurred by these features
• Maurice Ravel


  French composer (1875-1937)
• Ravel's String Quartet (1903), second movement

  • Student work written at the age of 27
  • Dedicated to his teacher Gabriel Fauré
  • Much more influenced by Debussy than Fauré
  • Conventional approach to form and phrase structure
• Structure of Ravel's String Quartet, second movement

  1. Ternary form

  2. B section is much slower than A section

  3. B section contrasts in key (Eb) and textures

  4. B section has motivic links to A material

  5. Extensive link back to reprise of A, reworking and combining material from both sections
• The form of the movement is: A1 (Aeolian), A2 (C# Dorian), A3 (more chromatic), A1 repeat, A2 repeat, A3 repeat, B (Eb major ish), Combination of B theme with A material, Winding up for return of A, A1 reprise, A2 reprise, A3 reprise
• Aeolian mode


  A type of musical mode with a minor tonic chord and a minor subdominant chord
• Dorian mode


  A type of musical mode with a minor tonic chord but a major subdominant chord
• The music is broadly tonal but has many modal inflections, beginning and ending in Aeolian mode, with whole-tone tinges in bar 8
• The second idea is centred around C# Dorian
• At the end of the first A section, there are a series of rich added note chords starting with an E dominant seventh, followed by G# and then C
• The end of the movement is quite chromatic, ending with an augmented sixth resolving not to V but to chord I in the last two bars
• Ravel's melodic writing


  • Fairly regular phrases (mostly two and four bars)
  • Melodic lines move mostly by step and small leaps
  • Lots of repetitions of melodic and rhythmic motifs
• The melody gets much more chromatic towards the end of the A section and in the B section
• There are many motivic connections between sections, with larger and smaller chunks of melody developed and combined, particularly at the end of the bridge section back to the A reprise
• Textures and sonorities in Ravel's String Quartet, second movement

  • Rapid all-pizzicato texture at the beginning
  • Tremolos and rapid repeated figures in the second idea of the A section
  • Layers built up just before the reprise, with second violin playing the opening idea in triple stop pizzicato, against hush triplet arpeggios and a tune played in challenging double stopped octaves, all over a pedal
  • Wide range of string techniques and effects including tremolo, rapid arpeggio figures, and use of mutes
  • At the beginning of the B section, the cello has the melody whilst the violin II has the bass part with the viola in the middle, drastically changing the colour