Ravel's Politics

Huebner, Steven

doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdu003

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…24 We might understand Ravel's piece, then, as conjuring Chabrier in the present, and its double-layered pastiche, Chabrier-paraphrasing-Gounod, means that the piece is not just an evocation of Chabrier's style, but also an aural vision of Chabrier in life. The phrase-rhythmic irregularities at the end of Ravel's piece serve both to depict the operation of Chabrier's wit upon Gounod's aria -Roy Howat has noted that Gounod's aria was at the time considered a warhorse ripe for sendingup (2009, p. 88), and Chabrier was famed for playing through and extemporising on other composers' music in salon settings (a scene captured by both Paul Verlaine's sonnet 'À Emmanuel Chabrier' and Henri Fantin-Latour's painting Autour du piano [Huebner 2001]) -and, in their performance of dissipating presence, the ultimate ephemerality of the conjured scene. 25 A reading of loss and distance in Â la manière de … Chabrier is buttressed by the second connection with those themes, namely that Ravel's piece subtly references Chabrier's piano piece 'Mélancolie', the second of his ten Pièces pittoresques.…”

Section: Phrase-rhythmic Performance Of Loss In Homage Compositionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Phrase Rhythm and Loss in the Music of Maurice Ravel

Blättler¹

2023

Music Analysis

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Phrase-rhythmic Performance Of Loss In Homage Compositionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2929This motion from 4+4 groupings into fragmentation and loose‐knit phrases is termed a ‘classical’ strategy in Huebner (2014, p. 87).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Phrase Rhythm and Loss in the Music of Maurice Ravel

Blättler¹

2023

Music Analysis

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Musical ‘Magic Words’: Trauma and the Politics of Mourning in Ravel'sLe Tombeau de Couperin, FrontispiceandLa Valse

Rogers¹

2022

Nineteenth-Century Music Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Upon hearing Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin in 1918 Jean Roger-Ducasse was disturbed by the incongruity between each movement's music and its dedication to a fallen soldier. Similarly, historians have noted the ‘strangeness’ of Frontispiece and La Valse, which Ravel wrote after his war service and his mother's death in 1917. When taken together, these instances of ‘strange’ music – written during an especially emotionally trying period of Ravel's life – lead to questions concerning relationships between Ravel's music and traumatic expression. Although Carolyn Abbate and Michael Puri have suggested that these pieces can be understood as expressions of loss, no one has yet attempted to address how they might illuminate Ravel's trauma within the context of conceptions of trauma in interwar France. In this article I suggest that Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, Frontispice and La Valse are musical performances of his traumatic responses to the war and his mother's death. I place primary and archival sources such as letters and diaries of Ravel and his peers in dialogue with early twentieth-century French sources in psychology and medicine to determine how Ravel understood trauma. Utilizing Abraham and Torok's theorizations of traumatic grief, I read Ravel's compositions as bearing ‘magic words’ – indirect articulations of trauma that manifest when individuals cannot openly voice their trauma. By studying these pieces in the context of modernist musical mourning traditions in World War I-era France, I suggest that Ravel's post-war compositions demonstrate his resistance to nationalistic norms requiring the suppression of trauma for the war effort.

show abstract

Ravel's Politics

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Phrase Rhythm and Loss in the Music of Maurice Ravel

Phrase Rhythm and Loss in the Music of Maurice Ravel

Musical ‘Magic Words’: Trauma and the Politics of Mourning in Ravel'sLe Tombeau de Couperin, FrontispiceandLa Valse

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About