耶鲁大学开放课程《聆听音乐》讲义：印象派音乐和异国情调

耶鲁大学开放课程《聆听音乐》讲义:印象派音乐和异国情调 Listening to Music: Lecture 21 Transcript December 2, 2008 << back Professor Craig Wright: 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 to Italy and to 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, really, 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 the 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 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 [of Ravel] 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 with 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 up [plays piano] 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. [plays piano] Let's pause on this for a moment. I'll be emphasizing the phenomenon of parallel motion today--parallelism today--and here is a moment of that. [plays piano], 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. [plays piano] Okay. Now another idea comes in here, [plays piano] lovely, really nice, [plays piano] 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. [plays piano] We have this chord [plays piano] and then we have this chord [plays piano] --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 [plays piano]. Then we could go [plays piano] and that kind of Beethoven-type sound, but here we get [plays piano], going to, not chords a fourth or a fifth away, but chords just a third away. [plays piano] Okay. [plays piano] 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-- [plays piano] And then the next chord is [plays piano]. 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 minor third on top. Minor, [plays piano] changes those around, [plays piano] 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 [plays piano] 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, [plays piano] yeah, that kind of sound. Well, it's a little bit weird [plays piano] 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. [plays piano] 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 and that 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 really 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 in 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 little 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 gotten--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 and they 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 returned A. See if you can tell me what the meter is here. [music playing] Okay. Let's just pause it there for a moment. 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 advantage than you do. So it's a little hard to know what it is there. We--I'd really 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, [sings] or [sings], 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. [music playing] Passed it to the oboe, [music playing], okay, pausing it there. So that melody, [sings] 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. Everybody got 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 key words 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 really a sequence of mood paintings throughout which the desires and dreams of the faun move in the heat of the afternoon." So Mallarméthen 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 as 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? 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 brush work of it, and let's go to that, a kind of close-up, we see--here we are--that it's really 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 [music and painting]. 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. [plays piano] 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 [plays piano] our octave [plays piano] with our--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 [plays piano] C to C in that fashion, we would be going [plays piano] --now I got to do a whole step [plays piano] --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 half tones into one whole tone. So all of this business [plays piano] 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? [plays piano] A.J. Student: Ostinato. Professor Craig Wright: 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 in 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. [plays piano] What's that? Well, it's a classic example [plays piano] of a glissando. Right? They use a lot in television and stuff. What's behind curtain number three? [plays piano] "Tell us, Vanna," or whatever. So it's simply playing an arpeggio--an arpeggio that's very rapid family, kind of--or fashion. [plays piano> 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 [plays piano]. All right. Now let's talk about the scale we have here because he's actually changed scales. We did have [plays piano] whole tone but now we get [plays piano] a pentatonic scale, just using five notes. [plays piano] We've bumped into the pentatonic scale before. Anybody remember when, way back early on? Roger. Student: [inaudible] Professor Craig Wright: I didn't hear that. A little bit loud. Student: [inaudible] Professor Craig Wright: Yes, to some extent. It was in that lecture where we were talking about blues. Blues tends to use more of a six-note scale, but it was at that very point. What kind of music was it? Emily. Student: [inaudible] Professor Craig Wright: Chinese music. Good for you. Chinese music. We had the Moon Reflected in the Distant Pool and it was played by an erhu. [plays piano] Well, here we have another five-note scale that involved whole steps and minor thirds [plays piano]. 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. [plays piano] 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: [inaudible] Professor Craig Wright: What? Student: The Far East. Professor Craig Wright: 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 [music playing] to a whole scale--a whole tone scale and then finally-- [plays piano] And he instructs the pianist there just to leave the foot on that sustaining pedal there, that rightmost pedal, the sustaining pedal, [plays piano] 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 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? 继续阅读