Automne - Set by Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924), Text by Armand Silvestre (1837-1901)

Gabriel Faure , a well-known French composers from the Romantic era, draws heavily on earlier French composers, such as Couperin and Gounod and he approached music with the idea of order and restraint in mind. Faure’s music can be contrasted with German composers (Wolf, Mahler, Strauss, etc), and Faure believed that chromaticism for chromaticism’s sake was wrong, leaning instead on the idea of chromaticism used to achieve equilibrium, which has been a long-running theme in French music.

Romanticism, as evidenced in several pieces on the program, lends itself to the piano and the voice parts remaining quasi-independent of each other. As opposed to earlier pieces of music where the piano would help the singer along, Automne immediately sets up a contrast between the two. The piano part opens with the triple meter immediately being subdivided into a duple feeling. The piano continues this, while the voice itself enters in with a heavy triple feel. The two come together for the B section of the piece, when the piano joins into the triple meter, but the piece ends with the two diverging again and once more returning to the beginning hemiolic motive.

9 Hanning, B. R. (2010). Concise history of western music: Based on J. Peter Burkholder, Donald J. Grout, and Claude V. Palisca, a history of Western music, Eighth Edition. Norton. Page 509-