Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Peripetie, Schoenberg - Music GCSE
- Facts
- Expressionism.
- He was an Austrian composer.
- He founded the Second Viennese School - a group of composers (including Berg and Webern who were
taught by Schoenberg in Vienna) who wrote Expressionist music.
- Peripetie is from the 'Five Orchestral Pieces' and was written in 1922 (the early twentieth century).
- It is the fourth of Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces.
- Peripetie means 'A sudden reversal'.
- It was completed in 1909. The first performance took place in London in 1912 .
- Texture and Dynamics
- Largely contrapuntal, occasional monophonic and homophonic moments.
- Textures built up by using imitation, diminution and inversion.
- The final climax of the piece is created from three different canons that are heard at the same time.
- There are frequent sudden changes of dynamics, leading to extreme contrasts between ppp and fff.
- Instrumentation
- Requires a large, full orchestra.
- Strings, woodwind, brass and percussion.
- Changes rapidly throughout, creating many contrasts in timbre.
- Instruments are played to the extreme of their range either very low or very high.
- Cymbals are played, unusually, with a mallet.
- Rhythm, Metre and Tempo
- Metre changes between 3/4, 2/4 and 4/4.
- Tempo is sehr rasch - very quick.
- Rhythms are complex, and varied, and change quickly in parts of the work.
- A number of different rhythmic patterns on top of each other to create complex contrapuntal textures.
- Tonality and Harmony
- Atonal - has no key or mode.
- Dissonant harmony chords and melodies, often built in hexachords (set of six notes).
- Melody
- Made up of short, fragmented motifs.
- Octave displacement is used - unexpectedly moving individual notes of the main melody into a
different octave.
- Motifs are varied through the use of inversion and rhythmic augmentation.
- Rhythmic augmentation - the notes become twice as long.
- Inversion - melody is turned upside down.
- Structure
- The piece is free rondo form, with five sections A B A C A.
- The piece is called free rondo because it is very different to the traditional type of rondo heard in
the Classical period, when different sections were clearly contrasted.