Le 28 juin 2017
de 11h00 à 11h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3201
Séance - French Music (I): Fauré and Saint-Saëns
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Laurence Willis
What does it mean to end? In the first decade of the twentieth century, tonality as a monolithic carrier of musical meaning was reaching its end. As musical expression stepped beyond the bounds of tonality, Gabriel Fauré continued to pursue a personal tonal idiom. His Nocturnes are testament to this, as direct musical expressions (to paraphrase Kœchlin) that interact dialectically with both the past and the composer’s present. This paper sheds light on the idiosyncratic way that Fauré reacted to the major upheavals of the early twentieth century, through analysis of his Nocturne No. 10. First, I describe the ways that Fauré adapts and extends nineteenth-century compositional norms. Secondly, I analyze moments in the piece that push beyond the realm of common-practice tonality with transformational methods from Cohn (2012), Bass (2001), and Douthett and Steinbach (1998). Thirdly, I place these findings in an hermeneutic perspective, relating the ending of the piece to the twilight of tonality and Fauré’s search for new expressive resources. The most startling example of these new resources is found in the final dominant of the piece. A whole-tone scale is harmonized with parallel major/minor seventh chords to extend and reinforce the dominant. This moment of crystalline beauty leads us to the proper tonic and stands as testament to Fauré’s integration of the new compositional procedures of his students Kœchlin and Ravel.
