Ravel String quartet Mvmt 2

    Cards (17)

    • 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