By Orion Music and Arts Cambridge MA

Copyright, © Orion Music and Arts Cambridge MA, 2023-2024, All Rights Reserved

Fairy-Tales in Music

Maurice Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, or Ma mere l’oye, as in the original French, a series of compositions based on French fairy-tales, is one example of fairy-tales that have been set to music.

Composed in 1910, the works in the Mother Goose Suite are, collectively, a unique series of compositions first written for piano duet.

Each of the movements are musical re-tellings of children’s fairy-tale narratives, from Beauty and the Beast and Little Tom Thumb, to less known stories like The Green Serpent, and also scenes from The Fairy Garden.

Later orchestrated in 1911, Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite is an example of music in the Romantic era that was both inspired by as well as written as forms of children’s literature.

Entirely without words, although based, in part, of quotations of key scenes from each of the stories mentioned above, the music creates moods and/or atmospheres that recreate, for the auditor, the narrative, either through a sense of what the essential scene might have felt like in terms of action and movement, or in terms of mental effect.

The work is especially useful as works both for enjoyment, as well as for music education.

The music is sophisticated, but with sufficient narrative elements that should keep even children engaged, and is highly recommended as a work for young children or young adults to work on, both musically and technically.

FURTHER INFORMATION

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By Orion Music and Arts, Cambridge MA, 2023-2024

Copyright, ©, Orion Music and Arts MA 2023-2024, 

All Rights Reserved

FOR PURCHASE – SCORE

If you would like to purchase a copy of the Ravel piano score to play, you may so do so by clicking on a recommended link and edition here.