MUTH 326 - The Music of Ravel

Semester Offered: Second Semester
Credits (Range): 3 Hours
Ravel’s music is inspired both by that of his contemporaries and by such diverse influences as gamelan music, Russian octatonicism, Basque folk music, orientalism, jazz, and the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. His harmonic language, though overall tonal at least in his early works, combines non-tonal elements—such as symmetrical chords drawn from nondiatonic collections—with complex dissonant diatonic harmonies. While his forms are creative adaptations of older models from the Baroque and Classical periods, his sophisticated motivic and thematic ideas and their transformations owe much to the spirit of the early twentieth century.

This course traces the various sources on which Ravel drew for inspiration and explores why, despite the diversity of his models, Ravel always sounds unmistakably like Ravel. Our textbook will be The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Deborah Mawer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Instructor: S. Heinzelmann
Prerequisites & Notes
Must have passed MUTH 232.
Enrollment Limit: 20