Lecture 21. Musical Impressionism and Exoticism: Debussy, Ravel and Monet
Prof: Now today we’re
going to be talking about musical Impressionism–next time
modernism, but today musical impressionism.
Impressionism,
generally speaking, is a period in the history of
music running from 1880 to 1920. It’s mostly a French phenomenon
although it did expand, as we will see,
to England and Italy and the United States even to some
degree. We have the American
Impressionist School of Art, for example.
Let’s turn to the board here
and visit some familiar names and faces.
You know of the painters:
Manet, Monet, Renoir, Alfred Sisley,
Camille Pissarro, and the American–interesting
enough–American woman, Mary Cassatt.
Any time an art museum needs to
raise cash, what sort of exhibition do they put on?
A blockbuster exhibition of
Impressionist painting.
That’s what brings everybody in.
It is the locus,
somehow, of what art is supposed to be.
Everybody loves these
Impressionist exhibitions whether it’s Boston,
New York, Chicago, wherever it might be.
So we have those artists.
We also have the poets–though
interestingly enough they’re not called so much Impressionist
poets. They’re called the Symbolist
poets and I’m sure in literature
classes and in French classes you have studied some of them:
Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine,
Arthur Rimbaud, and Stephane Mallarmé.
Turning now to the composers,
the most important of these is Claude Debussy.
He sort of started this school
of French composition, the Impressionist style.
We list others up
there–Maurice Ravel. We’ve bumped into Bolero
of Ravel; Gabriel Fauré
wrote some beautiful Impressionist music.
You may have heard of parts of
the Fauré “Requiem”
from time to time; Ottorino Respighi,
an Italian, suggesting that this also got to Italy;
and the American, Charles Griffes,
who died of influenza in New York City but wrote some
Impressionist piano and orchestral music.
In terms of the works of these
individuals, we’ve listed more over here for
Debussy than any one else– Clair de Lune,
that we’re going to be talking about today,
that’s important, Prelude to the Afternoon of
a Faun.– we’ll be hearing some of that
and you have your Listening Exercise 40 on Prelude to the
An afternoon of a Faun, other orchestral pieces,
Nocturnes– sort of night mood pieces,
La Mer, a big orchestral composition,
Images, more orchestral works,
and then preludes for piano.
And we’ll be foregrounding
those preludes for piano here today and a couple of pieces
that we listed on the board: the “Ondine”
from Gaspar de la Nuit that will be performed for us
later in the hour today, and the Bolero that we
have mentioned before. So those are the players.
Let’s take a look now at what
this music sounds like. I’m going to start by playing
some of this piece that you all know.
I’m sure you’ve heard this
before: Clair de Lune (1890) <<plays
piano>> And we’ll pick it up from there
in just a moment. But obviously– <<plays
piano>> we’ve talked a little about
this before–this general relaxation caused by the falling
down motive only to rise>
at this point.
But also of interest here is
the absence of any kind of clear-cut meter.
That’s, I think,
the big-ticket item here.
You’d be hard-pressed to tap
your foot to this, to conduct this in any way.
So that takes us through,
oh, the first twelve, fifteen bars of this piece.
Now a different kind of music.
>
Let’s pause on this for a
moment. I’ll be emphasizing the
phenomenon of parallel motion today–parallelism–and
here is a moment of that. >
, all the voices.
They probably have six
different notes <<plays piano>>
in that chord,
but the next one <<plays piano>>
all six are going in the same
direction rather than having–going in the opposite
direction. We’ll continue to elaborate on
that as we proceed. >
Okay.
Now another idea comes in here,
> lovely, really nice,
> could be Chopin,
right, that kind of rich sound with the <<plays
piano>> almost guitar-like
accompaniment underneath it, but something really neat
happens here. >
We have this chord
> and then we have this chord
> –kind of a surprising or
shocking, unexpected chord.
So that’s something else we get
here with this impressionist style: unexpected chords,
new chords. We might have normally
>. Then we could go <<plays
piano>> and that kind of Beethoven-type
sound, but here we get >
, going to, not chords a fourth
or a fifth away, but chords just a third away.
>
Okay.
>
Now that’s another interesting
moment.
We’ve had–we’ve got this sound
here to begin with <<plays piano>>.
Well, that’s kind of–
> And then the next chord is
>. We haven’t had those chords
before. We’ve had major triads,
we’ve had minor triads, we’ve had diminished triads and
now we’ve got the kind of flip side of the diminished triad–
the augmented triad. This is the fourth of our
triads. Major <<plays
piano>> –we’ve got a major third on
the bottom and a minor third on top.
Minor, <<plays
piano>> changes those around,
> a minor third on the bottom,
major on top, major, <<plays
piano>> minor.
Then we could have–we have got
this sharp, biting chord called >
the diminished if we just two
minor thirds.
It’s the most narrow of the
triads, <<plays piano>>
but supposing we had two major
thirds in this aggregate, >
yeah, that kind of sound.
Well, it’s a little bit weird
> so we get once again a new
chord here with the Impressionist–the augmented
triad, <<plays piano>>
–and we might kind of pile
them up <<plays piano>>
in this fashion.
>
It’s a different sound,
kind of a strange sound. All right.
Well, that’s a little bit of
Clair de Lune of Claude Debussy introduces us
to the Impressionist style. We’re going to move on now to
first– the first orchestral piece of
Debussy and that’s the Prelude to the Afternoon of a
Faun that’s listed on the board there.
In 1894, Debussy lamented that
he had never created a masterpiece.
Well, he sort of did with this
piece.
It’s a wonderful,
wonderful composition. It goes about ten minutes and
you’ve got the full composition there on your CD No.
5..
What can we say about it?
Well, first of all,
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun: its point of
inspiration was a poem by Stephane Mallarmé.
Mallarmé
was an aesthetic mentor of Debussy.
They were close friends.
Once a week they would meet and
talk about aesthetic issues in Paris on the Boulevard
Montparnasse area. So he–Mallarmé–had
written a poem called “The Afternoon of a Faun.”
Now this faun here is not
f-a-w-n, the baby deer-type fawn,
but f-a-u-n, a sort of randy satyr,
half man, half beast, who spends his afternoon in
pursuit of sexual gratification in the heat of the midday sun–
so it’s a bit more sexually supercharged than the story of
Bambi.
Let’s go on and think about the
type of music that we’re about to hear here.
It’s a different kind of music,
and maybe the best thing to do is just jump into it.
For us, it’s difficult to
appreciate how strange this must have sounded.
We’re kind of used to this
sound. We’ve got–and maybe you’ve
heard <<plays piano>>
augmented triads and there are
a lot of <<plays piano>>
major seventh chords in
Debussy, sounds a bit like a jazz chord, yeah,
because jazz <<plays piano>>
performers like that sound.
They heard it in the
Impressionists drew it into their music.
So there are strange chords
here, but there’s also strange orchestration,
and once again we should remember how unusual this must
have sounded at the time it was created.
So let’s listen to a little bit
of the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,
picking it up about– it’s in ternary form.
We’re picking it up in return
A.
See if you can tell me what the
meter is here. >
Okay.
Let’s just pause it there for a
moment. Does anybody know what the meter is?
No. I don’t either.
I’d have to look at the score
and I never look at the score for this course.
That seems like cheating.
I shouldn’t have any more
advantages than you do. So it’s a little hard to know
what it is there. We–I’d have to go get
the music and find out what it is there.
You heard kind of little harp
glissandos in the background. We’ll be talking more about
that–the harp playing away there, arpeggios periodically,
> or >
, just little dabs of color
underneath by way of a supporting accompaniment.
So let’s listen to a little bit
more here. Focus on the flute line.
That’s got the melody but it’s
a kind of different melody than the melodies that we have been
listening to.
>
Passed it to the oboe,
>, okay, pause it there.
So that melody,
> is kind of like a roulade,
kind of ill-formed in a way. It’s very beautiful,
but it’s difficult to sing. It’s chromatic,
it doesn’t have any regular structure to it,
and this is typical of the Impressionists’ approach to
melody. Well, as I say,
this was somewhat shocking at the time.
This is Debussy’s response to a
poem, and you have the poem there.
It’s given to you on the sheet
for today. Did everybody get the sheet?
We’re not going to read it
because we don’t have time for it.
It’s a good example, however.
It’s a wonderful example of the
Symbolist poetry, where the meaning comes not
from any kind of logical semantic–
no–syntactical presentation of ideas,
one word following the next in a logical fashion,
but just sort of placing keywords at interesting moments
that stimulate our thinking.
These words have resonance in
and of themselves. And I think that in some ways
gets to the essence of this Symbolist poetry,
so you can take a look at that on your own there.
So Debussy was not trying to
write program music here. He was just trying to use this
as a point of inspiration, and here’s what he said at the
time about his approach to this piece.
Quote: “The piece is
a sequence of mood paintings throughout which the
desires and dreams of the faun move in the heat of the
afternoon.” So Mallarmé
then went to the first concert of this piece and here’s what he
said in turn about Debussy’s music.
Quote: “I never expected
anything like it.
The music prolongs the emotion
of my poem and paints its scenery more passionately than
could colors,” —
paints it, so music is painting. Well, with this idea of music
as painting– because these two artistic
disciplines can’t be separated really from one another–
let’s turn to our first slide for today and we’ll see how this
works. What’s this? Does anybody know this?
Kind of a classic of
Impressionist painting, “La
Grenouillère,” the frog pond,
painted by Monet. I don’t know the date,
probably 1874 or 1875, I would guess.
And we get this general
impression of it. If we look, however,
at the brushwork of it, and let’s go to that,
a kind of close-up, we see–here we are–that it’s
made up of a series of individual gestures.
There’s a mark there,
a mark there, and so on, but when we–let’s
go to the next slide– stand back we do get this sort
of shimmering impression, and there’ll be a lot of that,
the same kind of effect worked out in music.
Yes, you can have a chord,
but that chord could be played as an arpeggio,
and you could pedal with it and you could play it very rapidly
and you wouldn’t notice the individual notes.
You would get the effect of the
impression of this general wash of sound so that,
in some ways, is a similarity here between
these two artistic disciplines.
Let’s go on to the next or
maybe that makes that point. No. This is fine.
We’re going to go on to a
sailboat here now. And we needn’t mention where
this comes from but this is a picture of sailboats sort of
luffing more or less listlessly at anchor here at a harbor
probably out near Argenteuil, a few miles to the west of
Paris. And with this as something of a
visual set-up, let’s turn to the next piece by
Debussy.
It’s one that you have on your
CDs. It’s called Voiles or
Sails–from these preludes for piano of 1910.
And I’m going to start just by
playing and then we’ll talk about what it is that I’m
playing. >
All of that music up to that
point is made up out of a new kind of scale,
a scale we haven’t talked about before but now’s the time.
It’s called a whole tone scale.
Remember when we have
> our octave <<plays
piano>> with or–it may take a major
scale in there–our octave divided into seven different
pitches, five whole steps, and two half steps.
But supposing we traded in
those two half steps for one whole step.
So instead of going
> C to C in that fashion,
we would be going <<plays piano>>
–now I got to do a whole step
> –so that’s a whole tone scale,
all whole tones within the octave.
There are a total of six of
them there–just converting two halftones into one whole tone.
So all of this business
> and so on, just running up and
down a whole tone scale.
All right.
Then at this point where we
stop, <<plays piano>>
well, underneath there–you’re
listening to the whole tone scale up above–but underneath
we’re getting <<plays piano>>
, kind of a rocking anchor.
What is this in music,
when you just repeat something over and over again?
>
A.J.
Student: Ostinato.
Prof: Ostinato.
Thank you very much.
So we have ostinatos coming
back into music here in the Impressionist period.
They were there in Baroque
music. They kind of went out of
fashion in the Classical period and the romantic period.
Romantic is too expansive for
ostinatos, but they come back in here in the Impressionist period
and they’re really important in the Modernist period.
So it’s a harbinger of things
to come in the Modernist period. All right.
Now let’s go on just a little
bit farther <<plays piano>>
where you can hear the ostinato
up above, and that’s a good example of <<plays
piano>> parallel motion,
all of the chords going up and going down at the same time.
>
What’s that?
Well, it’s a classic example
> of a glissando.
Right?
They use a lot of television
and stuff. What’s behind curtain number
three? >
“Tell us,
Vanna,” or whatever.
So it’s simply playing an
arpeggio–an arpeggio that’s very rapid family,
kind of–or fashion. * That’d
be another sort of glissando, just playing every white note
or every <<plays piano>>
black note, okay,
up on the keyboard. So we had this glissando
>. All right.
Now let’s talk about the scale
we have it here because he’s changed scales.
We did have <<plays
piano>> the whole tone but now we get
> a pentatonic scale,
just using five notes.
>
We’ve bumped into the
pentatonic scale before. Does anybody remember when
way back early on? Roger.
Student:
> Prof: I didn’t hear
that. A little bit loud.
Student:
> Prof: Yes,
to some extent. It was in that lecture where we
were talking about blues. Blues tend to use more of a
six-note scale, but it was at that very point.
What kind of music was it?
Emily.
Student:
> Prof: Chinese music.
Good for you.
Chinese music.
We had the Moon Reflected in
the Distant Pool and it was played by an erhu.
>
Well, here we have another
five-note scale that involved whole steps and minor thirds
>.
The simplest way to think of it
is just the black notes of the keyboard, and that’s kind of
what he’s using here. >
Now one other interesting thing
going on, and that is the combination <<plays
piano>> of–which is what he’s doing
here–of parallel motion and the pentatonic scale,
because– <<plays piano>>
Does that conjure up any–Chris
is smiling down here. Why are you smiling, Chris?
What does that remind you of?
Student:
> Prof: What?
Student: The Far East.
Prof: All right.
The Far East. Indeed.
But when I was a kid growing up
if I heard <<plays piano>>
I would be watching Indians
coming over the horizon in the West and the good guys or the
bad guys were chasing–it was a sign of the Indians.
What this was–what this became
in terms of film, music was a kind of racial stereotyping.
We had “us”
and “us” went along <<music
playing>> in major and minor scales,
and then we had these other people <<plays
piano>> who generally moved in parallel
motion and used a lot of pentatonic sounds.
So the people in Hollywood were
painting here ethnically with a very blunt brush.
It was “us”
in Hollywood in major and minor and functional harmonies and it
was “them” who went around in pentatonic
scales and in parallel motion.
It was a very interesting kind
of moment there in the history of American musical culture in a
way. So in any event,
that’s what we have in this particular piece.
Debussy is using this here,
and I’ll come back to this a little bit later on
because Debussy was very much influenced–
and we can document where and why–
very much influenced by the Orient,
by the East. He was hearing these Eastern
sounds in Paris beginning in eighteen eighty-nine.
All right.
Well, then this thing goes back
> to a whole scale–a whole tone
scale and then finally– >
And he instructs the pianist
there just to leave the foot on that sustaining pedal,
that rightmost pedal, the sustaining pedal,
> so we get, again,
this wash of sound. Okay?
Now one other point about
pedals, while I’ve got– while I have the–I’m at the
the keyboard here– and that is the following:
We’ve talked about the rightmost pedal <<plays
piano>>. It gives us <<plays
piano>> this kind of wash sound.
What’s it called, once again?
What’s the rightmost pedal
called on the piano? Yeah, I hear it over here.
Who’s got it?
Kristen?
Student:
> Prof: Okay.
Who said that please? Student:
> Prof: Okay.
Thank you.
This is the sustaining pedal,
right, and it gives us the wash of sound.
What’s the leftmost pedal do?
>
Frederick.
Student: And that’s the
one that moves it over >
Prof: That’s right.
Moves the whole keyboard over
so those hammers are only striking two strings rather than
striking three strings. It makes it a little softer.
The middlemost pedal,
however, is a very interesting one.
It doesn’t get used nearly as
much, and I was thinking this morning.
I was looking in my office on
my Steinway upright and there is no middle pedal.
And that’s because it doesn’t
get used very much. But when it does get used,
it’s used for sort of special effects.
I’m going to show you a good
example in another prelude of Debussy.
And this is a bit,
oh, hokey I suppose but it’s called La Cathédrale
Engloutie, the engulfed,
or sunken cathedral. And of course, Monet painted the
cathedral over and over again, with all sorts of different views of
this cathedral in different kinds of lights.
Which cathedral was it?
Notre Dame de Paris?
No.
Any art folks here? Sure.
Jacob, which cathedral is it
that Monet–show the next slide, please.
It’s an impression of the
Cathedral of Rouen, which is about a hundred miles
or so up the river– no–down the river toward the mouth
of the Seine so you go the Seine toward Harfleur and you come to
Rouen.
And he painted this,
and Debussy also constructed a musical equivalent of it.
It goes this way.
>
Notice all the parallel motion
here. >
All right.
So then the sun comes up on the
cathedral. Let’s see if we can get the sun
to come up here a little bit on our cathedral.
There we go,
a little bit sunnier, and we get this kind of music
and we’ll get to our middle pedal here.
>
Well, now Debussy is going to
show you what the bells sound like in the cathedral.
But as is the case with most of
In these French cathedral bells, there is one bell.
It’s called the bourdon,
this huge, big, low bell,
and he’s trying to give us the impression of the bourdon
here and he instructs that we should use the sostenuto pedal.
This is a bit counterintuitive
because we have the sustaining pedal to the right;
now we’ve got this thing called the sostenuto pedal that also
sustains but it sustains differently.
It allows you to hit a note
> and hold that note
> and then you can play other
stuff and clear that other stuff with your sustaining pedal while
that note is still sounding down there.
And he uses it here to get the
effect of this large bell >
as the other bells sound above
it > and then a fade-out at that
point.
>
Okay.
So that takes us to the end of
this particular prelude and I have a lot of other
things I’d like to say about Impressionist music,
very interesting stuff. I think I’m going to cut to the
chase, however, with just showing you
a few slides because we have a guest that we want to talk with
and she is here, and we want to move on to that.
In the textbook,
and you can read about this in the Impressionist chapter in the
textbook–let’s go on, Jacob, to the next slide.
And the point here is the
association of color.
So we’re going to make a point
here and that is that musicians in this Western tradition of
Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and so on
always tie line to color. In a section one day,
I think it was Roger– where’s my Roger–asked
me–there he is back– “How do we know it’s a
melody?” Well, one reason we know in all
this complex music that something is a melody is that in
orchestrated pieces when it’s melody time the composer will
bring in a new instrument. It’s like telling you,
holding up a sign again, “Hey, here’s the
melody.” The instruments are quiet.
Then they come in to play the
a melody so let’s listen to a famous passage from Tchaikovsky
here out of “Romeo and Juliet” where you work up
nicely in the strings.
When we get to
“melody” time,
in comes the flute playing the melody and a French horn now
enters to play an accompaniment with it.
>
Melody time.
>
Now that’s one approach,
but Debussy starts doing something a little bit
different. He’s going to start working
just with color–a little bit, if we can get to it,
of an orchestral piece with Debussy where he’s using a new
instrument. It’s the human voice.
What’s the instrument singing
here? >
Not singing much of anything,
just singing “ah.” It’s just–what he wants there
is the warm sound, the stable, warm sound of the
the human voice, and–as Thomas Mann said–and
he just brings that in, a little dab of color there,
a little dab of color there.
What’s interesting to him is not
a line but just color. He’s going to pull color
away from the line, and that begins to happen here
in the painting of the period. They begin to intensify color
and separate color from the line. Here we have Matisse,
nineteen oh-nine, “The Dancers.”
This is version one of this.
You may not know that he
painted this particular scene twice.
Version one,
notice just the kind of flesh-tone colors;
notice the position of the knees.
Now we’re going to go to
version two, two years later, much more intense.
The position of the legs and
the hamstrings here is much more angular and we have a much more
visceral response to this because of the addition of the
red color to it. And red becomes a very
important color with the painters of this period and they
begin to take this color and just play with the color itself
outside of the line, which is what Debussy is doing.
So let’s go on to the next
slide here.
Here is Matisse’s “Red
Studio,” for example,
where the color red begins to overrun everything or in musical
terms let’s go to Duffy’s “Red Violin”
here where the red varnish quality of the violin is
spilling out– outside of the line or normal
confines of the instrument. So that’s an interesting point,
I think–to watch these two arts work in tandem at this
a particular moment in history. All right.
I’m going to stop here and
introduce our guest, Naomi Woo.
Naomi, come on up.
I’ve never met Naomi, right?
But it’s nice to see you.
Thank you for joining us today.
So you’re a pianist here at
Yale, and we’ll–So here’s Naomi and we’re going to turn the
lights back on. So tell us about yourself nice
and loud if you would, please.
Are you a music major?
Naomi Woo:
I’m not sure yet.
I’m a freshman–
Prof: You’re a freshman. Naomi Woo: Yes, I am.
>
Prof: Interesting.
So why didn’t you go to
Juilliard then, or Eastman?
Naomi Woo:
I decided to come here ’cause I wanted to do a
liberal arts degree >
Juilliard and then realized
that I didn’t want to be sort of at a vocational school like that
> Prof: That’s a smart
move. I did it the wrong way.
I went to–and it was a
wrenching experience to go to the Eastman School of Music
first and then go to Harvard after that because you really
felt like a dummy.
At least I did and rightfully
so. So you’re doing it the correct
way. I think generally,
whatever your trajectory is in terms of your particular
profession, get your broad liberal arts
background first and then focus more and more intensely on your
specialty and then subspecialty, and it will go.
So here you are taking piano
lessons. With whom do you study?
Naomi Woo:
With Wei-Yi Yang Prof: So he is a faculty
member of the School of Music across the street and our most
talented undergraduates go over there to get their lessons and
they do their practicing. How many hours a day do you get
to practice? Naomi Woo:
I try to practice two hours a day but I usually can’t do
that more than a couple of times a week.
Prof: Okay.
Well–yeah.
That’s hard.
That was the thing that was so
weird about these conservatories.
They go down in these practice
rooms and six hours later they come out.
They spend their entire time
there.
It was like learning to be a
great plumber or something like that.
It’s not a very broadening
experience. Okay.
So you’re practicing for two hours
a day. Does that annoy the people all
around you? Naomi Woo:
Well, they’re >
Prof: Okay,
but how–I thought that was just for the School of Music
students. Naomi Woo:
They–for the undergraduates who are taking
lessons at the school– >
Prof: I see.
So you’re kind of a special
group. If Daniel decides he wants to
practice over there, they’re not going to let Daniel
have a key to the treasury. Okay, but we are right across
the street. What are we building over there?
A new music department building
so we’re going to have a lot more practice facilities in the
basement of that principally for undergraduates.
All right.
So this is something that
always interests me.
We have a little time to talk
about it. How good is your–these kids
that are good at this music business, they’re good for a
reason? It’s because they have some
talent and oftentimes this is aurally perceived talent.
So how good an ear do you have?
I’m not going to quiz you on
this. I like to quiz people on this
but tell me about this. Naomi Woo:
No. I have a really good ear and I
don’t know how much of that is innate or whether it’s because
I’ve been listening to music since I was a kid.
My parents were always playing
music– Prof: Were they
musicians? Naomi Woo:
They’re not musicians at all.
They–
Prof: What do they do? Naomi Woo:
My mother’s a doctor and my dad’s an economist.
Prof: Okay.
So they’re into quantitative
reasoning in some kind of way, and this is not incidental,
folks– Naomi Woo:
And I’m considering being a math major.
Prof: Yeah.
I knew that was coming.
So you may not have absolute
pitch.
You probably don’t have
absolute pitch. Right?
Naomi Woo: No. I–
Prof: Yeah, but you probably have a very
good sense of relative pitch. What would have happened if you
started–well, was piano your first
instrument? Naomi Woo: It was piano.
Prof: It was.
Supposing you had started
on–and what–how old were you when you started?
Naomi Woo: I was five.
Prof: Five.
Okay.
So you were a late starter.
No.
>
Sometimes–Kensho,
who was in here–what did he say?
He was three when he started
with the violin. Had you started with the
violin, do you think you would have an absolute pitch?
Naomi Woo:
I think I would have.
I do play the violin.
I play in the YSO and–
Prof: Wait a minute. You play >
violin also.
>
Really?
Naomi Woo: Yeah–
Prof: You play in the YSO.
That’s hard to get in
the YSO, folks.
That’s very competitive.
Oh.
Okay.
So how old were you when you
took up the violin? Naomi Woo:
I started violin when I was ten and I–my sense of pitch
didn’t develop for the violin– Prof: Okay.
So what did you learn from that
and what do we conclude from that experience?
If you wanted to develop
absolute pitch, what would have been the
the sequence in which you would have been exposed to these
instruments? Naomi Woo:
The violin first. Prof: The violin first
because it forces you to think about pitch constantly,
like the Eastern languages are–so many of them are tonal
languages. You have to think about this
issue of the pitch early on and statistically you–
somebody did a study of violinists of Asian nationality
or descent at the Eastman School of Music and something like
sixty-four percent of them had absolute pitch,
and it’s a combination, I think, of working with a
stringed instrument and working with a tonal language,
in many cases. So it’s a very interesting
phenomenon and it sure is very helpful when you go to play
these instruments ’cause you don’t have–
if you can stream the music, you’re not going to have memory
lapses and things like that.
So now we have a piece and
we’re going to have you play this piece, “Ondine,”
from beginning to end. It’s based on another poem.
We’ve given you the poem for
today but it’s not relevant–or that relevant.
What’s this poem about, Naomi?
Have you ever looked at the
poem? Naomi Woo: Yes, I have.
Prof: So what’s it do
for us? Naomi Woo:
The poem’s about a water nymph and she’s trying to seduce
this mortal man and she sings and she asks him to sort of come
in the lake with her and be the king of the lake with her,
and he–in the end, he says, “No,
I can’t. I love a mortal woman,”
and she pretends to cry a little bit and then she just
laughs and says, “Well, I didn’t love you
anyway,” but that’s sort of the story
that’s going on, and it’s very well reflected–
Prof: Uh huh. And so when you play this do
you think of–because we do have the text there–do you think of
particular moments in the poem? Naomi Woo: Definitely.
Prof: Oh.
Naomi Woo: Most of the–
Prof: Do you want to play one and–yeah.
Naomi Woo:
Sure.
Yeah.
Well, with the water that
happens in the whole piece, just a constant background–
> Prof: Interestingly
enough, that chord is an augmented triad.
I had– I cheated.
Are you supposed to
know–recognize an augmented triad?
No.
I did go get the score on this
’cause I don’t–I didn’t know this piece particularly well.
So–no.
You’re not supposed to
recognize a whole tone scale from a pentatonic scale,
maybe recognize it’s something different, but it is interesting
to know. It starts right off the bat
with an augmented triad so that’s the water that–
Naomi Woo: That’s the water and then
near the end– well, and then it sort of gets
tumultuous when she’s getting passionate about
it. Do you want me to play–
Prof: Yeah, play a little of that.
That’d be great.
>
Naomi Woo:
So that’s sort of when she’s getting passionate
and pleading with him to come into the water–
Prof: Yeah.
Does that sound easy or hard to
play? >
There’s a reason she’s playing
this and I am not, yeah, ’cause that’s–I took the
easy stuff, big chords, not–no.
You should look at the score,
and the other interesting thing is that the hand–
the chord positionings change each time they go up an octave
and that’s hard. Rather than repetition of an
arpeggio, up an octave,
repeat it, same hand position, up an octave,
the particular hand positions are changing as you go up octave
to octave. Anything else–I–at the very
beginning of this, I did notice–if you could play
the left-hand part just so we can hear this melody at the
beginning– >
Okay.
So there we have the outlines
of a pentatonic scale at work here, and you’re going to hear
that at the beginning and then you’ll hear at the end.
So the general form here,
as if often true with these Impressionist composers,
is just ternary form, A, B, A with the second and
final A slightly modified.
So we’re going to hear this now
from beginning to end, Naomi Woo playing
“Ondine” by Ravel.
>
Wonderful.
Thank you so much.
That was wonderful.
So as Ondine flies off,
you will fly off now to your next class.
Thanks very much.
.
