Rapsodie Espagnole Essay

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French composer Maurice Ravel is often associated with Debussy as an impressionist whose music encompasses a variety of influences while carrying traditional forms, diatonic melodies and complex harmonies within a tonal language. This language was developed at an early age, as Ravel was born into a musically nurturing environment and began music lessons at the age of six, giving his first recital at the age of fourteen, and would ultimately attend the Conservatoire de Paris as a piano major. This essay will outline Rapsodie Espagnole (1908), one of Ravel’s major works for orchestra. The Rapsodie Espagnole, composed during 1907-08 was first performed in the middle of March 1908 in Paris. The work is scored for an orchestra of 2 piccolos, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, sarrusophone (oboe/bassoon mixed breed), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, castanets, tambourine, gong, snare drum, celesta, 2 harps and strings. The work was dedicated "À mon cher maître Charles de Bériot.” Bériot was Ravel's piano teacher at the Conservatoire from 1891 to 1895. Although first performed in France, this is not Ravel’s first work in the Spanish style. Other Spanish influences include his early piano pieces, the especially popular Bolero of 1928, and his final song cycle Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, a score that was intended to be used for a stage version of the Cervantes novel. Ravel came to the Spanish idiom by no accident, as his father was Swiss and his mother was from the Northeast corner of Spain, and spoke Basque, also, Spanish was commonly spoken and sung in Ravel’s childhood home. During his migration to and musical studies at the Paris Conservatory, Ravel was greatly infatuated with Spain to the point that he would sometimes compose in the Spanish style even when the assignment did not request it. He admitted that a type of

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