How Ravel Writes for Orchestra

writing a piece for orchestra is one of the most challenging things a composer gets to do you're faced with 70 odd instruments 20 different kinds of instrument each with their own challenges features things that make them shine things that make them sound better or worse and then there are all the ways you can mix and blend those instruments into different combinations so how do you go about figuring all this out well today we're going to look at a piece by the french composer maurice ravel and we'll look at a small piano piece he wrote in 1905 called alborado del gracioso what's useful about this piece is that about 15 years after he wrote it ravel orchestrated it so it's about as good a chance as you're going to get i think to have a look at how someone who's often considered the king of orchestration goes about turning notes written for the black and white keys of the piano into the full technicolor of the orchestra [Music] so we'll look at the piano piece and firstly try to imagine how we would do it ourselves what the logical choices would be and then we'll overlay on that foundation the little splashes of magic that revel adds those tricks that make all the difference and i hope even if you have no plans yourself to orchestrate anything you'll still find this an interesting look behind the scenes of how something like this is put [Music] together [Music] ravel was born in a little place called sibor near biaret's part of the french basque region and just 11 or so miles from the spanish border and although he's french i think he can justifiably claim a strong spanish heritage his mum was basque and grew up in madrid and revell recalled loving what he called the guajeras a sort of cuban spanish folk style of music that she sang to him as a child ravel's father on the other hand came from switzerland and was an inventor and industrialist he actually made one of the first internal combustion engines and something of his father's meticulous craftsmanship may have rubbed off on maurice whom stravinsky later dubbed the swiss watchmaker of composers so this piece in many ways is a perfect combination of the two sides of ravel's heritage it's packed with spanish influence but it also displays the intricate mechanisms of a precision machine the opening very much captures the spanish flavour the rhythm is a typically spanish mixture of six eight and three four in fact it's a key feature of the guajira that ravel talked about if you listen to the tune in the lower hand you get a strong sense of three four one two three one two three and then you get these contrasting accents picking out the six eight time one and two and one and two under it's also full of allusions to flamenco music and that most spanish of instruments the guitar the texture itself is very guitar like a plucked staccato melody with accompanying syncopated chords and the chords are also very typical of flamenco music with clashing intervals known as flat nines and sharp nines and you get that flamenco sound right now i'm just playing an e major triad with a flat nine notice how all the chords are rolled to underline the guitar-like effect revel marks them as trey sere which means very tight very short again this may be to imitate the flamenco guitar effect known as rasgueado where you sort of flick the strings with your fingernails and you get that flamenco so this is all giving us a flavor and a pointer as to the direction we should take the orchestration in it makes sense to start with some kind of pizzicato strings to really emulate that plucked guitar effect personally i always like the pizzicato on the a string of the cello it's quite a focused and punchy sound so i might have put the main melody line there but we've also got two harps in our orchestra so we can double some of the lines on the half and it will give the pizzicato some extra ring some extra resonance and also a very nice tone to the melody we're not really used to harps playing the melody line that often [Music] and then if you were doing something very simply you would split the three notes of those chords between the upper strings that would probably work fine [Music] but we've not yet managed to capture more of that guitar-like strum and this is where reveal's orchestration really comes into its own look at this chord for example on the second violins it's just three different d's you've got the open d string which always has the sort of extra ringing quality then you've got a d stopped on the g string and a higher d on the a string it all sits very comfortably to play but what it means is you can play all of these d's at once by strumming across the strings and it really produces more of that guitar effect especially when the whole section of strings plays it so when i look back at the ravel orchestration it was also fascinating to see that he didn't actually use the cello for his main melody he put it on the violin and half of the viola is still doubled on the harp and this by comparison gives the whole thing a lighter texture i think mine might have been quite heavy whereas there's a sort of soft precision charm to it being in the upper strings and one other tiny little detail to mention at the end of this section is the high bassoon doing that embellished run at the end it just adds sort of sweet comical touch [Music] next we come to perhaps one of the most notable sections of orchestration in the whole piece which is these extremely fast repeated notes and on the piano these still cause a fair amount of trepidation amongst performers revell himself apparently used a piano which had a much lighter touch than more modern pianos so this kind of figuration is harder to play today than it was for revell and it feels quite remarkable to hear it in the orchestra particularly because the sound is so continuous this is achieved with a cunning overlapping of instruments so with a bit of luck you don't notice where one starts and the other end it's obviously an effect that was designed to create a bit of a wow factor to create something so fragile that it only really holds together through the sheer technical brilliance of the players one of the big challenges of creating an interesting orchestration is to tread that fine line and find that exact moment just before the possible becomes the impossible the playable becomes unplayable in many cases you might find yourself writing something that's never even been tried before and you should expect some of the less adventurous minded players to give you a lot of grief and maybe even tell you you're incompetent you don't know what you're doing now this repeated note effect is pretty challenging on most instruments but i think it's particularly challenging on the harp which revel also adds here very subtly in the background i've seen some players kind of bluff this and fake it just playing duplets instead of triplets so i'm sure this is one of those areas ravel thought very carefully about how close to that line he was pushing himself next let's look at combining instruments and focus on a single sound that happens at the end of this section well it's a chord in two parts it's basically a boom thwack sound it's already quite interesting how it's laid out the foundation of the chord comes from this deep d and a down in the bass and then in the second part the root note is removed and we're left with what's called a first inversion chord with f sharps at the bottom and lots of d's and a's at the top so if i was orchestrating this i might start with well obviously a bass drum and maybe a symbol on the second whack [Music] the d's and a's would be fairly easy to add on the bassoons the low brass and the low strings and then to fill in the notes i would probably put that little run on just the piccolo because it's amazing how much the piccolo stands out even when you have a full orchestra it would just be a very nice little into the main chord and then i would probably make mainly d's and a's in the woodwind uh keep a first inversion kind of layout in the horns and the brass and something similar in the strings orchestrating a big chord like this can seem a bit daunting but it's important to remember that some notes are much more important than others so here it would be important to balance the brass section as a whole probably each instrument would be playing in their comfortable higher mid range and these will be the most prominent sounds you'll hear together with the high end of the woodwinds particularly high clarinets or flutes and piccolos they'll all come through if you get those right the chord should sound pretty good regardless of what else you do because even though there are a lot of strings a loud brass and percussion hit can easily drown out an entire string section so there's my attempt now let's compare it to ravel so it's reasonably close the brass chord is very similar and so is the woodwind but there are two things that stand out to me firstly this fascinating chord in pizzicato on the first violins which has the open dna string and then a very high a now i would have said that the open strings will completely drown out that high a i'm not totally convinced this comes through in the texture but i will bow to ravel's superior knowledge and second is the percussion i should have thought of this sooner because one of the golden rules of percussion in many cases is never use one sound where multiple will do it always seems to sound a bit better if you double up a percussive hit with several instruments so where i just used a bass drum ravel added a timpani a kind of double whack and where i just use a symbol ravel adds a triangle tambourine casternets of course to give it that sort of spanish flavor a military drum with a little roll beforehand and another timpani strike so you end up with all these instruments all doing this one hit to bring out the oldest cliche in the music book it's comparable to cooking you want a multi-layered complex taste that gives you nuance to your palette you don't just want one sound one symbol you put them all together and the overall result is much more richer and more interesting and then comes the main middle section of the piece which is these long solo lines accompanied by schmoozy schmaltzy chords for the solo line i think ravel was thinking of this kind of spanish vocal singing known as the kante hondo the deep song which instrument would you choose to emulate this kind of sound well ravel went for bassoon which i think is a genius choice it has a sort of nasal quality and a mixture of tenderness and melancholy which i think works wonderfully the gratioso of the title is a spanish word roughly meaning jester so the morning song of the gesture is one translation so revel may also have been playing on the stereotypical role of the bassoon as the comical instrument of the orchestra but i have to say it's such a lyrical passage you don't feel much of a sense of silliness in particular especially when it's joined by the passionate cellos later on [Music] so these lyrical melody lines are interrupted with those schmoozy chords we'll look at this first one here it's basically a b minor nine so b d f sharp a and c sharp but it's arranged in this quite jazzy spacing with the ninth at the bottom and particularly when you have this gentle bass line it has almost a bottom over kind of feel even though that's a style that wasn't invented for another 40 years or so so let's see we might put these on the harps and maybe a xylophone just to pick out the top note and yes ravel does this as well although he also continues the doubling of percussion adding the military drum and a pinging crotal just to kick each chord off but ravel wanted to go a stage further by adding some of the sustained sound that you get from the piano pedal and he achieves this with a huge divisy of the orchestral string parts if you look at older scores by composers like beethoven or mozart you tend to get one part for all of the first violins and another part for the second violins and one for each of the viola cello and basses occasionally you might split apart into two which is what davisi usually refers to but reveal goes much further the strings are actually subdivided so that the first violins are separated into six different lines and so are the seconds the viola is into five the cello's into four and the base is into three he separates out all of the eight notes of that upper chord and half of the strings play that as a pizzicato adding yet another layer of flavor to the percussive part of the sound and half play it as a bowed sustain background sound and almost all of these held notes are string harmonics and where possible they are natural harmonics which is a note that you can play by just lightly touching the string at certain points to make a higher pitch what's interesting about these is that you can't really play vibrato on them because the harmonic only sounds at that particular point so if you wobble your finger to make the vibrato the harmonic will just disappear so it's a good way of producing this kind of ice cool sustain sound which when warmed by those plucked and percussive sounds is a great combination so i hope you found that an interesting look at a really beautiful little piece and something that's a really great lesson in orchestration if you want to take the time to have a look at it if you'd like to support the channel do please consider joining my patrons over at patreon if you enjoyed the video do check out my other videos and consider subscribing thanks so much for watching and i'll see you next time you

Channel: David Bruce Composer

Views: 100,488

Keywords: alborada del gracioso, ravel, orchestration

Id: fQAE4uBxgR0

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020