MUTH 326 - Ravel

FC CNDP, DDHU

4 credits
Ravel’s music is inspired both by that of his contemporaries and by such diverse influences as gamelan music, Russian octatonicism, Basque fold 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 nondiationic 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 20th 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.

Prerequisites: two courses in MUTH 250-299.