Music 10

Quarter 1 - Week 3
John Benedict C Teh
10 – St. Margaret Mary
 About us

Claude Debussy’s Compositions

 La
La mer was the second of Debussy's three orchestral works in three sections.
Mer:
The first, the Nocturnes, was premiered in Paris in 1901, and though it had
not made any great impact with the public it was well reviewed by musicians including Paul
Dukas, Alfred Bruneau, and Pierre de Bréville.
Debussy conceived the idea of a more complex tripartite orchestral piece, and began work
in August 1903.
He was usually a slow worker, and although the composition of La mer took him more than
a year and a half, this was unusually quick progress by his standards, particularly at a time
of upheaval in his personal life.

He began composing the work while visiting his parents-in-law in Burgundy, by the time it was complete, he had left his
wife and was living with Emma Bardac, who was pregnant with Debussy's child. Debussy retained fond childhood
memories of the beauties of the sea, but when composing La mer he rarely visited it, spending most of his time far away
from large bodies of water. He drew inspiration from art, "preferring the seascapes available in painting and literature" to
the physical sea. Although the detailed scheme of the work changed during its composition, Debussy decided from the
outset that it was to be "three symphonic sketches" with the title La mer. In a letter to André Messager, he described the
planned sections as "Mère belle aux Îles Sanguinaires", "Jeu de vagues", and "Le vent fait danser la mer".The first of these,
inspired by a short story of the same name by Camille Mauclair, was abandoned in favour of a less restrictive theme, the
sea from dawn to midday. The last was also dropped, as too reminiscent of ballet, and the less specific theme of the
dialogue between the wind and the sea took its place.
 Clair De
Clair de lune, (French: Moonlight) the third
Lune:
segment in Suite bergamasque, a four-movement
composition for piano by French composer Claude
Debussy, begun in 1890 and revised and published
in 1905. The gentle “Clair de lune” provides an
elegant contrast to the suite’s sprightly second and
fourth movements.

One of Debussy’s early compositions, it is the most readily recognizable segment of his
works. The title of the movement refers to a folk song that was the conventional
accompaniment of scenes of the love-sick Pierrot in the French pantomime. Set in the larger
composition’s reference to Bergamo, Italy—a city traditionally considered the home of
Harlequin, a standard figure of the commedia dell’arte—the piece shows Debussy’s
connections with the circus spirit prevalent in early 20th-century compositions.
Rêverie:
Written in 1890, Debussy's Reverie was one of his first solo piano works to make an impact. Even at this
early stage in his career, when he was still working out what kind of composer he wanted to be (he was
apparently a fervent debater when it came to Wagnerism), it's clear to see traits of that signature Debussy
sound.

However, the young Debussy had not quite developed the style and
tricks that would earmark him as one of his generation's most
notable talents. There are no fireworks here, no sudden explosions
in texture that would come to characterise his later works, this is
more of a meditation, the perfect precursor to exploring those later
works.

The gently repetitive theme that opens the work feels like a descent
into sleepy dream-world (as the title suggests), and as the textures
become ever richer the dreams only become more lush and
addictive. A fantastic early sign that this Debussy fellow was one to
watch…
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Maurice Ravel’s Compositions

 Boléro:
Boléro is a one-movement orchestral piece by the French composer Maurice Ravel
(1875–1937). Originally composed as a ballet commissioned by Russian actress and
dancer Ida Rubinstein, the piece, which premiered in 1928, is Ravel's most famous
musical composition.[1] Before Boléro, Ravel had composed large-scale ballets (such
as Daphnis et Chloé, composed for the Ballets Russes 1909–1912), suites for the
ballet (e.g. the second orchestral version of Ma mère l'oye, 1912), and one-movement
dance pieces (for example La valse, 1906–1920). Apart from these compositions
intended for a staged dance performance, Ravel had demonstrated an interest in
composing re-styled dances, from his earliest successes—the 1895 Menuet and the
1899 Pavane—to his more mature works such as Le Tombeau de Couperin, which
takes the format of a dance suite. Boléro epitomizes Ravel's preoccupation with
restyling and reinventing dance movements.
It was also one of the last pieces he composed before illness forced him into retirement. The two piano concertos and the
song cycle Don Quichotte à Dulcinée were the only completed compositions that followed Boléro. The work had its
genesis in a commission from the dancer Ida Rubinstein, who asked Ravel to make an orchestral transcription of six pieces
from Isaac Albéniz's set of piano pieces, Iberia. While working on the transcription, Ravel was informed that the
movements had already been orchestrated by Spanish conductor Enrique Fernández Arbós, and that copyright law
prevented any other arrangement from being made. When Arbós heard of this, he said he would happily waive his rights
and allow Ravel to orchestrate the pieces. However, Ravel changed his mind and decided initially to orchestrate one of his
own works. He then changed his mind again and decided to write a completely new piece based on the musical form and
Spanish dance called bolero.
 Sonatine:
Sonatine is a piano work written by Maurice Ravel. Although Ravel wrote in
his autobiography that he wrote the sonatina after his piano suite Miroirs, it
seems to have been written between 1903 and 1905. He most likely referred
to the dates he finished both of the works. Ravel wrote the first movement of
the Sonatine for a competition sponsored by the Weekly Critical Review
magazine after being encouraged by a close friend who was a contributor to
that publication.The competition requirement was the composition of the first
movement of a piano sonatina no longer than 75 bars, with the prize being
100 francs.
In 1941 the publication Music & Letters printed the article When Ravel Composed to Order by Michel
Dimitri Calvocoressi. Calvocoressi discussed how he supposedly encouraged Ravel to write the piece in
response to a competition posted in the Paris Weekly Critical Review. Peter Jost of G. Henle Publishers
found the original article in the Review published in three March 1903 editions. The original manuscript
that Ravel submitted had the text ‘par Verla’ written and struck out, replaced with ‘par Maurice Ravel’.
Ravel submitted the piece under a pseudonym and chose an anagram of his name. The Sonatine was first
performed fully in Lyon on March 10, 1906 by Paule de Lestang. Shortly afterwards the piece received a
Paris premiere, where it was played by Gabriel Grovlez. The work was dedicated to Ida and Cipa Godebski;
he later dedicated his Ma mère l'Oye suite to their children.
T
La valse:
he idea of La valse began first with the title "Vienne", then Wien (French and German for "Vienna", respectively) as
early as 1906, where Ravel intended to orchestrate a piece in tribute to the waltz form and to Johann Strauss II. An
earlier influence from another composer was the waltz from Emmanuel Chabrier's opera Le roi malgré lui. In Ravel's own
compositional output, a precursor to La valse was his 1911 Valses nobles et sentimentales, which contains a motif that
Ravel reused in the later work.

After his service in the French Army, Ravel returned to his original idea of the
symphonic poem Wien. Ravel described his own attraction to waltz rhythm as
follows, to Jean Marnold, while writing La valse: You know my intense attraction
to these wonderful rhythms and that I value the joie de vivre expressed in the
dance much more deeply than Franckist puritanism. La valse, poème
chorégraphique pour orchestre (a choreographic poem for orchestra), is a work
written by Maurice Ravel between February 1919 and 1920; it was first
performed on 12 December 1920 in Paris. It was conceived as a ballet but is now
more often heard as a concert work. The work has been described as a tribute to
the waltz; the composer George Benjamin, in his analysis of La valse, summarized
the ethos of the work: "Whether or not it was intended as a metaphor for the
predicament of European civilization in the aftermath of the Great War, its one-
movement design plots the birth, decay and destruction of a musical genre: the
waltz.