Le 30 juin 2017
de 11h00 à 11h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3201
Séance - French Music (III): Satie in Theory and Practice
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Alexander Amato
To accommodate the elaborations of harmony and tonality that characterized many twentieth-century musical styles, Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) stated that it is not the scalar context of chord roots that initiate tonality, but rather the juxtaposition of the chords’ constituent intervals. As part of his compositional practice, he devised a system of measuring dissonance and tonal force in harmonies, classifying them by intervallic content into six groups of graduating dissonance while discounting the scalar context of the chords’ roots. He coined the term harmonic fluctuation for varying levels of dissonance between adjacent harmonies. Recent analyses employing harmonic fluctuation show that it can be an important component, if not the main component in the analysis of many post-tonal styles, being applicable to many musical contexts.
Intervals also played a key role in Erik Satie’s composition of his Nocturnes (1919) for solo piano. Satie departed from his practice of parodying earlier styles and shifted to a more serious compositional style in the Nocturnes by largely abandoning functional harmony and systematically using intervals as the basis for his harmonic language, and this is evident in the works’ sketches. Taking into account the emphasis on intervals in both Hindemith’s and Satie’s construction methods, this study will trace the evolution of Satie’s use of chromaticism and obscured tonality in his Nocturnes by utilizing harmonic fluctuation.
