Page 246 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

pictures at an exhibition (1874)
The genesis of Pictures at an Exhibition can be traced to the death of Musorgsky’s close friend, the Russian painter and architect Victor Hartmann, who had died suddenly of a heart attack in 1873. As a memorial to Hartmann, friends mounted an exhibition of his paintings and drawings in Moscow the next year. Musorgsky was inspired to capture the spirit of Hartmann’s works in a series of ten short pieces for piano. To provide unity within the sequence of musical pictures, the composer hit on the idea of incorporating a recurring interlude, which he called Promenade. This gave listeners the impression of enjoying a leisurely stroll into and through a gallery, moving from one of Hartmann’s images to the next each time the Promenade music was heard.
Today Pictures at an Exhibition is best known in the brilliantly orchestrated version by Maurice Ravel (1875–1937), completed in 1922. (Perhaps by coinci- dence, the first attempts at making color motion pictures occurred about this same time.) Whether fulfilling Musorgsky’s original intent or going beyond it, Ravel’s ver- sion greatly enhances the impact of the music by replacing the “black-and-white” sounds of the piano with the radiant color of the full late-Romantic orchestra.
With the Promenade (see Listening Cue and Example 14.3), we enter not just any gallery, but one filled with purely Russian art. The tempo is marked “Fast but resolute, in the Russian manner”; the meter is irregular, as in a folk dance, with alternating five- and six-beat measures; and the melody is built on a pen- tatonic scale, which uses only five notes instead of the usual Western scale of seven—here B♭ C, D, F, and G. Throughout the world, indigenous folk cultures use the pentatonic (five-note) scale. To Western ears, then, Promenade, like Rus- sia itself, seems both familiar and strange.
bœœ œ 6 œ bœ œ œ &4œœ 4 œœ4œœ œ4 œœœœœ -- -- œœœœ- œ-œ-œœ
Listening Cue
reAD . . . a detailed Listening Guide of this selection online. LiSTeN TO . . . this selection streaming online.
WATCH . . . an Active Listening Guide of this selection online.
224 chapter fourteen late romantic orchestral music
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LiSTeN TO . . . Example 14.3 online.
WATCH . . . a demonstration of thepentatonicscale,online.
Example 14.3 > promenade Allegro giusto, nel modo russico
trumpet solo brasses œ œ œ œ -----
--œ-œ-œœ
5 bœœ œ 6 œ œbœœ 5 f-
bœœœ- - - œ --- œ-
Modest Musorgsky, Promenade from Pictures at an Exhibition (1874) Download 42 Orchestrated by Maurice Ravel (1922)
what to listen for: The alternation of texture between monophony (brilliant trumpet) and homophony (full brasses). Also try conducting with the music and you’ll notice how the meter continually shifts—a characteristic of folk music.
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