This article investigates the use of octatonic chord progressions at deeper structural levels in the music of Maurice Ravel. Octatonic chord progressions are successions of triads and seventh chords derived from a single octatonic collection that are incompatible with other scales. These are shown to form the foundation for large spans of music, even when their constituent chords are embellished with non-octatonic macroharmony; the Discrete Fourier Transform is used to distinguish between the octatonicity of an underlying progression and the various surface colors that adorn it. Deeper-level octatonic chord progressions are woven into the formal scripts of several of Ravel’s major compositions: the two piano concerti, the Violin Sonata, and the Rapsodie espagnole. In these pieces, long-range motion through octatonic progressions undergirds entire sections or movements, and interacts with other elements of the work to create dynamic formal processes.

A particular subset of Ravel's output features a phrase‐rhythmic technique wherein tonal and thematic returns are accompanied by surprisingly asymmetrical or ambiguous phrase rhythm. This defies both generic conventions linking thematic reprise and tonal closure to relatively stable phrase rhythm and specific expectations created by these works’ formal processes, and contrasts with trajectories moving from phrase‐rhythmic instability to stability which Ravel deploys in other works. The set of pieces which features this technique includes À la manière de … Chabrier, the Menuet sur le nom d'Haydn, pieces from Le Tombeau de Couperin, the last of the Valses nobles et sentimentales, and the ‘Blues’ movement from the Violin Sonata. This study notes how themes of loss and distance connect these pieces, allowing for the phrase‐rhythmic technique to be bound up with interpretative implications which can enhance our understanding of how phrase rhythm can carry expressive freight.

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This article develops, for the Parisian modernist repertoire, a model of additive harmony in which voicing plays a foundational role. In comparison with the conventional extendedtriad model of additive harmony, the voicing-based model be&er describes the range of novel verticalities used in tonal progressions in this repertoire, and the features that allow those verticalities to serve as stand-ins for common-practice chords. This study also enriches our understanding of the important developments in Western tonal language that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most research on these stylistic developments details how innovation within certain horizontal-domain pitch constraints allowed for the incorporation of new harmonic successions into tonal contexts; this paper demonstrates that a similar process can be read in the vertical domain, wherein adherence to certain vertical-domain pitch constraints allowed for the incorporation of new chords into tonal contexts.