Orchestration Case

Tuileres, or Dispute d'enfants après jeux, translated into English as "Dispute Between Children at Play", is the third movement in Ravel's orchestration of the original piano composition "Pictures at an Exhibition" by Modest Mussorgsky. Written in through-composed ternary form, the crux of the original is centred on a main theme, "A", that is at first introduced as an orientation to the piece's musical character in the opening, before being re-introduced as a conclusion, interspersed by a section of contrasting material. The foundations of this structure is the primary means by which it is possible to deconstruct the essence of Ravel's approach to creating colour in his subsequent orchestration, thereby drawing insight into how his otherwise apparently aimless instrumental choices form a unified, coherent whole. Supposedly germinating from the inspired friendship Mussorgsky cultivated when making acquaintance with the artist Viktor Hartmann – both of whom shared a passionate vision for refining the standard of Russian arts to that of Europe – the final product of the composer's piano work attempts to encapsulate a series of paintings created by Hartmann, mainly on his travels abroad. Mussorgsky essentially attempts to evoke the experience of a crowd's emotional reactions whilst walking through a gallery with such artwork. The specific picture relevent to the Tuileres movement, depicting the Parisian Jardin des Tuileries near the Louvre is now lost. The critic Vladimir Stasov, an iconic cultural figure of the times, described it as "an avenue in the garden of Tuileres, with a swarm of children and nurses." With an eye towards to capturing the necessary intensity of musical forthrightness and energy capable of suggesting conflict of some sort, without distorting it into an overly aggressive style, Ravel pursues using a blend of woodwind and strings that manage to reproduce an appropriate balance of hostility and serenity.

As a composition written to evoke the squabbling banter of children in a park, Mussorsgsky opens his original work with a delicate and sprightly but somewhat biting motif in the high registers of the piano. This motif comes to not only introduce the principal theme but encapsulate the definitive character of the entire work within no more than a few bars. In his orchestration, Ravel's initial and most essential decision in his attempt to re-capture this mood is to assign this motif to the idiosyncratic timbre of woodwind instrumentation. The simultaneous capacity it has to be soothingly gentle and yet searingly piercing lends itself appropriately to the opening section and a concluding passage that re-introduces this material. In bar 1, he begins with a trio of wind instruments that play a brief rhythmic pattern comprising an accented crotchet on the downbeat slurred to a quaver with staccato. As it is in Mussorsgsky's, this fragment