Classical Music | Violin Music

Recorded on 08/20/2014, uploaded on 01/08/2015

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

As the Jazz Age swept America and Europe during the Roaring 20s, many composers turned to this style of music born of African-American spirituals as a new means of expression, blending it with the elements of the Classical tradition and new experimental techniques alike. Of course the name George Gershwin is synonymous with the classical-jazz fusion, but in post-war France, America’s jazz influenced Paris’s young avant-garde composers, such as Maurice Ravel. Ravel was intrigued by the melodies and rhythms of jazz and when he visited America during the latter part of the decade, he soaked in the music he heard in Harlem and New Orleans. His interest and use of jazz in his own compositions spanned several works during this time, reaching its pinnacle in his two concerti for piano composed during 1929-31. Just prior to that pair of works and his trip to America, he composed another important jazz-influenced composition—the Sonata for violin and piano.

The Sonata’s first movement is thinly textured and contrasts three different melodic ideas. Ravel himself thought the violin and piano two instruments ill-suited for each other, and this is to some extent played out in the contrasting melodic ideas of the movement. Much of the movement is serene, even ethereal at times, and builds to a solitary climax before slowly evaporating away. Entitled “Blues,” the middle movement’s composition actually predates Ravel’s trip to America and his exposure to the music of Harlem and New Orleans. Alongside its noticeable jazz idioms, Ravel makes use in this movement of 20^th century techniques such as bitonality. Lastly, the “Perpetuum mobile” finale incorporates themes from the preceding two movements.      Joseph DuBose

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Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano            Maurice Ravel

Maurice Ravel suffered from insomnia. He spent the restless night hours in the cafes of Paris where he absorbed American jazz and its older cousin, the blues. Jazz was all the rage at the time, though what Ravel took from it for use in the second movement of his Violin Sonata would not likely have been recognizable to a jazz musician of the era.

This appropriation of an apparently incompatible form is characteristic of Ravel. 

The first movement of the Sonata is built from two clearly distinct themes. Ravel hoped to explore what he considered the fundamental incompatibility of piano and violin. Thus the two instruments alternate in presenting the main ideas, sometimes in apparent conflict with the other. But there is method to Ravel’s madness.

The second “blues” movement incorporates the technique of bitonality, which assigns different keys to different instruments to give each a specific character. Combined with the melodic figures taken from American jazz, the effect can evoke a slide saxophone or a smoky, jazzy, looser vocal style. In the third movement, there’s a return of musical ideas from the first, in a steady stream of pulses that create a feeling of propulsive, endless motion.        Soran Sophia Lee

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.