Phrase, Subphrase in Granados’s Piano suite Goyescas (Los Majos Enamorados), No.1 Los Requiebros

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Hongwei Cai

Phrase, Subphrase in
Granados’s Piano suite Goyescas (Los Majos Enamorados),
No.1 Los Requiebros

The late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century was a flourishing era in the music community to both musicians and music fans. A great number of composers through their unique musical aesthetics and unrestrained creativity composed a great volume of different style music. A major contemporary trend or the feature of the music at that time was tonality collapse. However, there were quite a few composers still insisting on composing tonal music. In this essay, I will use Burkhart’s “the very musicianly topic of the phrase” theory to analyze Granados’s “Goyescas, No.1 Los Requiebros”. I will singly identify phrase structure of primary sections for identify phrases in different hierarchy, and how does the composer form a larger phrases.
“Goyescas”, composed by Spanish composer Enrique Granados in 1911, is a set of piano suite containing seven pieces: “Los requiebros”, “Coloquio en la reja”, “El fandango de candil”, “Quejas, o la maja y el ruisenor”, “El Amor Y la Muerte”, “Epilogo: Serenata del espectro”, and the “El pelele”. Among them, El pelele was not included when the suite was first published. It is broadly acknowledged that the inspiration of this suite comes from Francisco Goya’s paintings. Unlike some other composers who composed same title pieces for paintings like Mussorgsky’ “Picture at an Exhibition”, every single piano piece of this suite is not a map onto the specific painting . The first piece of this suite titled Los Requiebros, is one of my favorite piano pieces, and is the one of the hardest pieces I have played. Its beautiful, lyrical, and multilayered melodic line and flowing rhythmic desig...

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...the end of the former subphrase, but also the beginning of the later subphrase. The composer just use these ways that endows the music a freely and romantic style.
From what I have discussed above, I assert that a phrase is not only composed by two subphrases sometimes. In addition, a group of subphrases form a higher hierarchical phrase should has the functional utilities. The functional utilities could be accorded with either the process of the development of the music, or echo of two portions. Last but not least, the composer through elaboration, rhythmic diminishing, and overlapping to form phrases to a higher hierarchical phrase.

Citation
Charles Burkhart, The Phrase Phythm Of Chopin’s A-flat Major Mazurka, Op.59, No.2
Harald Krebs, Hypermeter and Hypermetric Irregularity in the Songs of Josephine Lang
Online source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goyescas

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