Le 29 juin 2017
de 16h00 à 16h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 4
Séance précomposée - Quel futur pour la Formenlehre? Challenging Recapitulatory Paradigms
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Andrew Aziz
Following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, French composers—particularly Saint-Saëns, Franck, Fauré, and d’Indy—began to compose works in a musical form that had to that point been associated almost exclusively with Teutonic composers: the sonata. The next generation of French composers experimented with the form’s thematic and harmonic dimensions, highlighting the recapitulation in particular as a potential source of dramatic meaning. Among them, Debussy and Ravel experimented with sonata forms in “abstract” and “programmatic” genres.
I approach these pieces through the lens of listener expectation: because the titles of programmatic works do not imply sonata forms, such works paint their sonata pictures, as it were, on a blank canvas. In the programmatic works (Debussy’s “Par les rues et par les chemins,” “Fêtes,” L’isle Joyeuse; Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, “Ondine,” “Scarbo”) coherent expositional rotations are formed by well-defined thematic areas and clear modulations to secondary keys. The recapitulations of these programmatic pieces, however, are atypical: they are often truncated, or the rotation is subjected to a neutral formal function called “resetting of the formal compass”—marked by a wash of sound, often containing a symmetrical scale—that swaps thematic order. In the abstract works (Debussy’s String Quartet, Cello Sonata, and Violin Sonata; Ravel’s String Quartet, Piano Trio, and Violin Sonata), expositions often do not modulate as prescribed by the external sonata template (“generic clash”), while recapitulations do provide this large-scale tonal contrast (“generic restoration”), previously unfulfilled by the exposition. These new concepts are essential to the fin-de-siecle formal toolbox.
