How Ravel Orchestrated: Mother Goose Suite - PDF eBook

How Ravel Orchestrated: Mother Goose Suite - A Variety of Musical Moods

Maurice Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite began life as a piano suite based on the Mother Goose short stories (not the nursery rhymes). Out of these stories emerge a variety of situations to be described musically, all of which are ideal for the dramatic, film/TV, and game composer. A partial list includes scoring such moods as:

• stateliness,
• unsureness,
• animal effects without synthesizers,
• romantic anxiety,
• joy,
• emotional rising without the basses,
• happily ever after,
• the sound of the Orient,
• and much more.

See How Ravel Went From Piano To Orchestra

By matching the music to the stories, you'll find an amazing set of scoring devices you can apply and use in your own compositions today. From the music score, you can see how Ravel went from piano to orchestra, and where within his own composition he changed things!

This may not seem like a big deal until you realize that there are two approaches for transcribing a score from piano to orchestra (or other ensemble). One approach is to score as close to the piano part as possible to preserve the composer’s intent. The other, is to change as you go. Ravel did both. In his own compositions, he changed them to better suit the music to the medium of the larger ensemble. But when it came to another composer’s work, like Pictures At an Exhibition by Moussorgsky, Ravel altered voicings and fillers, but didn’t rewrite the work.

A New Approach To Learning

In How Ravel Orchestrated: Mother Goose Suite, this classic work has been completely re-engraved with the condensed piano part at page bottom in an oversized A4 format (which can be easily resized on your home printer if you want to print the book out).

By including the piano part at page bottom, you can see specific devices that Ravel used, where, and how he orchestrated them. Jazz musicians and composers will also see how Ravel composed and orchestrated using altered DOM7 chords, mixolydian chord scales, and triads with the added 9th.

For fast referencing, each bar is numbered at the bottom of the page (original rehearsal marks are also included).

Before each movement, you'll find the complete short story that movement was based on. Now you can look at Mother Goose Suite to better understand the dramatic composition and scoring techniques that went into each work. By comparing back to the original story, you gain a better understanding of Ravel’s approach.

Following each movement is a brief orchestration analysis based on the Eight Keys To Learning Professional Orchestration as taught in our Professional Orchestration.^™ series of books.

How Ravel Orchestrated: Mother Goose Suite goes beyond traditional analysis by including two literary works by Edgar Allan Poe which greatly impacted Ravel, The Poetic Principle and The Philosophy of Composition.

Also included is a brief section on Ravel’s method of working which goes a long way to taking the mystery out of orchestral scoring.

Click on the Contents tab above to see the Table of Contents for this book.

Watch The Symphony Orchestra of the Liszt School Of Music, play Maurice Ravel's "Ma Mère l'Oye" (Mother Goose) in 5 Suites, conducted by Prof. Nicolás Pasquet:

Additional Titles Available To Enhance Your Studies

How Ravel Orchestrated: Mother Goose Suite MP3 Audio/Score Package. Includes an MP3 audio performance of Ravel's Mother Goose Suite, licensed from eClassical, and conducted by Sir Neville Marriner and the chamber orchestra of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. You can listen to the audio as you study each movement in the book. Also included are three (3) color-coded movements from the Suite showing how Ravel went from piano to full orchestra. You also get a bonus PDF of the complete score from the book that you can print out and mark up for your own private study.

The Mother Goose Suite MP3 Audio/Score Package is included in the How Ravel Orchestrated: Mother Goose Suite PDF Book/Audio Bundle, or can be purchased separately. Both are available from the How Ravel Orchestrated: Mother Goose Suite subcategory.

LOOKING FOR A PRINTED BOOK EDITION?

A paperback edition of How Ravel Orchestrated: Mother Goose Suite is available to order from Amazon or through most major bookstores using the information below:

Title: How Ravel Orchestrated: Mother Goose Suite
Author: Peter Lawrence Alexander / ISBN: 978-0-939067-12-1