Magician of Sound: Ravel and the Aesthetics of Illusion 9780520976962

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Magician of Sound

Magician of Sound Ravel and the Aesthetics of Illusion

Jessie Fillerup

UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2021 by Jessie Fillerup

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fillerup, Jessie, 1976- author. Title: Magician of sound : Ravel and the aesthetics of illusion / Jessie Fillerup. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2020032179 (print) | lccn 2020032180 (ebook) | isbn 9780520379886 (cloth) | isbn 9780520976962 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Ravel, Maurice, 1875–1937—Criticism and interpretation. | Music and magic. Classification: lcc ml410.r23 f55 2021 (print) | lcc ml410.r23 (ebook) | ddc 780.92 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032179 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032180

Manufactured in the United States of America 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Michael and Rebecca, as ever

c ontents

List of Examples, Figures, and Table Acknowledgments Introduction

ix xiii 1

1 Misdirection, or Image, Illusion, and Musical Motion

18

2 Emblems of Enchantment

49

3 The Machine Bewitched

93

4 Illusions of Form and Void

151

5 Motion, Illusion, and Phantasmagoria in La Valse

192

Conclusion: Time, Space, Sortilèges Bibliography Index

224 251 271

list of examples, figures, and table

EXAMPLES

0.1. 1.1a. 1.1b. 1.1c. 1.2. 1.3. 1.4. 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 2.4. 2.5. 2.6. 2.7. 2.8. 2.9. 2.10. 2.11.

Maurice Ravel, String Quartet in F Major, mm. 1–8 9 Frédéric Chopin, Piano Sonata No. 2, Finale, mm. 1–3 39 Francis Poulenc, Trois mouvements perpétuels, No. 1, mm. 1–4 39 John Adams, Phrygian Gates, mm. 10–13 39 Olivier Messiaen, Louange à l’immortalité de Jésus, mm. 1–6 43 Detailed reduction of Igor Stravinsky, Petrushka, fourth tableau, mm. 7–10 46 Registral expansion in Petrushka, mm. 1–11 after rehearsal 83 47 Ravel, Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête, Beauty’s theme, mm. 2–8 52 Ravel, Les Entretiens, Beast’s theme 52 Ravel, Les Entretiens, Beast’s theme in Beauty’s register 52 Ravel, Les Entretiens, the Beast-as-Prince’s theme 53 Ravel, Introduction et Allegro, mm. 1–4 62 Ravel, Introduction et Allegro, mechanistic fragments accompanied by harp glissandos, R10/3–10 64 Ravel, Le Jardin féerique, graphic overview of ascents 77 Ravel, Le Jardin féerique, semi-reduction of ascent, mm. 1–13 79 Ravel, Le Jardin féerique, mm. 23–34 80 Ravel, detailed reduction of Prélude à la nuit, melody and ostinato at R4 83 Ravel, detailed reduction of Feria at R17, cyclic ostinato in celesta, violin, and cello 85 ix

x

list of examples, figures, and table

2.12. Ravel, Daphnis et Chloé, graphic overview of chromatic ascent, R89–R92 90 3.1. Ravel, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, mm. 1–8 108 3.2. Ravel, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, two-piano reduction, ascent from R5 110 3.3. Ravel, Concerto for the Left Hand, triadic motive followed by slurred figure at R15 122 3.4. Ravel, Concerto for the Left Hand, triadic motive followed by slurred figure variation at R16 123 3.5. Ravel, Concerto for the Left Hand, musical prosthesis via the main enchantée in the piano exposition 127 3.6. Ravel, Boléro, first phrase of theme A, mm. 5–12 141 3.7. Ravel, Boléro, first phrase of theme B, two measures after R2 142 4.1. Ravel, Sonata for Violin and Cello, first movement, mm. 1–12 153 4.2. Ravel, Le Gibet, mm. 3–4, “gallows” gesture 158 4.3. Ravel, Le Gibet, mm. 6–7, arch-shaped opening melody 158 4.4. Ravel, Le Gibet, mm. 28–33, linear phrases 160 4.5. Ravel, Oiseaux tristes, mm. 1–5 165 4.6. Chopin, Prelude in DH major, op. 28, no. 15, mm. 60–67 166 4.7. Ravel, Daphnis et Chloé, R172/1–4, Chloé performing Syrinx 171 4.8. Ravel, Daphnis et Chloé, the couple’s theme in its first appearance, R1/6–R2 173 4.9. Ravel, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, “Surgi de la croupe et du bond,” mm. 1–4 188 5.1. Ravel, La Valse, motive x at R1 and its adapted form at R5 201 5.2. Ravel, La Valse, motive x in the waltz theme at R9/4 201 5.3. Ravel, La Valse, D major waltz (R9) accompanied by dissonant tremolos and appoggiaturas 204 5.4. Ravel, La Valse, circular movement at R30 in 1:1 and 2:1 cycles 210 5.5. Ravel, La Valse, looped coiling spring motive and misaligned rotational motion at R77 211 5.6. Ravel, La Valse, compressed and misaligned rotational motion, R83/5–R84 212 5.7. György Ligeti, L’Escalier du diable, chromatic ascents (marked tenuto) in mm. 1–3 213 5.8. Chromatic ascents in La Valse from R76 and R82 216 6.1a–b. Ravel, detailed reduction of L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, pinnacle of a transformational ascent (R49) 232 6.2. Ravel, L’Enfant, harp glissandos introduce the Princess, R62/4–7 236 6.3. Ravel, L’Enfant, woodwind arpeggios simulate the harp at R65 237 6.4a–b. Ravel, detailed reduction of L’Enfant, the animals cry “Maman,” and the Child awakes 242

list of examples, figures, and table

xi

F IG U R E S

1.1. Robert-Houdin and his son Eugène performing at St. James’s Theatre in 1848. Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 22 3.1. Caricature of Sigismond Thalberg, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 114 3.2. Caricature of Ignacy Jan Paderewski. Courtesy of Granger. 122 3.3. Ravel, Concerto for the Left Hand, mechanical pairings 125 3.4. Ravel, Concerto for the Left Hand, structural gears in the development 126 3.5. Static and motional tendencies in Boléro’s A and B themes 140 3.6. Raven Lite spectrogram of Boléro, image extracted by Benjamin Broening. 149 4.1. Robert-Houdin, Napoleon III mystery clock. Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images. 152 4.2. Édouard Vuillard, Foliage—Oak Tree and Fruit Seller. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Millennium Gift of Sara Lee Corporation (1999.373). The Art Institute of Chicago. 168 4.3. Music and character relationships for Daphnis and Chloé 171 4.4. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Cook. Oil on wood. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Photo: Anna Danielsson. 174 4.5. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Cook, inverted 174 4.6. François Boucher, Pan et Syrinx. The National Gallery, London. Presented by Mrs. Robert Hollond, 1880. 176 4.7. Rubin’s vase, created by Nevit Dilmen. 186 5.1. Duck-rabbit in Fliegende Blätter 197 6.1. Stage design for the first tableau of L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. 230 TA B L E

5.1. Chromatic ascents in La Valse from the opening to R76 215

acknowled gments

Despite a lifelong love of writing, words can fail me in moments of surprise or shock. One such moment occurred several years ago, when I received an email out of the blue from Richard Taruskin. I approached the message as if it were live ammunition. Never could I have imagined it would contain an invitation to submit a manuscript for the University of California Press’s Twentieth-Century Music series, nor could I have anticipated Richard’s generosity and care as he shepherded my manuscript through its various stages of development. I’m profoundly grateful for his patience, incisive wit, and especially his encouragement to cultivate my own voice. Raina Polivka, my editor at the press, has been a warm, reassuring presence during uncertain times; I thank her and her able assistant, Madison Wetzell, for their support, kindness, and efficiency. Many thanks also to Peter Dreyer, whose practiced eye and verbal agility made the process of copy-editing a breeze. Many friends and colleagues have shaped my thoughts on Ravel over the years and sustained my energy for this project when it flagged. The enduring friendships of Carlo Caballero, Keith Clifton, and Matthew Balensuela have enlivened my thinking and helped me through many difficult moments professionally and personally. Gurminder Bhogal, Brian Hart, Steven Huebner, Elinor Olin, and Anthony Sheppard have read drafts, shared ideas, or participated in lively and stimulating conversations, all of which have made this a much better book. My department chairs at the University of Richmond—Gene Anderson, Jennifer Cable, and Jeffrey Riehl—provided a congenial environment for pursuing my research interests. Among my Richmond colleagues, I’m especially grateful to Joanna Love, for her friendship and tireless encouragement; Benjamin Broening, who challenged my intellectual habits in many conversations; Elisabeth Gruner, for her support and xiii

xiv

acknowledgments

advocacy; and to Linda Fairtile, Mari Lee Mifsud, and Elizabeth Outka, exceptionally accomplished women who have inspired me over lunch dates and email threads. Other friends flung far and wide have brightened my horizons during years of toil, including Melody Bergman, James Davis, Kari Knight, Sherry Lee, Karin Messell, Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen, Palle and Rikke Rosenkilde, and Deborah Weagel. I was fortunate to receive several sources of funding for this project, including multiple summer fellowships from the University of Richmond and a faculty research grant from the University of Mary Washington. I’m grateful to the staff at the Beinecke Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France (François-Mitterand and Arts du spectacles divisions), and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which awarded me a Mellon Foundation travel grant. I worked on the final phases of the manuscript as a research fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS) in Denmark, which supports individual and collaborative projects in a wide range of fields. (The grant was co-funded by the Aarhus University Research Foundation and the European Union’s Seventh Framework for research, grant number 609033.) The camaraderie and encouragement of fellow scholars—especially Cici Alexander, Anja Bechmann, Georgina Born, Franco De Angelis, Andrew Faulkner, Christina Kkona, and Isabelle Torrance—made the end of my journey not merely bearable but pleasant. The former and current directors of AIAS, Morten Kyndrup and Søren Keiding, ensured that I had access to travel funding, archival sources and, most important, dedicated time for research, with few bureaucratic strings attached—a rare and precious gift. I first came to know Ravel’s music as a pianist, guided by my warm, long-suffering teacher at the University of Arizona, Rex Woods. As a PhD student at the University of Kansas, my advisor, Roberta Freund Schwartz, took part in my first written explorations of Ravel’s music and exemplified a successful, ethical career in academia. A multitude of music and writing teachers in my youth prepared me for a career in musicology, especially Kim Holland, Gloria Swann, and Eloise Bell. My three siblings, Carrie, Samantha, and Benjamin, are wonderful companions and conversationalists who have lightened my burdens on many occasions. Most of all, I’m grateful to my parents, who provided me with a musical education despite limited means and championed my artistic pursuits when they overtook my early ambitions to become a scientist. While I worked on this book, they showed their support in countless ways, from refinishing my outdoor deck to supporting me through a twin pregnancy and multiple surgeries. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they opened their doors to me and my children, Darcy and Leo, shouldering childcare responsibilities so that I could work through my final draft. I dedicate this book to them with deep gratitude and affection. Payson, Arizona May 2020

Introduction

Two months after the premiere of Maurice Ravel’s Histoires naturelles in 1908, Claude Debussy wrote to the music critic Louis Laloy, describing his fellow composer with a pair of unusual terms: “I agree with you in acknowledging that Ravel is exceptionally gifted, but what irritates me is his posture as a ‘faiseur de tours,’ or better yet, as an enchanting fakir, who can make flowers spring up around a chair. Unfortunately, a trick is always prepared, and it can only astonish once!”1 Neither “faiseur de tours” (performer of tricks) nor “fakir” was in common usage in the early twentieth century, though the latter term would have been known from Judith Gautier’s historical novel La Conquête du paradis (1890), whose title aptly captures its romanticized, colonialist perspective on eighteenth-century India. By linking him to conjurers—whether theatrical entertainers or exoticized thaumaturgists—Debussy impugned the long-term prospects of Ravel’s work. How could a trick with a looming expiration date produce music that would withstand repeat performances without unveiling its mysteries or losing its luster? Ravel’s music, for all its silvery charm, would soon tarnish; the weight of passing time would grind it to dust. To hear it once was to exhaust its secrets. But Debussy’s criticism was rapidly turned on its head by critics, biographers, and scholars who found in the language of conjuring the words they needed to combat Ravel’s detractors. Laloy, for one, compared Ravel to a sorcerer in a 1909 review of Gaspard de la nuit and described him as a “magician of sounds” when 1. Claude Debussy to Louis Laloy, March 8, 1908, in Maurice Ravel, A Ravel Reader: Correspondences, Articles, Interviews, trans. and ed. Arbie Orenstein (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003), 87; also in Claude Debussy, Lettres 1884–1918, ed. François Lesure (Paris: Hermann, 1980), 157.

1

2

Introduction

reviewing Daphnis et Chloé in 1912. Others linked magic and conjuring to Ma mère l’Oye, La Valse, Boléro, L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, and Ravel’s two piano concertos, among other pieces.2 In 1925, Ravel’s longtime friend and first biographer, RolandManuel, published “Maurice Ravel ou l’esthétique de l’imposture,” a locus classicus for the study of Ravelian artifice. For Roland-Manuel, Ravel possessed the “cunning of an illusionist” who convinces us he has nothing in his hands or pockets, nor signs of the composer’s trade visible on his desk; the movement of piano keys alone seems to trigger the music engraver’s stylus.3 His “paradoxical jonglerie” can be heard to advantage in Le Jardin féerique from Ravel’s fairy-tale ballet Ma mère l’Oye, where an anticipated trumpet fanfare is replaced by the “shadow of a trumpet evoked by the flute.” Vladimir Jankélévitch, another early Ravel biographer, found the comparison to conjurers, sorcerers, and illusionists at once fitting and mystifying: “How could [Ravel], who preached the long patience of labor through his scruples and technical probity, pass for an illusionist, a practitioner of ambiguity and jonglerie?”4 Magician of Sound seeks to answer this question by examining Ravel’s music through the lens of theatrical conjuring, which remained a popular form of entertainment throughout the composer’s lifetime, sustained by renowned performers like Nevil Maskelyne and David Devant in England, Harry Kellar and Howard Thurston in the United States, Georges Méliès in France, and, of course, Harry Houdini. Yet when describing Ravel as a magician, critics would have had none of these figures in mind—or rather, they would have seen reflected in modern conjurers the most famous illusionist of the nineteenth century, Jean-Eugène RobertHoudin, who died five years before Ravel was born. (Certainly they were not thinking of Houdini, the “Handkuff King,” whose early feats brought to mind contortionists and equilibrists, not illusionists.) Though Robert-Houdin performed in his self-styled Soirées fantastiques for only nine years before embarking on other pursuits, the shadow he cast over subsequent generations of conjurers was comparable to Beethoven’s in music. Soirées fantastiques lived on after his death through licensing agreements with magicians who leased his former theater; indeed, in Ravel’s childhood, after his family had moved to Paris, the composer might have witnessed such a show. I use the figure of Robert-Houdin to introduce the key themes in Magician of Sound, including Ravel’s public image, his fascination with machines, and his compositional practices. My central focus is illusory experience. What is it like for 2. A survey of these critical views can be found in Fillerup, “Ravel and Robert-Houdin, Magicians,” 19th-Century Music 37 (Fall 2013): 131–32. 3. Roland-Manuel, “Maurice Ravel ou l’esthétique de l’imposture,” La Revue musicale 6 (April 1925): 18. 4. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Ravel, ed. Jean-Michel Nectoux (Paris: Seuil, 1995), 83.

Introduction

3

listeners to mistake a trumpet for a flute? Is this misattribution really a processing error, or does it reflect the shortcuts and distortions typical of perceptual experience? If composers seek to manipulate our senses as magicians do, how might our interpretive volition be affected? In what ways do musical illusions differ from imitative or metaphorical effects? Ravel’s music compellingly engages such questions because it places timbre and sonic phenomena in the musical foreground. Critics noticed and complained accordingly: Rapsodie espagnole (1908), for example, was said to lack melody and development, resulting in a “simple piece of effect,” and the abundant variety of sonorities and timbres in Daphnis et Chloé (1912), however ingenious, seemed to cancel one another out.5 At times, these critical appraisals even invoked the magician’s “effect” (French cognate effet), a term describing how spectators experience a magic trick. Roland-Manuel insisted, for instance, that “a good enchanter must never be the dupe of his own enchantments, lest he botch the spell,” adding that Ravel, with his “justifiable horror of method, attaches great importance to the effect.”6 Ravel’s musical illusions emerge most plainly in his novel combinations of instruments—the trumpeting flute fanfare that Roland-Manuel pointed out, or the calliope sound midway through Boléro, composed of piccolos, solo horn, and celesta moving in parallel motion and spaced to replicate notes in the harmonic series. These effects, immediately apparent to critics, furnished the basis for their characterization of Ravel’s music as magical. Though other types of illusion were less conspicuous, critics detected traces of them, linking the whirling movement of La Valse, for example, to phantasmagoria and vertige (vertigo), both of which involve the sensory confusion typical of illusory experience. Many of Ravel’s illusions conjure up impressions of motion, stasis, and directional movement, raising questions about the nature of musical perception. Why does some music seem immobile, while other music seems to move? Evocation differs from illusion: we would not mistake the bell-like sounds in La Vallée des cloches, the final piece of the piano suite Miroirs, for real bells. (Only the rolled chords in the bass at the end of the piece—said by Ravel to suggest La Savoyard, the largest bell in Montmartre—come close to the real thing, their evenly spaced fourths alluding to inharmonic partials.) Nor would the right-hand grace note figures in “Le Grillon” from Histoires naturelles be confused with real cricket chirps, whether in the concert hall or the natural world. Irony is also categorically distinct from illusion, though they have an overlapping history in Ravel studies. Many of the composer’s supporters, including Roland-Manuel and Jankélévitch, offered irony and artifice (illusion’s cousin) as twin pillars upholding his musical 5. Jean Marnold, “Musique,” Mercure de France, April 16, 1908, 723; Pierre Lalo, “La Musique,” Le Temps, June 18, 1912, 3. 6. Roland-Manuel, “Maurice Ravel,” La Revue musicale 2, no. 6 (April 1921): 9.

4

Introduction

aesthetics. To distinguish between them, we might consider two examples from Ravel’s first opera, L’Heure espagnole, that convey oppositional relationships between music and text—a hallmark of dramatic irony.7 When Torquemada, a clockmaker, leaves his shop to regulate the municipal clocks, he declares, “L’heure officielle n’attend pas” (Official time doesn’t wait), but this pronouncement, which concludes with a ritardando, is accompanied by sustained chords in the trombone and tuba, which patiently await his cue. In Concepion’s aria, “Oh! Le pitoyable aventure,” the refrain, “Le temps me dure” (Time drags), is swept along by rising chords and tremolos marked pressez and au mouvement. Both are humorous examples of irony, but neither involve illusory perception, apart from the impression of movement suggested by most forms of music. Dramatic illusion and its relationship to theatrical magic is another matter. In some respects, conjuring mimics staged representation, and vice versa: both involve the tacit agreement that, for the duration of the performance, we accept a depicted reality (however fantastical) as real. Yet a key difference lies in the degree to which our self-conscious experience as spectators is subordinated to the reality of the staged virtual world. In plays, ballet, opera, and film—art forms tending to involve dramatized narratives—we may, for long stretches, become enthralled and seem to forget that we are watching a performance. It would be quite unusual, by contrast, to lose our self-conscious awareness of a magic show, even for a moment. Theatrical magic is not inherently less absorbing, but it tends to be situational and episodic; it involves personas instead of enacted characters. As Jean-Marc Larrue notes, magicians have more in common with stand-up comedians than with many other types of performers, both producing scripted, interactive routines with thematic connections but little overarching narrative.8 Conjuring advertises the artifice that dramatic storytelling conceals. In this sense, it resembles certain avant-garde forms of theater that bring to the surface an artful duplicity more typically latent. Similarities between stage magic and dramatic representation can be seen in L’Heure espagnole’s overture, which simulates the sounds of a clock shop, from mechanical figures and musical automata to clocks of various sizes and types. A looping melody formed wholly of quarter notes meanders through assorted instrumental groupings, its chronometric regularity concealing the music’s frequent metrical shifts. Sounding throughout are three clocks set at different tempos: = 40, 100, and 232. As the music unfolds, its polyrhythmic relationships grow more complex, incorporating syncopation, conflicting metrical divisions, 7. I shall not seek to define musical irony here, which Stephen Zank and many others have done. For a theoretical approach to irony in Ravel’s music, see Zank, Irony and Sound: The Music of Maurice Ravel (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009), especially 7–39. 8. Jean-Marc Larrue, “The Multimodal Experience of the Minimalist Scene: The Case of Stand-Up (and Its Success)”; paper presented October 24, 2019.

Introduction

5

and phase-shifting rhythmic patterns. For Manuel Rosenthal, one of Ravel’s former students, it was all too much, an “opulent demonstration” encumbered by effects.9 Despite its complexity, Ravel’s simulation of a clock shop would not be mistaken for the real article, partly for the same reasons that La Vallée des cloches evokes but does not feign actual bell sounds. Yet his use of three clocks as instruments reveals a hidden affinity between drama and stage conjuring: the fusion of real and representational elements in ways that deepen illusory experience. Unlike hallucinations or dreams, illusions involve sensory input and offer a degree of authentic knowledge about the world. A conjurer who saws his assistant in half may be using a real saw and is almost certainly assisted by at least two real people (usually women) on stage. Not everything about the conjurer’s routine is fact, but not everything is false either. The same may be said of Ravel’s overture, which conjures up a clock shop by combining imitative and evocative clock sounds with the ticking of real clocks, whose presence reminds us that we are hearing a representation. We might extend this line of thought to the pantomime scene in Daphnis et Chloé, where the title characters become actors themselves, miming the myth of Pan and Syrinx. The founding illusion of dramatic enactment is here made transparent: Daphnis and Chloé are at once dancers playing characters and characters playing dancers, their reciprocal enactment straining our sense of what (or who) is real versus representational. My approach to Ravel’s music rests on a groundswell of scholarship, produced over the past ten years by Gurminder Bhogal, Peter Kaminsky, Barbara Kelly, Steven Huebner, Deborah Mawer, Roger Nichols, Michael Puri, and many others. Yet I also draw on philosophers, psychologists, historians of magic, and music theorists, connecting Ravel to interdisciplinary research on magic, technology, spectacle, and mass entertainment.10 By focusing on Ravel’s vivid, distinctive timbres and sounds, I am also foregrounding sensation, technology, and sonic effects, an approach seen recently in the work of Francesca Brittan, Emily Dolan, Alexandra Kieffer, and Deirdre Loughridge.11 Combining an attention to musical sound with 9. Manuel Rosenthal, Ravel: Souvenirs de Manuel Rosenthal, ed. Marcel Marnat (Paris: Hazan, 1995), 28. 10. Two research consortiums that have taken up these themes are Les Arts trompeurs, an international network of scholars, magicians, archives, and institutions focused on magic, technology, and spectacle, and B-Magic, which convened a network of researchers and institutions to examine the magic lantern as a mass medium in Belgium. 11. See Francesca Brittan, Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Emily Dolan, The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Alexandra Kieffer, Debussy’s Critics: Sound, Affect, and the Experience of Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Deirdre Loughridge, Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

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Introduction

interdisciplinary perspectives on spectacle and perception yields abundant insights into the processes that generate musical illusions. In many ways, illusory experience confounds researchers, irrespective of discipline. Psychologists can produce experimental measures of attention and misdirection, but their explanations for such complex processes have yet to be refined. Philosophers struggle to classify illusions, which are neither hallucinations (occurring without corresponding sensory input) nor wholly authentic representations of veridical experience. Conjurers are more willing to reveal their methods than one might think—many have done so in print after their retirement—but old habits die hard: they remain professional pretenders, onstage and off, and their writings must be treated with caution. In music cognition, the study of illusory effects tends to be limited to specific auditory phenomena like the Shepard scale, an electronically generated sequence of notes that seems perpetually to rise. Yet if the limitations of discipline-specific explanations means that no field has been able to tell a coherent story about musical illusion on its own, each possesses singular insights that could be assembled into an eclectic, harmonious mosaic. I have sought to identify the most compatible of these fragments to present an integrated (if selective) account of music and illusion. To do this, I have established categories of Ravelian effects, including illusions of perpetual ascent, transformational ascent, mechanization, and apparent motion and stasis. I arrived at these groupings by combining theoretical views of illusion with three types of historical evidence: (1) reviews pertaining to conjuring, illusion, phantasmagoria, and specific sensory effects; (2) nineteenth-century ballet, opera, and orchestral scores featuring “magical” effects; and (3) memoirs and handbooks on magic written by magicians—particularly those of Robert-Houdin, the conjuring touchstone of this study. I have also turned to a corpus of theater and media history that has helped me link Ravel’s music to the popular entertainment of his youth. Phantasmagoria, for example, had evolved from the apparitional horror theater of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the mid-century ghost shows of fairgrounds and theatrical dramas; its spectral imagery still lingered in fin-de-siècle motion-picture advertisements and the trick films of Georges Méliès.12 Phantoms persisted in written accounts, too: in Du côté de chez Swann (1913), the first volume of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the narrator’s toy magic lantern projects wondrous colors and shapes onto the familiar objects in his room, creating an effect of ghostly doubling. Introducing this media heritage reveals thematic ties to pieces like La Valse, described by critics in language evoking the ghost shows of centuries past.

12. See Terry Castle, “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie,” Critical Inquiry 15 (Autumn 1988): 42.

Introduction

7

Ravel’s effects can consume an entire piece, as they do in La Valse, or appear as fleeting phenomena, like the fusion of distinct timbres into a composite sound, as heard in the opening passages of his Sonata for Violin and Cello. Throughout Magician of Sound, I examine both Ravel’s scenes of enchantment—drawn, directly or obliquely, from fairy tales, myths, literature, and theatrical spectacle—and his largescale illusions, which pervade whole pieces or movements. At times, music with apparently unambiguous effects requires closer scrutiny. Critics described the Concerto for the Left Hand, for example, as compositional legerdemain displaying, as Roland-Manuel put it, a main enchantée—a virtual right hand that amplified the piano’s sound, leaving an impression of two hands playing. But relating the piece to various models of pianistic virtuosity suggests that the virtual hand is a method, not an effect, a means of hybridizing the organic and the mechanical. Indeed, many of Ravel’s illusions suggest metamorphosis, often signaled by an ascending passage that seems to transport the music to a different time or place—from the Nymph’s grotto to the pirate camp in Daphnis et Chloé, or from twilight to nightfall in L’Enfant et les Sortilèges. In Daphnis, this ascent is a function of stagecraft, bridging a change of scenery that unfolds in darkness; it also signifies a shift of perspective if we view the scene in the pirate camp as a manifestation of Daphnis’s dream, glimpsed through his metaphysical, disembodied vision.13 The ascent in L’Enfant, by contrast, has a misdirectional quality: unlike the parallel sequence in Daphnis, there are no signs of dreaming or magic, perhaps because the protagonist of the opera, the Child, possesses vision already assumed to be enchanted. Often the illusions can be linked to specific orchestral effects, particularly those interpreted by critics as novel, curious, or recherché (a term frequently encountered in Ravel criticism). The orchestral harp glissando—one of Ravel’s most evocative gestures, closely allied to the transformational ascent—entered the semiotic vocabulary of the late nineteenth century, its thematic pairing with enchantment and metamorphosis especially apparent in Tchaikovsky’s ballets and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas. Ravel’s harp glissés, which reflect his well-documented interest in the music of Russian composers, serve a range of expressive and mimetic functions, though their emblematic character emerges most distinctly in temporal shifts, transportive effects, and transformations. Other signs of Ravelian enchantment include strings playing sur la touche, bowed and fingered tremolos, harmonics, and novel combinations of timbres—the “instrumental mystification” described by Jankélévitch.14 If these techniques serve as signposts to an enchanted realm, they can also function as misdirectional diversions, justified solely by their capacity to tantalize the ear. 13. Michael Puri makes this suggestion in Ravel the Decadent: Memory, Sublimation, and Desire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 127. 14. Jankélévitch, Ravel, 140.

8

Introduction

Behind every effect is a method—or more precisely, a multitude of them. Sometimes conjurers develop several ways of achieving the same effect, swapping them in and out to prevent spectators from guessing how a trick is done. Ravel did likewise, offering a heterogeneous menu of methods and effects that he could mix and match. Sources in conjuring, psychology, and music theory will help us identify some of his tactics, which include priming, “inattentional” blindness,15 misdirection, and the application of gestalt principles. If percepts—the sensory impression of objects—are filtered and distorted by our sensory apparatus, as empirical studies demonstrate, perception can be manipulated, leading us to make false inferences, apply grouping schemata to neutral phenomena, and train our attentional spotlight on certain percepts while ignoring others. The pioneering work of Susana Martinez-Conde, Gustav Kuhn, and Stephen Macknik, among others, has shown how magic tricks performed in experimental settings can answer psychological and neuroscientific questions about perception. Their empirical accounts should be taken as suggestive, not conclusive: most studies involving magic tricks are less than ten years old, and many have yet to be replicated. But combined with other forms of evidence, they help explain potential links between method and effect in Ravel’s music. We might illustrate one such link by listening to the pair of phrases that opens the String Quartet in F Major (1903), completed early in Ravel’s career, but already exhibiting some keystone techniques in his musical masonry. The first violin carries the melody in antecedent and consequent phrases through mostly serpentine motion, interspersing coiled figures of seconds and thirds with leaps of fourths and fifths (example 0.1). Listening to the first violin alone, we hear a melodic rise and fall divided symmetrically over two four-bar phrases, though we also recognize disjunct motion within the melody, its fluidity achieved with bowed slurs and sustained tones. (Play the tune on a piano, an instrument afflicted with sonic decay, and appreciate the difference.) Yet hearing the pair of phrases played by the full quartet produces a wholly different effect—a composite wave of sound that steadily climbs, crests, and falls by similar gradations. In this context the melody appears more conjunct than it really is, because the second violin and cello play ascending two-octave scales spaced a tenth apart, aiding the impression of a smoothly rising contour. The effect works thanks to a gestalt principle known as “grouping by common fate”: the motion of the climbing serpentine melody seems to merge with that of the ascending scales, presenting a single, sweeping impression. Though the same effect occurs in the consequent phrase, its method differs. The descending wave in the second violin and cello is neither scalar nor smooth; it hesitates, skips, doubles back. But because the corresponding ascent in the first 15. Stephen L. Macknik et al., “Attention and Awareness in Stage Magic: Turning Tricks into Research,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9 (November 2008): 871.

Introduction

9

ex. 0.1 . Maurice Ravel, String Quartet in F Major, mm. 1–8. Allegro mod. Très doux (q = 120)

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phrase unfolded two octaves in unbroken stepwise motion, we have been primed to hear the consequent descent in like manner. Other episodes manipulate our sense of temporal passage, suggesting an illusion of stasis or a convergence of multiple temporalities. Both types of illusion function at perceptual and metacognitive levels, calling into question whether our descriptions of temporality accurately represent our temporal experience. Magicians speak of stopping time by using humor or surprise, which allows them to complete a surreptitious movement. A related technique, termed time misdirection, involves a temporal separation between method and effect, which complicates the spectator’s attempt to uncover causal relationships. Ravel implements

10

Introduction

both approaches to temporal illusion, his effects of motion and stasis questioning whether (musical) time moves at all. Such illusions work on a variety of scales, just as the magician’s sleight-of-hand can be adapted for closeup or stage magic. Le Gibet, the middle movement of the piano suite Gaspard de la nuit, treats the theme of time in about seven minutes, using the range of timbres and effects available to a skilled solo pianist. L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, which takes about an hour to perform, dramatizes memory and temporal experience through a series of episodes with Proustian overtones, enlisting the full range of sonic novelties in Ravel’s orchestra, including the luthéal, an attachment to pianos with parallel strings that can imitate the harp and cimbalom, among other instruments. There are good reasons to consider Proust’s work alongside Ravel’s, as Michael Puri notes: both men were inclined toward dandyism and sybaritic decadence, and they moved in similar social circles, though it seems they were not personally acquainted.16 Proust’s preoccupation with temporal experience in relation to memory, space, and sensory perception has clear analogues in Ravel’s music, especially in pieces like La Valse and L’Enfant. In the latter, Ravel and Colette, the librettist, plant misdirectional cues in the opera, evoking the shattered chronology of involuntary memory, through which multiple selves can coexist. Memory here functions like a conjuring trick, bringing past experiences mysteriously to life. Not only does misdirection assume many guises in Ravel’s music, it often informs his own remarks as well. As he gained international notoriety, he gave interviews with greater frequency, both to satisfy the public appetite for commentary and to manage the reception of his latest works. Yet these media campaigns could be misleading: consider his claim that Boléro, whose forward momentum is propelled entirely by changes of timbre, contained “no contrasts.”17 His interpretive remarks denying symbolic significance in La Valse were similarly deceptive: Ravel wrote the piece to be staged and included details of its setting (an imperial court in 1855) in the ballet’s livret. The point here is not to subject Ravel to a polygraph test, but rather to suggest that his comments, especially later in his career, functioned like magician’s patter. By pointing out what is ostensibly missing in Boléro, Ravel directs our attention to an illusory void, where there is (quite literally) nothing to see. Yet the elements to whose absence he calls attention are in fact central to the music’s method—as indeed they are to almost all tonal music, which thrives on the tension between variety and repetition. Boléro so foregrounds that issue as to risk revealing some hidden tricks of the trade. Minimizing the role of timbre helps 16. Puri supplies two pieces of evidence suggesting their artistic admiration for each other: that Ravel had a hardbound copy of À la recherche du temps perdu in his library at Montfort l’Amaury, and that Proust wanted his funeral music to be Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte. See Puri, “Memory, Pastiche, and Aestheticism in Ravel and Proust,” in Ravel Studies, ed. Deborah Mawer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 56. 17. Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, “M. Ravel Discusses His Own Work,” in A Ravel Reader, 477.

Introduction

11

divert attention to melodic and harmonic relationships, neither of which are all that engrossing in the piece. If Magician of Sound brings some novel sources to bear on Ravel studies, it also engages long-standing themes and debates. One of these involves the composer’s lifelong fascination with Edgar Allan Poe—hardly unusual for a French artist of Ravel’s era, but worth exploring for its potential revelations about Ravel’s aesthetics. Certainly, the composer would have been drawn to the lurid, Gothic imagery of Poe’s tales (reflected in pieces like Gaspard de la nuit) and the puzzle-box machinations of the detective stories featuring C. Auguste Dupin, Poe’s proto-Sherlock Holmes. The Catalan pianist Ricardo Viñes tells of the teenage Ravel showing him two sketches he had drawn of Poe’s seafaring adventures, “MS. Found in a Bottle” and “A Descent into the Maelström.”18 But arguably of greatest influence on Ravel was “The Philosophy of Composition,” an essay in which Poe claimed to describe the methods behind his poem The Raven. Ravel’s interest in this, as Steven Huebner notes, might have been aroused by Charles Baudelaire’s introduction to his French translation of it, which invites us to “look backstage, in the workshop, the laboratory, the internal mechanism”—whatever metaphor, he says, best suits us.19 No wonder Ravel was hooked: Baudelaire (as translator) promised to combine behindthe-scenes stage artifice with the methodical objectivity of the science lab and the mechanical workings of the artist’s mind. In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe notes how his writing began with “the consideration of an effect”—the poetic end to be achieved by dint of craft and calculation. He settled on the use of a refrain in The Raven after “thinking over all the usual artistic effects—or more properly points, in the theatrical sense,” referring to an eighteenth-century approach to stage acting in which players represented the passions in a series of statuesque tableaux.20 This allusion makes Baudelaire’s mention of backstage artifice seem less like salesmanship than like the chatter of a loquacious yet dispassionate theatrical auteur. In his fiction, Poe relies on devices similar to those used by conjurers: “The Gold Bug,” for example, features misdirection, credulity, and autobiographical realism.21 He combines these elements with his theatrical notion of effect in the detective stories, where the maddeningly self-assured Dupin outsmarts the Paris police prefecture. In “The Purloined Letter,” Poe creates verisimilitude through the “true crime” subject of the tale, allusions to Dupin’s past cases, and the confessional 18. Viñes, “Le Journal inédit de Ricardo Viñes,” ed. Nina Gubish, Revue internationale de musique française 1 (June 1980): 183. 19. Quoted in Steven Huebner, “Ravel’s Perfection,” in Ravel Studies, ed. Deborah Mawer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 23. 20. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 14, Essays and Miscellanies, ed. James A. Harrison (New York: AMS Press, 1965), 199. 21. Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 18.

12

Introduction

intimacy of the narratological perspective. He then uses the conjurer’s technique of demonstrating to spectators that the objects they see on stage are perfectly ordinary. The tale’s exhaustive descriptions of police searches mirror the magician’s standard assurances that cabinets are empty, table legs have not been hollowed out, and secret drawers are nowhere to be found. When the police prefect remarks that “to a properly trained police-agent, such a thing as a ‘secret’ drawer is impossible,” he echoes the spectator’s trust in the physical evidence: seeing no machinations at work, we must assume that the secret lies elsewhere.22 Though the searches prove worthless, they allow Poe to direct the reader’s attention away from a vital clue supplied before the prefect relates his story, when Dupin remarks that “perhaps the mystery is a little too plain . . . a little too self-evident.” These misdirectional tactics produce an effect akin to the conjurer’s, the surprising discovery of the purloined letter like a dove materializing in the magician’s hand. Ravel’s fascination with Poe may also be linked to his views on art, which distinguish creative process from artistic product. In a 1928 address to the Rice Institute in Houston, Ravel compared Poe’s aesthetics to Mallarmé’s poetry, whose “unbounded visions, yet precise in design, enclosed in a mystery of somber abstraction” creates elements “so intimately bound up together that one cannot analyze, but only sense, its effect.”23 For Ravel, the poet’s calculations of rhythm and sound lie behind a scrim, inaccessible to the reader; the poem might as well have emanated from an incantation as from a fountain pen. Mallarmé’s own views go further: in his 1893 vignette “Magie,” he describes the poet as an “enchanter of letters” who sets ideas into play until “some illusion equal to the gaze shimmers,” opening and closing the poem with rhymes resembling “the fairy’s or the magician’s rounds amid the grass.”24 If Mallarmé relates the poet more to alchemists and druids than to conjurers, he nonetheless suggests a model of creation that offers simulations and likenesses, recalling his claim to “paint not the thing, but the effect it produces.”25 Beyond the concepts and tactics borrowed from magicians, Mallarmé and Poe offered explanations, methods—keys to the cryptogram. Ravel took careful note. 22. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter,” in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, introduction by Hervey Allen (New York: Modern Library/Random House, 1965), 211. 23. Translation in A Ravel Reader, 38. The original text can be found in Roland-Manuel, “Lettres de Maurice Ravel et documents inédits,” Revue de musicologie 38 (July 1956): 53. 24. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Magie,” in Œuvres complètes de Stéphane Mallarmé, ed. Henri Mondor and Georges Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 400. Good translations of this text are hard to come by (and difficult to generate). Here, I have drawn from Katherine Streip’s translation in Yve-Alain Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” Representations, no. 18 (Spring 1987): 58. 25. Mallarmé to Henri Cazalis, October 30, 1864, in Correspondance complète (1862–1871), suivi de Lettres sur la poésie (1872–1898), ed. Bertrand Marchal, preface by Yves Bonnefoy (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 206.

Introduction

13

Baudelaire’s description of Poe’s “internal mechanism” evokes another critical trope: the artisanal Ravel, master of machines, his music a sonic clockwork patiently assembled in a workshop concealed from view. This view originates partly from Ravel’s own remarks on craftsmanship and his aforementioned interest in Poe’s writing strategies. Artifice and artisanship can together account for Ravel’s compositional processes and his cultivated exteriors, musical as well as personal. RobertHoudin, whose public image would have rhymed with Ravel’s dandyism, makes explicit the theatricality inherent in being perpetually in costume, trading one mask for another. This dandyish guise, cultivated through demeanor and style of dress, reflected Robert-Houdin’s maxim that the conjurer is “an actor playing the role of magician.”26 Ravel’s masks are conventionally seen as less performative than expressive, intertwining with his identity and revealing his desire to be shielded from scrutiny: “no mask: no Ravel,” as Deborah Mawer puts it.27 But I shall draw no hard lines between stage persona and authentic self, especially given the performative, social nature of identity. Costumes and masks are ways of engaging with the world; everyone uses them (all the world’s a stage). What distinguishes Ravel is his deliberate and overt mode of self-presentation in the manner of stage performers. Instead of understanding his costumes as camouflage, we might view them as prostheses, working like the actor’s mask or the magician’s wand to enable the suspension of disbelief. Ravel’s penchant for machines, demonstrated by his visits to factories and his sizeable collection of automata, reveals another interest shared with nineteenthcentury conjurers, who outfitted their theaters with contraptions of all sorts. Some, like Robert-Houdin and John Nevil Maskelyne, even exhibited automata as part of their act. Before launching his Soirées fantastiques, Robert-Houdin created several automatons, including a singing nightingale, a girl pianist, and a writing and drawing figure exhibited at the 1844 Paris Exhibition, where it was purchased by P. T. Barnum. That he developed the drawing figure in just eighteen months, its intricacy surpassing even those created by the eighteenth-century horologists Pierre JacquetDroz and Henri Maillardet, suggests it was either a copy or a fake. Peter Lamont and Jim Steinmeyer believe the latter: the automaton responded to questions from the audience and, for a time, was outfitted with an unnecessary whirring sound, “like a flax-spinning machine,” as Robert-Houdin put it.28 Trick automatons had long coexisted with their mechanical cousins: Wolfgang von Kempelen’s chess player, apparently mechanical but operated by a person inside it, was first exhibited in 26. Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, Les Secrets de la prestidigitation et de la magie: Comment on devient sorcier (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1868), 54. 27. The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Deborah Mawer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1. 28. Peter Lamont and Jim Steinmeyer, The Secret History of Magic: The True Story of the Deceptive Art (New York: TarcherPerigree, 2018), 136; Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, Confidences d’un prestidigitateur, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1859), 330.

14

Introduction

1770, and Robert-Houdin’s Pastry Chef, displayed at his Soirées fantastiques, similarly required human intervention. These pseudo-machines divulge the extent to which automata and magic tricks were coterminous, and thus easily confused by spectators. They also suggest how Ravel’s musical machines, often likened to the eighteenth-century mechanical curiosities of which he was so fond, may reflect more contemporary scientific pursuits focused on relationships among energy, industry, and human labor. Hermann von Helmholtz’s contributions to thermodynamic laws in the mid-nineteenth century helped lead to key developments in human physiology following the Great War, when veterans fitted with prosthetics challenged conceptions of bodily capability. Ravel’s postwar music confronts these anxieties by suggesting that all human behavior is founded on automaticity: as the burgeoning field of disability studies informs us, we are already trick machines with porous physical boundaries. A C HA P T E R OV E RV I EW

Divided into five chapters and a conclusion, Magician of Sound examines Ravel’s illusions in every musical genre to which he contributed from the early 1900s to the 1930s. The opening chapter surveys themes linked to perceptual illusion, beginning with Robert-Houdin, whose public image evoked the dandy. It is followed by an explanation of how illusions work according to philosophers, psychologists, and conjurers, observing some of the strategies behind magical effects, such as misdirection and priming. One key function of this chapter is to decouple deception from illusion: the perceptual processes we use to filter and triage sensory data, while easily exploited, are not inherently deceptive. A case study of the perpetuum mobile suggests that musical motion may be considered a type of illusion, simulating movement through the use of quick tempos and homogeneous textures. Examples from Poulenc’s Trois mouvements perpétuels and the fourth tableau of Stravinsky’s Petrushka demonstrate how musical motion resembles conjuring tricks or optical illusions. Themes and analytical strategies emerge that will be revisited in subsequent chapters, including apparent motion and the relationship between illusion and temporal passage. With these theoretical underpinnings in place, chapter 2 takes a closer look at illusory effects in music. Ravel’s Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête, from the fairy-tale ballet Ma mère l’Oye, provides a point of entry. To denote the moment of the Beast’s transformation into a prince, Ravel chooses a harp glissando— conventional usage for a gesture used by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov to signify transformation, motion, and temporal or spatial rupture. Other characteristic emblems of enchantment, like string tremolos and harmonics, emerged in pieces by Berlioz, Wagner, and Debussy, among others, their evolution detectable in nineteenth-century orchestration treatises. This chapter demonstrates how

Introduction

15

Ravel’s magical effects featured stock gestures and timbres in idiosyncratic contexts, creating an impression of perpetual ascent in Le Jardin féerique (1910) and an illusion of mechanization in Rapsodie espagnole (1908), whose cyclic ostinato recalls the Sleeping Beauty, a popular fin-de-siècle attraction using mechanical viscera to simulate life. Ravel’s effects are often initiatory: in the dream sequence and nocturne in Daphnis et Chloé, the example that concludes the chapter, orchestrational effects signal entry into an enchanted space. The illusion of mechanization introduced in Rapsodie espagnole is the theme of chapter 3, which shifts focus from the toys, baubles, and eighteenth-century automata often explored in Ravel scholarship to machines and scientific principles developed in the nineteenth century. During the Great War, Ravel drove a truck for the Thirteenth Artillery Regiment, but unlike many fellow veterans, he remained sanguine about technology after his military service. His intertwining interest in machines and magical effects led to illusory mechanizations similar to the pseudoautomatons of Robert-Houdin and Von Kempelen. The two piano concertos reveal the interdependence of sensuous organicism and hidden mechanical processes, refracting postwar views of human automaticity and embodiment through the lens of pianistic virtuosity. Boléro, described by critics as ecstatic and mechanical, unfolds through processes that emulate thermodynamic laws, reflecting, in the words of one reviewer, the “all-powerful motor of life itself ”—the ballet dancers, orchestral musicians, and spectators watching them functioning as organic machines.29 The same strategies responsible for the illusion of mechanization in Boléro produce a corollary effect: an experience of motion or stasis emerging from the gradual inversion of the musical foreground and background. Chapter 4 examines this phenomenon more closely, using as an introductory example the opening gestures of the Sonata for Violin and Cello, which illustrate Ravel’s tendency to dissolve or invert hierarchical relationships. Edgar John Rubin’s vase, a figure-ground illusion in which negative space appears to be a pair of faces looking eye to eye,30 provides a visual analogy for Ravel’s shifting planes of aural and visual perspective in three mid-career pieces: Le Gibet, “Surgi de la croupe et du bond” in Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, and the pantomime from Daphnis et Chloé. If Le Gibet’s circular gestures and non-teleological architecture create an impression of stasis, a sense of mobility arises from its phrase structures, pointing toward mid-twentieth-century “moment form,” while harking back to the repetitive, static qualities of Russian music. Figure-ground illusions emerge in the pantomime scene, in which musical and dramatic disjunctions between Daphnis-Chloé and Pan-Syrinx suggest the grotesque, treated here as an outgrowth of illusion. “Surgi,” the final example of the

29. René Levy, “Notes de musique,” La Nouvelle Revue, March 15, 1930, 153. 30. The image was first published by the Danish psychologist Edgar John Rubin in 1915.

16

Introduction

chapter, explores the creative potential of the void—the negative space that frames an object of contemplation. The figure-ground ambiguities of Rubin’s vase also form the conceptual basis of chapter 5, which explores La Valse as a cognitive illusion similar to reversible figures like the famous duck-rabbit. Rather than integrating its apparently discordant material into a single framework, most critics have projected a nostalgic, conflictdriven (or disjunctive) narrative onto the piece. Reviews of La Valse from the 1920s and 1930s cited a range of visual and perceptual effects, from magic lantern shows and phantasmagoria to vertige—a psychological and physiological response akin to vertigo, linked to Baudelaire, Poe, and the French grotesque. Magic lantern shows, with their dissolving views, superimposition, polychromatic displays, and whirling movement indicate how disjunctive and integrative views of La Valse might function simultaneously, depending on the type of temporally based attentional focus we adopt. Vertige emerges from the music’s illusions of rotation and perpetual ascent—effects in Ravel’s music that typically lead to transformation, though the outcome in La Valse is less sure. The piece’s latent intertextuality with nineteenthcentury symphonic music unveils the phantasmagoria of musical listening: pieces we have heard before awaken from memory, mingling with the piece we are hearing in the moment. As a summative gesture, I conclude with an analysis of Ravel’s second opera, L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, which harmonizes many of the techniques explored throughout the book. Its themes of loss and discovery resonate with Ravel’s postwar music, especially La Valse and the Concerto for the Left Hand, while its focus on childhood experience reflects a fascination apparent in earlier pieces like Noël des jouets (1905) and Ma mère l’Oye. In L’Enfant, Ravel empties his bag of tricks, refuting Debussy’s claim that they can only astonish once: here we find transformational ascents, spoken and musical incantations, priming, misdirection, and a variety of orchestral effects. L’Enfant treats temporal dislocation as a fountainhead of knowledge, using memory as a form of magic to animate the past, just as Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu does. Specific episodes in the opera achieve a convergence of past and present—a spatialized view of time that permits the synchronous juxtaposition of events, clashing with our predominantly linear experience of time. Yet instead of deceiving us, this illusion of temporal passage lays bare the many ways in which our perception of the world is not what we imagine it to be. Indeed, it points to the illusory nature of temporality itself, whose ghostly form eludes our grasp. Before we proceed behind the curtain, I offer one more caveat. If we scrupulously adhere to the analogy between musical and magical performance, then casting Ravel as a conjurer imputes an unmasking function to the analysis of his methods. I see no reason to shrink from this comparison: the similarities between music and conjuring are striking enough to be pursued far beyond the confines of this book. Among magicians, exposing methods can be seen as a breach of ethics

Introduction

17

that potentially jeopardizes the spectator’s ability to experience wonder and astonishment. Musicians tend to hold the opposite view, feeling that listeners who have taken piano lessons or improvised in a high school band have a greater appreciation for the feats of virtuoso pianists and jazz musicians. (Those flurries of arpeggios have much in common with the magician’s card tricks.) I find the musician’s view more persuasive, especially given how many conjuring tricks I still find captivating—and incomprehensible—despite my growing awareness of the methods behind them. When well executed, illusions work regardless of one’s technical knowledge, because they exploit vulnerabilities in our sensory apparatus, which few spectators can see around or through. Throughout Magician of Sound, I have revealed methods behind a handful of effects for two reasons: (1) the magicians who originally performed them did their own unmasking, and (2) an awareness of the method was essential to making my point. I have not exercised the same restraint with Ravel’s music, which I believe can weather our scrutiny with its charms intact. Indeed, an amplified knowledge of his methods, joined with a panoramic, historicized view of illusory spectacle, may yet deepen our enchantment— if we so will it.

1

Misdirection, or Image, Illusion, and Musical Motion

Nobody wants to look like a fool, but most of us sometimes like to be deceived. That, at least, was the French illusionist Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin’s hope when he took the stage for his Soirées fantastiques, a magic show featuring illusions, automata, and mind-reading tricks. Years after his retirement, he wrote about the task of handling spectators whose combative instincts were aroused by conjuring tricks. The “common man” (l’homme vulgaire), he declared, treated the magic show as a form of intellectual challenge, perhaps feeling that theatrical deceptions presented an affront to his powers of discernment, but the “clever man” (l’homme d’esprit) wanted nothing more than to be taken in: “The more he is deceived, the more he is satisfied, since that is what he paid for.”1 During a run of performances in London at St. James’s Theatre in 1848, Robert-Houdin made goldfish appear in an empty bowl while standing in plain sight of the audience. A critic reviewing the show, evidently a clever man, decided to withhold his theory of the trick, for “the pleasure in being deceived is so great—and it really is—we would not deprive our readers of a treat, by betraying a glimpse of the proceeding.”2 In taxonomies of the arts, the fields of literature, theater, and music are traditionally seen as distinct from (and elevated above) stage conjuring, perhaps owing to its a long-standing alliance with the supernatural—the stuff of bubbling cauldrons, muttered incantations, and vengeful spirits. If theatrical magic gradually 1. “Plus il est trompé, plus il est satisfait, puisqu’il a payé pour cela” (Robert-Houdin, Confidences d’un prestidigitateur, 1: 218–19). 2. Press clipping, December 23, 1848, Magic Collection, box 20, Harry Ransom Center (HRC), University of Texas at Austin.

18

Misdirection

19

edged away from the occult in the seventeenth century, when Enlightenment skeptics hounded metaphysicians for empirical proof of their mysteries, stage conjurers continued to evoke alchemy and sorcery in their acts. At the same time, illusion and magic, once considered diabolical crafts in the hands of necromancers and witches, became skills entertainers could learn. By the eighteenth century, magicians sought to advertise themselves as “natural philosophers,” “mathematical artists,” and “professors,” attaching scientific legitimacy to their craft and marrying entertainment to the natural magic and occult practices of centuries past.3 Conjuring started to acquire its status as a public art around the time the fictional novel emerged as a popular literary genre—one that heightened and complicated the conceptual differences between reality and illusion, functioning as both “a report on the world and an invention that parodies that report.”4 Thanks to an increasingly literate, novel-reading citizenry, fiction found an important place in daily life. But theatrical conjuring, which developed alongside modern literature, was perceived quite differently, its technologically driven, “exteriorized” spectacles contrasting unfavorably with the “interiorized” magic of literature.5 In the nineteenth century, conjuring struggled to attain legitimacy, despite sharing with music and theater an explicitly temporal, gestural mode of expression. Magic shows, which indulged the “innate capacity for lucid self-delusion,”6 functioned much like the virtual worlds of literature, music, and theater, but their immense popularity and influence did little to accrue cultural capital—at least of the sort scholars have conventionally traded in. Of course, illusory experience is not confined to the theater. Sensory and optical illusions have long captivated philosophers and scientists, who explain how perceptual illusions are pervasive and beyond our control. Though artistic illusions involve a degree of agency that perceptual illusions lack, there are compelling reasons to examine the similarities between them—and this is particularly true of Ravel’s music. Some musical genres, like opera, produce the sort of virtual reality typical of theatrical plays; others, like instrumental music, provoke debates about the fictions and referential networks they create. Robert Hatten’s work on gesture and agency in 3. Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 14–15, 85. 4. Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 212; Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 27. 5. During, Modern Enchantments, 46. Critical distinctions between nineteenth-century musical genres developed similarly, the “introspective” genres, like symphonies and string quartets, often exalted over the music of showy, squabbling virtuosos. 6. Joshua Landy, “Modern Magic: Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin and Stéphane Mallarmé,” in The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, ed. Joshua Landy and Michael Saler (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 125.

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instrumental music, for example, describes how we “construct a virtual environment in sound,” in which musical phenomena—“actants,” in Hatten’s terminology— behave as fictional agents.7 Hatten constructs a conceptual bridge between illusion and his theory of virtual agency by referring to an experience common to most readers: becoming absorbed in the story world of a film. As I discuss later in the chapter, there is a strong possibility that the types of musical experiences Hatten describes have their neurobiological roots in illusory perception. The premise that art presents a virtual world, itself a type of illusion or artifice, prevailed in aesthetic theories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries— especially those advanced by francophone and British adherents of l’art pour l’art movement, whose influence extended to fin-de-siècle decadent artists like JorisKarl Huysmans, Paul Verlaine, and Ravel. Witness Oscar Wilde, who proclaimed through a literary proxy that the proper aim of art is “the telling of beautiful untrue things,” or Stéphane Mallarmé, who suggested to Henri Cazalis that he “paint not the thing, but the effect it produces.”8 Edgar Allan Poe, prophet and godfather of French decadent literature, advocated the twin virtues of artifice and a cool head by claiming in his tale “The Domain of Arnheim, or The Landscape Garden” that “no such combination of scenery exists in nature as the painter of genius may produce,” affirming the creative virtues of artifice over nature.9 Years after the decadent movement had waned, Ravel nevertheless declared in a 1924 interview that “art is a beautiful lie” meant to “correct nature’s imperfections,” recalling Wilde; in 1931, he asked “since we cannot express ourselves without exploiting and thus transforming our emotions, isn’t it better at least to be fully aware and acknowledge that art is the supreme imposture?”10 These remarks obliquely assert Ravel’s view of the relationship between perception and sensory experience. To correct nature’s imperfections, one must be able to perceive them: nature is accessible to the senses and does not consist of noumena in a transcendental realm. In Ravel’s formulation, art is transformational, not translational, existing in a sphere independent of but referable to nature, the senses playing a mediating role between them. Illusion is a by-product of that mediation, something Ravel at once creates and strives to control. (“The truth is, one can never 7. Robert Hatten, A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 20. The foundations of his theory are set out in pp. 15–27. 8. Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in The Writings of Oscar Wilde, vol. 6, Intentions (New York: Keller-Farmer, 1907), 63; Stéphane Mallarmé to Henri Cazalis, October 30, 1864, in Correspondance complète, 206. 9. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Domain of Arnheim, or The Landscape Garden,” in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Modern Library/Random House, 1965), 607. 10. Interview with André Révész, ABC de Madrid (May 1, 1924), and “Memories of a Lazy Child,” La Petite Gironde (July 12, 1931), in Orenstein’s Ravel Reader, 395, 433. Neither text appears in Orenstein’s French edition, Maurice Ravel: Lettres, écrits, entretiens (Paris: Flammarion, 1989).

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have enough control,” he says.)11 If theatrical illusions provide a venue for exploring relationships between perception, imagination, and sensory experience, the conjuring trick links thematically to the artwork conceived as an enchanted space, recalling Mallarmé’s “incantatory stroke” of verse, the “secret equivalence” between ancient alchemical magic and modern poetic experience.12 The purpose of this chapter is first to establish an understanding of the magician’s art in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular attention to Robert-Houdin, whose gravitational pull in the conjuring universe extended well into the twentieth century. Once this context is in place, I go on to analyze various types of theatrical and perceptual illusions, incorporating perspectives from stage conjuring and philosophy of mind. The chapter concludes with a case study that draws on the foregoing evidence to illuminate a long-standing perceptual puzzle: the nature of musical motion. R O B E RT- HO U D I N ’ S I L LU SIO N S

One of the many attractions lining the Galerie de Valois at the Palais-Royal in Paris was the Théâtre de Séraphin, popularly known as the Ombres chinoises. Its exhibitions of automata, marionettes, and shadow puppet plays opened in 1784 and attracted crowds through the mid-nineteenth century.13 In 1845, RobertHoudin renovated an apartment in the vicinity at 11 rue de Valois, No. 164, and established a type of entertainment that had already appealed to audiences in that sector. But what distinguished his Soirées fantastiques from competitors’ shows was immediately apparent when spectators entered the theater, which resembled an elegantly appointed salon rather than a conjurer’s stage. In place of the conventional tables draped with cloths (inviting spectators to wonder what might be hiding beneath them), Robert-Houdin used white tables with gold-leaf accents in a Louis Quinze design, curvilinear legs exposed and pressing into a plush carpet. Spectators thus found themselves apparently in the sumptuous home of an affluent friend, though they had paid for the privilege of their invitation. Some conjurers still costumed themselves in long robes and a pointed wizard’s hat adorned with stars, but Robert-Houdin wore evening attire typical of the mid-nineteenth century gentleman: a black tailcoat, white tie, and white waistcoat. He established a gentle, affable rapport with spectators and presented illusions for refined tastes 11. Ravel, “Memories of a Lazy Child,” 395. 12. “Magie,” in Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, 399–400. For an analysis of Mallarmé’s poetic enchantments, see Joshua Landy, How to Do Things with Fictions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), esp. 78–82. 13. Victor Champier and Gustave-Roger Sandoz, Le Palais-Royal d’après des documents inédits, 1629–1900 (Paris: Société de propagation des livres d’arts, 1900), 148.

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fig. 1.1 . Illustration of Robert-Houdin and his son Eugène performing at St. James’s Theatre, London, in 1848. Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

and general audiences: no sex, no puns, no self-aggrandizing, and few occult flourishes.14 After retiring, Robert-Houdin took his act from the stage to the page, writing his memoirs, Confidences d’un prestidigitateur, in an overtly theatrical style. In the 14. Robert-Houdin describes his “reforms” of theatrical magic in Confidences, 1: 375–79; more detailed explanations may be found in Robert-Houdin, Magie et Physique amusante (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1885), 29–47.

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book’s preface, titled “The Author’s Overture,” he imagines himself presenting memories of his career in place of tricks and automata, suggesting that he need not relinquish his act in retirement: “Could I not, each evening when the clock strikes eight . . . continue my performances in another form? My public will be the reader, and my stage a book.”15 By framing his narrative in a theatrical context, RobertHoudin challenges readers to question its authenticity; indeed, he concludes the book by declaring his “performance” over, adding shrewdly, “One must recall that I presented my narrative under this title.”16 Though many (not all) of the events related in his memoirs can be independently verified, Robert-Houdin wants to breed skepticism—perhaps a misdirectional tactic, rhyming with his claim that magicians “even go so far as to feign to feign.”17 (What could be duller than a magician who tells the truth?) He invites readers to treat the narrative playfully, defying the usual insistence on authenticity, or at least verisimilitude, in autobiography. Embedded in his tale of humble beginnings, struggles overcome, and fame achieved—a conventional model for celebrity memoirs then and now—is his preoccupation with presentation and self-fashioning, evoking the dandy. The first of Robert-Houdin’s Soirées fantastiques took place in 1845, the year Barbey d’Aurevilly published Du Dandysme et de George Brummell. Nearly two decades later, Baudelaire’s indispensable essay on the dandy appeared in Le Peintre de la vie moderne. Baudelaire claimed, perhaps with a touch of irony, that simplicity and fastidiousness in dress were exterior markers of the dandy: no sartorial eccentricities should undermine the wearer’s elegance and independence of manner.18 For Robert-Houdin, investing the disreputable practice of theatrical magic with a sense of nobility and good taste meant simplifying stage accoutrements, exchanging the haze and dazzle of wax candles for gas lighting and rejecting attire that spectators might find bizarre. He eschewed the elaborate robes of contemporaries like Philippe Talon (1802–78) and criticized the Italian magician Bartolomeo Bosco (1793–1863) for wearing a “coat adorned with ornamental braiding and trimmed with fur, which made him look like a Russian prince.”19 In crafting his 15. “Ne pourrais-je pas, chaque soir, alors que huit heures sonnent, guidé par de fidèles souvenirs, continuer sous une autre forme le cours de mes représentations d’autrefois?. . . . Mon public serait le lecteur et ma scène un volume” (Robert-Houdin, Confidences, 1: vii). 16. “Il faut se rappeler que c’est sous ce titre que j’ai présenté mon récit” (ibid., 2: 325). 17. “Que ne feint-on pas, puisqu’on va même jusqu’à feindre de feindre?” (Robert-Houdin, Secrets, 88). 18. See Baudelaire, “Le Dandy,” in Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863), in Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 709–12; also Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Du Dandysme et de George Brummell (1845), 3rd ed. (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1879). Michael Puri, “Dandy, Interrupted: Sublimation, Repression, and Self-Portraiture in Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 60 (Summer 2007): 317–72, interprets both essays in light of Ravel’s musical self-portraits. 19. Robert-Houdin described Bosco as “un gros monsieur, vêtu d’une redingote ornée de brandebourgs et garnie de fourrures qui lui donnent tout-à-fait l’air d’un prince russe en voyage” (Confidences, 1: 294).

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own public persona, he set out to establish a different standard of dress for magicians, indicating that he was not a common street entertainer, but an artist with loftier aesthetic aims. His attire signaled membership in a particular social and cultural milieu, defined less by nobility of birth than by one’s ability to coordinate an elegant toilette appropriate to the occasion.20 In creating this identity, he had a paradoxical aim: to avoid looking like a spectacle in his own show. If Robert-Houdin sought to elevate the status of theatrical magic, he also wanted to avoid the appearance of bohemian eccentricity. In the nineteenth century, male artists and writers might choose to present themselves as aristocratic dandies—as Eugène Delacroix did when Nadar photographed him in 1858—or as creative nonconformists, the preferred mode for Nadar’s 1857 photograph of Théophile Gautier, who looks disheveled and quixotic in a crumpled artist’s smock.21 Robert-Houdin’s choice of evening wear resembles the dandyish Delacroix, asserting his independence and originality in relation to fellow conjurers while adhering to contemporary standards of good taste and refinement. (Future generations of conjurers followed suit.) Perhaps Robert-Houdin also sought to ally himself with male musicians, whose artistic status and sartorial conformity would have appealed to his dual aims. Pianists and violinists had been wearing formal black tailcoats since the reign of Paganini, if not before, and a handful of them— including the famed violinist—had already been linked to conjurers.22 Similarities between Paganini and Robert-Houdin are especially evocative. Both were stage performers who peddled a novel brand of virtuosity while wearing formal black suits (though Paganini’s black frock coat and white cravat seem less bourgeois than neo-Gothic). Speculation swirled around the violinist’s “secrets,” from his superhuman technique to his Faustian bargain, and he fanned the flames, as any respectable illusionist would do. He was rarely, if ever, heard to practice while on tour, lest he reveal the methods behind his effects.23 If Paganini could improve his image by besmirching it with the conjurer’s notoriety, then Robert-Houdin could do the inverse, countering insinuations of charlatanism by linking himself to the newly reputable male virtuoso. Robert-Houdin disparaged the “ ‘false-bottom’ school of conjuring,” comparing it to organ-grinder music, and encouraged magicians to avoid feints and mannered clumsiness, asking, “What would we think of an actor who feigned a memory lapse, or of a singer who made us believe, for a moment, that she sang out of tune to gain greater 20. Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 93–94. 21. Amelia Jones, “ ‘Clothes Make the Man’: The Male Artist as a Performative Function,” Oxford Art Journal 18, no. 2 (1995): 20. 22. Mai Kawabata, Paganini: The Demonic Virtuoso (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2013), 28–33. 23. See J. C. Lobe’s account, translated by Marian Miller and reprinted in Kawabata, Paganini, 240.

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appreciation later?”24 Reflecting on his early experiments with sleight of hand, he compared his art to the pianist’s ability to sight-read—a complex skill obtainable with practice.25 Whether or not Robert-Houdin modeled his behavior or attire on professional musicians, his interest in costuming was motivated by a belief that conjurers were actors. He played his part long after retiring from the stage, setting up a country home full of tricks that caused visitors to wonder whether he indeed possessed supernatural gifts. Baudelaire’s dandy enjoyed “the pleasure of astonishing and the proud satisfaction of never being astonished,”26 and Robert-Houdin lived this axiom on stage and off, always performing the aloof man of mystery. His stage identity, once fashioned, could not be undone: he claimed to have experienced many “disagreeable scenes” stemming from his reputation as a sorcerer.27 This fusion of art and life, of public and private spheres, anticipated the dandyish “cult of the self ” (espèce de culte de soi-même) celebrated by Barbey d’Aureville and Baudelaire. Ravel Playing the Part of a Musician Instances of Ravel’s Baudelairean dandyism are numerous and well known. An early example occurs in Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi’s 1913 essay in The Musical Times, in which he claims that “artificiality is natural to M. Ravel.”28 This paradoxical comment seems as likely to mystify as illuminate. With it, Calvocoressi achieves several aims at once. He asserts the composer’s independence from contemporaries like Debussy, whom critics claimed Ravel had imitated too much (by using similar musical materials) or not enough (by cultivating a musical style devoid of emotional sensitivity). Moreover, he seeks to normalize Ravel’s apparent artificiality by suggesting that it might be an outgrowth of natural expression, as if soil and sunlight could as readily sprout colorful plastic flowers as organic blooms. By implying that Ravel’s artifice issues from a reservoir of authentic selfhood, he inoculates the composer against barbs from other quarters, including debates over the aesthetic role of sincerity in musical composition, which implicated Ravel’s former teacher Gabriel Fauré.29 Calvocoressi’s narrative also neatly accommodates Ravel’s tendency both to observe and flout convention. For Roger Nichols, the composer’s playful attitude toward decorum recalls Baudelaire’s dandy, for whom originality lies at the “outer limits” of 24. “Que dirait-on, en effet, d’un acteur qui feindrait de perdre la mémoire, ou d’un chanteur qui ferait croire, pour un instant, à la fausseté de sa voix pour se faire mieux apprécier ensuite?” (RobertHoudin, Secrets, 40, 46). 25. Robert-Houdin, Confidences, 1: 54. 26. Baudelaire, “Le Dandy,” 710. 27. Robert-Houdin, Confidences, 2: 15. 28. M. D. Calvocoressi, “Maurice Ravel,” Musical Times 54 (December 1, 1913): 785. 29. On Fauré’s sincerity, see Carlo Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 11–12, 25–27.

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convention. Nichols notes that “when Ravel caused scandals—with his 1905 offerings for the Prix de Rome, with Histoires Naturelles, with Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, the cat duet in L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, Aoua! in Chanson Madécasses, and, of course, with Boléro—it could be simply that he misjudged (or judged precisely?) where those limits were being set by his audiences.”30 Calvocoressi underscores how Ravel’s music and public persona exude the deceptive verisimilitude associated with conjuring. The paradox of “natural” artificiality seems like a blunter version of Robert-Houdin’s maxim on artifice in life and stage magic, which reads as if it could have emerged from the cagey pen of Oscar Wilde: “Isn’t what we call fashion, or the customs of good society, a charming tissue of dissimulations and deceptions? As for the art I cultivated, what might it be without falsehood?”31 Robert-Houdin’s mingling of fashion, art, and social behavior is a fitting analogy, given Ravel’s own fastidious attention to dress and his cultivated, formal demeanor. His childhood friend Ricardo Viñes reports that when the two attended Chabrier’s funeral, Ravel had wanted to return home to change his suit and hat, feeling he was not properly attired. He was known to keep abreast of fashion trends and to address even intimate friends as “vous,” reserving the informal “tu” only for his brother, Édouard. Both behaviors were a way of keeping the world at arm’s length. Steven Huebner correlates Ravel’s musical perfectionism—his artisanal construction of glittering sonic surfaces—with an aloof disposition.32 The composer’s clothing and accessories likewise present a hard-surfaced exterior that might absorb and deflect attention from the man wearing them. Pairing a garish tie with an impeccably tailored suit, as Ravel was known to do, might invite questions, but the clothes would have served their purpose, steering conversation toward an ostensibly superficial topic. Fashion also signals membership in shifting and overlapping groups. In Proust’s Á la recherche du temps perdu (specifically in La prisionnière), the baron de Charlus’s dark suit reveals his homosexuality to other gay men while concealing it from those unfamiliar with this covert fashion code.33 For Ravel, whose own sexuality bewildered even his friends, fashion may not have been as safe a hiding place, but it nonetheless offered strategic misdirection.

30. Roger Nichols, Ravel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 18; Baudelaire, “Le Dandy,” 710. 31. “N’est-il pas jusqu’à ce qu’on appelle le bon ton ou l’usage de la bonne compagnie, qui ne soit un charmant tissue de dissimulations et de tromperies? Quant à l’art que je cultivais, que pouvait-il être sans le mensonge?” (Robert-Houdin, Confidences, 1: 113). 32. Steven Huebner, “Ravel’s Perfection,” in Ravel Studies, 21–22, 24–25. 33. Diana Festa-McCormick, Proustian Optics of Clothes: Mirrors, Masks, Mores, Stanford French and Italian Studies 29 (Saratoga, CA: Anima Libri, 1984), 93–103; Steele, Paris Fashion, 212–13.

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If Ravel was hiding something, Calvocoressi believed it was usually emotion, concealed behind a metaphorical mask: “But the absence of emotion is only apparent; and although the emotion itself is subdued, and its expression always toned down and recondite, many instances may be adduced in which genuine feeling asserts itself under the industrious show of impassivity, whilst in others the composer drops the mask altogether.”34 For many critics, the mask figures the composer as actor, inhabiting a variety of musical roles, while forever concealing himself. The durable mystery of Ravel’s artifice rests on a pervasive assumption about the nature of selfhood—that an immutable, binding nucleus persists over time, stabilizing the self within changing physical and social environments.35 Invoking Robert-Houdin’s inherently theatrical notion of self-presentation—“an actor playing the role of magician”—extricates Ravel from the polemics of selfhood, freeing us to focus on the implications of his aesthetic posturing and its relationship to the conjurer’s art. HOW I L LU SIO N S WO R K

While it is a commonplace that magicians jealously guard their secrets, it’s not the whole truth. In the nineteenth century, conjurers were known to unveil the methods of competitors who pilfered tricks and presented them as their own. (In such cases, the smug satisfaction of revealing a competitor’s fraud outweighed the loss of that trick from one’s repertoire—or the need to invent a new method for it.) Post-retirement memoirs and trick books also helped magicians prolong their celebrity status: Robert-Houdin, for example, revealed methods for his card tricks, mesmerist acts, and illusions. Two of his most popular effects were also family affairs. One of them, the Pâtissier of the Palais-Royal, distributed warm pastries to spectators, ensuring the routine’s long-standing popularity. Atop a table sat a miniature bakery, in which mechanical assistants could be seen, through the windows, rolling out dough. A tiny baker presented himself at the shop door to collect orders: tarts, cakes, brioches, liqueurs, and ice cream were all on hand. After delivering the confections, the baker fetched correct change for patrons who tried to pay him. Spectators marveled at the clever android, who rivaled (or exceeded) the efficiency and skill of their local pâtissier. But inside the mechanical bakery, Robert-Houdin’s younger son Eugène did the robot’s thinking for him. The boy 34. Calvocoressi, “Maurice Ravel,” 786. 35. The question of how Ravel’s public persona interacts with his musical works has been considered recently by Steven Huebner and Michael Puri. See Huebner, “Private Life, Public Works,” in Musical Biography: Towards New Paradigms, ed. Jolanta T. Pekacz (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006), 69–88; Puri, “Dandy, Interrupted,” 317–72.

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controlled the baker’s movements and the opening and closing of the shop doors, which in turn activated the clockwork motion of the assistants. When Théophile Gautier reviewed Robert-Houdin’s show six months after it opened, he cautioned spectators not to attend if they expected to see a disciple of Mesmer. Robert-Houdin was no hypnotist but a theatrical artisan, a “skillful prestidigitator . . . who does whatever he wants with his hands.”36 Much of that handiwork involved preparatory tinkering: besides the mechanical pâtissier, he exhibited automata, including the clowns Auriol and Debureau, who performed acrobatic feats, smoked a pipe, and played the flageolet.37 Gautier recognized the clown-like figures as mechanical marvels that should be appreciated as such, except by the very young, or perhaps the very gullible. But he called the baking automaton a pâtissier magique, suggesting it belonged to a different category of illusion: the magical machine. Illusions and automata were often intertwined in magic shows, serving interchangeable functions. Robert-Houdin’s Pastry Chef looked like an automaton, but the pâtissier’s ability to take orders, figure calculations, and communicate with assistants suggested that it might be something else—as indeed it was. It operated on principles similar to Wolfgang von Kempelen’s mechanical chess player, the Turk, which accomplished tasks so variable and complex that many observers, including Poe, were convinced the machine was a fraud. When its later owner Johann Maelzel exhibited the Turk, a man hid behind panels that were removed one at a time, exposing the machine’s motorized, though mostly inoperative, entrails.38 Its arm movements were controlled by the concealed man, much like the assistants in the mechanical bakery, who moved when Eugène opened and closed its doors. In a mentalist effect called Second Sight, Robert-Houdin enlisted the help of his older son, Émile, whom he felt possessed a supernatural bearing—particularly his face, which was pale and thoughtful, still waters running deep. After blindfolding Émile and seating him in a chair onstage, the illusionist requested small items from the audience: watches, rings, coins, any object in their pockets or decorating their persons. One spectator offered his watch and found that Émile, who could not see or touch it, was able to name its make and the time it currently displayed, down to the second. Another presented a coin, which the boy identified by its 36. “C’est un rival de Philippe, de Bosco et de Comte; un prestidigitateur très habile, qui fait tout ce qu’il veut de ses mains” (Théophile Gautier, “Théâtres,” La Presse, December 1, 1845, 2). 37. The clowns were named after Jean-Batiste Auriol, a mime and acrobat, and Jean-Gaspard Deburau, the mime most famous for his portrayals of Pierrot. (Note the different spelling of the latter clown’s name.) 38. James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 67.

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value and country of origin. Every object Robert-Houdin collected, Émile described in astonishing detail, without hesitation. Once Second Sight had become a regular feature in the magician’s repertoire, spectators started bringing obscure objects they felt might overwhelm the boy’s purportedly paranormal gifts, but nothing could confound him.39 Gautier confessed he could not divine the method behind Second Sight, but he insisted the trick was not achieved with the help of confederates, nor was it the result of a mesmeric trance, since Émile was awake and lucid the entire time.40 To perform the effect, Robert-Houdin and his son committed an improbable array of details to memory, including the names and values of foreign coinage, various coats of arms, non-Latin characters (purportedly Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, and Cyrillic), assorted stones and minerals, and the terms for surgical instruments. Once they had mastered this compendium of trivia, they developed a “secret, elusive correspondence”—most likely a spoken code.41 If Robert-Houdin’s patter lent an air of genial sociability to the effect, the words themselves conveyed to Émile the identity and relevant details of each object.42 The trick’s mode of execution was plain to hear but disguised in such a way that few, if any, spectators figured it out, making it a close methodological cousin to Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (discussed in the Introduction). Indeed, its method brings to mind an adage of Sherlock Holmes, a literary descendant of Poe’s detective Dupin, who remarks that “the world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”43 Even something as simple as a card trick can illustrate the unobserved principles behind large-scale stage illusions. In a method book, Robert-Houdin describes a trick called “Magical Transformation,” in which the ace of spades turns into the queen of hearts in full view of the spectator. The illusion, recounted in narrative form, reads like a pale implausibility: how could this possibly fool anyone?44 Magicians have been warning for centuries that once we uncover the simplicity and crudeness of an effect’s method, disappointment will inevitably follow. (Though skeptical of this claim, we may consider ourselves forewarned.) Robert-Houdin begins his explanation with the secret method, which involves placing the ace of 39. For Robert-Houdin’s account of Second Sight, see Robert-Houdin, Confidences, 2: 8–14. 40. Gautier, “Théâtres,” 2. 41. Robert-Houdin, Confidences, 2: 12. 42. Robert-Houdin later performed a silent version of the effect, whose method he did not reveal. 43. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1902), 36. 44. The English magician Professor Hoffmann [pseud.] (1843–1919), who translated Robert-Houdin’s books, made precisely this point, complaining in the preface to his own trick book that “a conjuring trick so described is like an air picked out with one finger on the piano.” See Louis Hoffmann, Later Magic ( New York: Dutton, 1904), iv.

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spades and the queen of hearts back to back, held in such a way that the cards can be whipped around in a split second. He then describes the trick as if he were performing it, holding up the ace of spades and asking (rhetorically) which card presents the most marked contrast to it. Settling on the queen of hearts, he declares that he will make this card, assumed to be somewhere in the deck, exchange places with the ace of spades in his hand. He riffles the pack of cards with his left hand while flipping the two cards around vertically in his right. To get rid of the unwanted ace of spades, Robert-Houdin suggests laying the pair of cards, queen of hearts visible, on top of the deck. As the transformed card is passed around and inspected for irregularities (none will be found, for none are required), the ace of spades can be slipped anonymously into the pack of cards.45 This card trick begins with a simple gesture (displaying the ace of spades), a declaration of the effect to be performed (changing the card in view of the spectator), and a rhetorical question that seems to invite the spectator’s input without actually doing so. (“Which figure might form the most striking contrast with the ace of spades? The queen of hearts.”) With a gesture and a few simple phrases, the magician sets expectations and defines the spatial and temporal dimensions of the trick, signaling when to watch closely for the moment of transformation. But the spectator still doesn’t see it. From the magician’s perspective, there are several reasons for the oversight. First, the riffling motion of the card deck distracts the spectator and misdirects attention, gaze, or both from the card swap. (Robert-Houdin would describe this riffling as a temps, an “opportune moment for executing sleight of hand unbeknownst to spectators.”46) Second, the key preparation for the trick— juxtaposing the ace of spades and queen of hearts—has been accomplished before it started. When the magician’s introductory patter invites the spectator to pay attention, the critical moment has already passed. We might be inclined to attribute part of the trick’s effectiveness to the magician’s speedy technique, which might have been quicker than the eye, but Robert-Houdin suggests that the magician’s fingers “must be more deft than quick,” the best kind of movement being quiet and unobtrusive.47 Psychologists and Philosophers on Magic Cognitive psychologists would agree. Experiments in laboratory settings confirm what magicians have long known: magic tricks manipulate attentional focus, invite false causal inferences, and exploit shortcuts in our processing of sensory data. A pair of recent studies suggests how spectators, even those who have been informed of a trick’s method, may fail to detect a secret action despite their eyes being 45. See Robert-Houdin, Secrets, 274–75. 46. Ibid., 88. 47. Ibid., 43.

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trained right on it.48 In Robert-Houdin’s “Magical Transformation,” spectators likely miss the swap in the magician’s right hand because their attention is focused on the riffling cards in the left hand—an effect that holds even if their gaze remains on the ace of spades, since attention and gaze can be differently directed. The trick thus exploits bottom-up cognitive processing driven by physical stimuli over topdown processing informed by concepts, memories, and expectations. In magic tricks featuring two simultaneous movements, neuroscientists report, spectators consider the larger movement to be more salient, resonating with the magician’s maxim, “A big move covers a small move.”49 In “Magical Transformation,” the riffling of the card deck provides cover for the card swap. The Palais-Royal pâtissier, by contrast, relies on top-down processing: spectators see what looks like an automaton and make assumptions about how it must work. Misdirection can assume many guises. Second Sight drew the attentional spotlight instead of the gaze, Robert-Houdin’s patter absorbing spectators’ focus while conveying information to Émile. Ethereal Suspension, performed with his son Eugène, employed another type of misdirection: the false attribution of method. After describing a new surgical anesthetic with quasi-magical effects, the magician offered a demonstration by placing Eugène on a stool, propping a cane under each of his arms, and holding a bottle under his nose. (A backstage assistant used a fan to waft the aroma of ether into the theater.) He explained how, when the ether took hold, the child would become virtually weightless: see how he hovers above the stage once the stool under his feet has been removed? Dislodging first one cane, then another, he lifted his son’s legs to make the boy lie parallel with the stage as if in suspended animation, defying gravity and common sense. At times, the trick worked too well. Some spectators reacted with concern for Eugène’s welfare, demonstrated by two letters (which Robert-Houdin apparently kept as a point of pride) encouraging him to stop dosing the child nightly with ether.50 Of course, he never dosed Eugène with anything: levitation tricks typically involve a harness, fine wires, or (in this case) mechanical scaffolding. But the illusion was particularly clever because its misdirectional cues came from multiple sources—Robert-Houdin’s patter, the scent of ether, and Eugène’s somnolent appearance, all of which pointed toward a scientific explanation. Those skeptical of Robert-Houdin’s science dreamed up explanations far more 48. Gustav Kuhn et al., “Misdirection in Magic: Implications for the Relationship between Eye Gaze and Attention,” Visual Cognition 16, nos. 2/3 (2008): 401–2; Kuhn et al., “Magic and Fixation: Now You Don’t See It, Now You Do,” Perception 34, no. 9 (2005): 1160–61. These studies, and many like them, were conducted in a laboratory environment with one participant at a time, making it difficult to assess the role of social cues in attention and misdirection. 49. Macknik et al., “Attention and Awareness,” 875. 50. Christian Fechner, The Magic of Robert-Houdin: An Artist’s Life, trans. Stacey Dagron, ed. Todd Karr (Boulogne, France: Éd. FCF, 2002), 271.

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complicated and implausible than any the magician could devise, even suggesting Eugène was really an automaton. Ethereal Suspension found its place in Soirées fantastiques, where Robert-Houdin promised an evening of automata, sleight of hand, and magic, always taking pains to ensure that spectators didn’t know which was which. Besides misdirection, other techniques for manipulating perception involve vision (afterimages), optics (“smoke and mirrors”), special effects, mechanical contrivances, priming, memory illusions, and “inattentional” blindness.51 Priming, which occurs when a stimulus is repeated, thus heightening sensitivity to it, may be combined with social cues to improve its effectiveness. In the Vanishing Ball illusion, for example, the magician tosses a ball in the air several times, conspicuously tracking its movement with his head and eyes before causing it to disappear in mid-flight. Even though the spectator experiences a vanishing effect, the oculomotor system knows better: it doesn’t direct the gaze to the place where the ball supposedly disappears.52 Conjurers can influence a spectator’s formation of memories by temporally or spatially displacing method from effect, or by using trivial, forgettable movements (like scratching one’s head) to accompany the method.53 Further, they may plant misleading information that causes the spectator to reconstruct events inaccurately, or to remember an action implied but not executed, recalling Robert-Houdin’s maxim that the magician must “try to cause the audience to attribute the effect to any other principle than the one that produced it.”54 Inattentional blindness, a form of covert misdirection, occurs when meaningless tasks absorb the spectator’s attention. Its best-known experimental manifestation involves a film created by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris and shown to participants who were asked to count the number of times people wearing white shirts passed a basketball. Engrossed with the task given to them, nearly half of viewers failed to notice the gorilla (a woman dressed in a gorilla suit) who walked into the camera frame, beat her chest, and walked off.55

51. Macknik et al., “Attention and Awareness,” 871. The authors draw on nine categories of magical effects explored in Peter Lamont and Richard Wiseman’s Magic in Theory: An Introduction to the Theoretical and Psychological Elements of Conjuring (Hatfield, Herts, England: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1999). 52. Gustav Kuhn and M. F. Land, “There’s More to Magic than Meets the Eye,” Current Biology 16 (December 2006): R950. 53. Macknik et al., “Attention and Awareness,” 875; Lamont and Wiseman, Magic in Theory, 93–94. 54. “Lorsque vous présentez un tour, tâcher de faire attribuer son exécution à tout autre principe qu’à celui qui le produit” (Robert-Houdin, Secrets de la prestidigitation, 45). 55. Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, “Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events,” Perception 28 (1999): 1068. The researchers expanded on these findings in a book for general readers called The Invisible Gorilla (New York: Crown Archetype, 2010). Their gorilla video may be seen at www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html.

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While psychologists have sought to explain perceptual illusions using experimental findings, philosophers have been pursuing other vexing questions about illusory perception. If illusions cannot be distinguished from what we perceive to be reality, our sensory impressions cannot be trusted. Philosophical debates over the nature of perception are wide-ranging and complex, but a few contemporary approaches are especially relevant to artistic and theatrical illusions.56 Of primary concern is the common belief that illusion arises from misperception—that is, if I perceive a yellow square as green, my senses have been deceived. Disjunctivist philosophers typically divide perceptual experiences into “good” and “bad” cases according to the perceptual knowledge available to us; illusion tends to be grouped with hallucination, under the “bad” disjunct. But A. D. Smith refutes this categorical definition, arguing that an illusion may be “any perceptual situation in which a physical object is actually perceived, but in which that object perceptually appears other than it really is.”57 Illusions, unlike hallucinations, thus offer “a direct awareness of the world,” allowing some of an object’s features to be perceived, even if partly in fictitious guise; indeed, illusions are often of a mixed character, neither wholly “good” nor “bad.”58 The yellow square that appears green remains a square, even I perceive its color differently. Stage illusions may correspondingly look and feel real despite the ways they diverge from typical experiences of reality. But spectators will only accept their fantastical premises if magicians cloak them in verisimilitude: a square must remain a square irrespective of its change of color. Because the conjuring trick is a “tissue of dissimulations,” as Robert-Houdin put it, the performer must “sufficiently enter the spirit of his role to himself believe in the reality of the fictions he turns out.”59 The levitating boy in Ethereal Suspension is, in fact, a real child, and the scent of ether wafting through the theater is (alarmingly) real ether. That illusions are perceived amid veridical experiences may seem an obvious point, but it is an important one. The philosopher Louise Antony extends this notion by describing how, seeing her dog Freya lolling about in the grass, her perceptual experience has a phenomenal character, which she labels “lollidogginess.” Later, she thinks she sees the lolling dog but actually observes the play of shadows on grass. This second experience 56. A substantive overview of contemporary philosophical arguments (with references to classical texts) may be found in Tim Crane and Craig French, “The Problem of Perception,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ed. Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2017 edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ spr2017/entries/perception-problem/. 57. A. D. Smith, The Problem of Perception (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 23. 58. A. D. Smith, “Disjunctivism and Illusion,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 80 (May 2010): 408. 59. “On doit se pénétrer assez de l’esprit de son rôle pour croire soi-même à la réalité des fables que l’on débite” (Robert-Houdin, Secrets, 45).

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also seems lollidoggy, despite the fact that no dog is present. Antony turns to vision science for an explanation, finding that “all perception is artifactual” because illusions and veridical experiences alike are constructions assembled from the processing of sensory data: a bright red wall in a friend’s living room appears to be a homogeneous color, even though the cones in our retinas absorb different wavelengths of light that vary the color’s hue. The claim that we are deceived by perceptual illusions implies that things should look differently than they do—that there is a “better way things could look.”60 But when a straight stick immersed partly in water appears to be bent, our senses are not deceiving us; they are behaving precisely as expected given the perceptual equipment we have. Antony echoes Goethe’s perspective on vision, noting there is “no such thing as an optical illusion,” because, as Jonathan Crary notes, “whatever the healthy corporeal eye experienced was in fact optical truth.”61 Antony’s perceptual experience also has a temporal dimension. Had she not first seen Freya lolling about, or had several hours or days elapsed between her first and second glance, chances are she would have seen an ordinary patch of grass without the appearance property of lollidoggy. Once having witnessed lollidogginess primed her to see it again, so long as the second glance was spatially and temporally proximate to the first. Moreover, Antony’s memory of events differed from her immediate perception, suggesting that she both experienced that percept as real and perceived something other than what was actually there. Antony’s thinking helps explain a certain type of musical illusion that explicitly engages memory and perception. Take, for example, a passage from Ravel’s opera L’Enfant et les Sortilèges. A harp glissando signals the arrival of a fairy tale princess—just as might be expected in a Disney cartoon—followed by alternating clarinet and bassoon arpeggios whose sound has the phenomenal character of a harp. This illusory harp has two key referents: the general class of harp sounds dissociated from particular contexts, and the recent memory of having heard that specific instrument only moments ago in the opera. The harp glissando could be likened to Antony’s lolling dog, and the illusory harp effect to the lollidoggy patch of grass. Both sounds share the same phenomenal character (harpiness?), but one was produced by a real harp, the other by a clever combination of woodwind instruments. When we hear the harp effect, we have not made an error in classifying the sound: it sounds like a harp because we have been primed to hear it that way, just as Antony had been primed to see a lollidoggy patch of grass. The harp illusion, a phenomenologically real event, refers to past events—the harp glissando in L’Enfant and other associative harp sounds— 60. Louise Antony, “The Openness of Illusions,” Philosophical Issues 21 (October 2011): 28, 33. 61. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 98.

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that we also experienced as real. Like most perceptual illusions, it presents a mixed character, neither “good” nor “bad.” T H E P R O B L E M O F M U SIC A L M O T IO N

If music is indeed an elaborate artifice, as Ravel and others have theorized, then the value of studying musical illusions like the harp effect is not immediately apparent. Think of characters singing in an opera: little is noteworthy there about the act of singing itself. (Better for a character not to sing if she wants to call attention to herself.) The illusory harp might similarly lose its evocative power when experienced as part of the auditory mirage known as music. Our perception of musical motion, discussed below, accommodates illusions of many types, however, including Ravel’s clarinet and bassoon “harp” arpeggios alluded to in the preceding section. The language used by scholars and listeners alike suggests that music moves: it rushes, sways, and wanders; it rises and falls, enters and exits, ebbs and flows. All of these expressions assume that musical elements undergo spatiotemporal passage. Victor Zuckerkandl is one of many theorists to note that a melody—a succession of static tones—doesn’t move through space, adding that theorists are flummoxed by musical motion because philosophers find motion itself so puzzling.62 Zeno’s paradoxes of motion, of which the best known is that of Achilles and the tortoise, illustrate how musical motion is merely one part of a much larger, longstanding philosophical problem. A corollary matter centers on the nature of musical tones, which are not object-like particulars but sonorous events with fuzzy boundaries: though sound waves travel through space, sound events don’t necessarily do the same.63 A number of solutions have been proposed to justify the overwhelming perception that music moves, despite convincing physical and theoretical evidence to the contrary. One way out of the bind is to claim that the language of musical motion is metaphorical, mapping embodied experiences onto aural processes. When the music critic Eduard Hanslick equated musical content with “tonally moving forms” (tönend bewegte Formen), he acknowledged the limits of such explanations, noting that “what in every other art is still description is in music already metaphor.”64 Johann Gottfried Herder offered a similar (if non-formalist) perspective, imparting 62. Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World, vol. 1, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), 83, 123–24. 63. This description comes from Casey O’Callaghan, Sounds: A Philosophical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 13–28. 64. Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. and ed. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), 30. For an interpretation of Hanslick’s memorable phrase, see Mark Evan Bonds, Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 147–48.

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agency and corporeality to a musical force that “feels itself to be mobile, in other words, no longer at rest and through its own inner forces caused to reproduce itself.” Herder added that the force “feels itself moved,” translating the listener’s metaphorical experience to the virtual field of musical performance.65 Steve Larson, a recent proponent of the representative approach, identified ways in which the listener may adopt “embodied metaphoric reasoning” (to use Arnie Cox’s phrase): by traveling diachronically through the musical landscape of the piece, surveying the music from afar (as one might do when analyzing a score), or experiencing the music as a type of magnetic force.66 Yet the metaphorical mapping of space onto sound, while common in music-theoretical literature, cannot capture the visceral experience of hearing a sweeping melody or oscillating planes of sound. Larson insists that metaphorical motion is real motion—that it is “no less real for being a product of human imagination.”67 If so, this sort of motion seems to disregard nonconceptual aspects of perception and experience. Examining the aesthetic history of Bewegung (movement) in German philosophy, Lydia Goehr asserts that “all music moves; how can it not move?”68 A number of theorists have answered that question by suggesting that musical motion is partly or wholly a phenomenon of consciousness, like the experience of listening to music itself. Zuckerkandl claims that we ascribe motion to perceived changes in “dynamic quality,” which impart to music some directionality within a tonal field.69 An interval is thus not merely a succession of two pitches but a musical unit articulating a sense of arrival or departure. Christopher Hasty similarly identifies the interval as a fundamental unit: the second tone introduces a “qualitative change” to the first tone, from which the listener constructs a sense of order and continuity about the intervallic pairing.70 Like Zuckerkandl, Hasty notes that intervals imply tonal direction, but he also describes how structurally unified events in highly chromatic and atonal music may suggest a sense of motion. Roger Scruton believes that we translate the characteristics of space into the temporal processes of musical time, producing a phenomenal field that lacks the defining features of spatial 65. Johann Gottfried Herder, “On Music,” in Song Loves the Masses, trans. and ed. Philip V. Bohlman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 251. 66. Steve Larson, Musical Forces: Motion, Metaphor, and Meaning in Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 67–75; also Arnie Cox, review of Musical Forces, by Steve Larson, Music Theory Online 19, no. 1 (March 2013), paragraph 5. Cox notes how “it can feel as though musical motion is not metaphoric—an illusion that is motivated by the non-metaphoric elements of experience” (9). 67. Larson, Musical Forces, 76. 68. Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 4. 69. Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 90–93. 70. Christopher Hasty, “Rhythm in Post-Tonal Music: Preliminary Questions of Duration and Motion,” Journal of Music Theory 25 (Autumn 1981): 191. It could be argued that an interval is not a structure but a metaphorical construction of spatial distance.

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order: “The topological character of space, as a system of places and surfaces, is not reproduced in the acousmatic realm. In that realm we confront only a succession of events, ordered in time but not in space, and retaining the directionality and placelessness which are the marks of the temporal dimension.”71 Arnie Cox adopts a similar perspective, employing cross-domain mapping to demonstrate metaphorical relationships between musical motion and spatial qualities, like location and distance.72 A related theory, grounded in studies of musical perception, seeks to establish greater continuity between embodied experience and musical listening. Patrick Shove and Bruno Repp point out that philosophers and theorists of musical movement tend to forget about the role of the human performer, focusing almost exclusively on aspects of musical structure. Even recordings leave traces of embodied motion—usually articulated attacks whose “timing and amplitude ‘specify’ the continuity of movement.”73 Eric Clarke advocates a similar approach, noting how musical gestures, patterns, and effects evoke real-world correlates indicative of motion: the opening motive of Beethoven’s fifth symphony approximates the sound of a hand rapping on a door, for example, suggesting the proverbial figure of Fate coming to call.74 For Clarke, musical motion is “truly perceptual rather than metaphorical, symbolic, or analogical,” referring to everyday physical motion much the same way as shading and modeling in a painting represent the real-world reflections of light.75 But if this is the case, the Fifth Symphony might require an explanatory apparatus: without Anton Schindler’s report of a Beethoven anecdote, would we still hear a musical translation of Fate knocking on a door? An embodied theory like the one proposed by Shove and Repp accounts for the intuitive sense that music moves, but it also may be needlessly limiting. If the notion that “musical movement is human movement” invites listeners to hear the activities of music-making, it leaves little room for the types of motional experiences Larson has identified: the listener as traveler, or the magnetic forces that (metaphorically) move a listener. It

71. Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 75. Directionality may admittedly be a spatial metaphor, but I think Scruton’s point holds notwithstanding. 72. Arnie Cox, Music as Embodied Cognition: Listening, Moving, Feeling, Thinking (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 109–33. 73. Patrick Shove and Bruno H. Repp, “Musical Motion and Performance: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives,” in The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation, ed. John Rink (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 60. 74. Eric F. Clarke, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 73–74. Larson also links his metaphorical understanding of musical motion to a theory of musical forces driven by cross-domain mapping, embodied experience informing how we understand and perceive music. See Larson, Musical Forces, esp. 82–109. 75. Clarke, Ways of Listening, 74.

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also neglects that some electronic music is produced without the involvement of a live or recorded human performer. Despite some differences in the theories discussed above, many share key thematic elements. Common to them is the importance of musical continuity, achieved through tonal relationships, structural groupings, or a schema supplied by our perceptual apparatus. Continuity overcomes the “stasis-gap-stasis-gap” obstacle of tones in a melody, which puts listeners “always between the tones, on the way from tone to tone”; continuity also implies change, though perhaps of a different order than the sort effected by the motion of objects through space.76 Change may be experienced through a particular mode of attention that allows the listener to hear a musical interval, not as two notes separated by a “durationless instant,” but as an ordered succession generating a sense of passage—a qualitative difference from one pitch to the next.77 In studying musical motion, nearly every theorist has overlooked one obvious source of evidence: the perpetuum mobile, which evokes movement without necessarily referring to embodied motion (or even to perpetual motion machines, discussed in chapter 3). The list of such works is vast, but it includes pieces like Schumann’s Toccata, the finale of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2, Poulenc’s Trois mouvements perpétuels, John Adams’s Phrygian Gates, Paganini’s Moto Perpetuo (Op. 11), the finale of Samuel Barber’s violin concerto, and the prelude in D minor from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (book 1). Examples 1a–1c compare passages from three of these works, each unfolding in a manner characteristic of the excerpted measures.78 All of these pieces convey a sense of propulsive motion through repeating contour patterns and harmonic sequences, homogeneous textures, infrequent use of rests, isochronal note values, and quick (sometimes breakneck) tempi. These qualities contribute to a hierarchically flat musical structure: events unfold in a unidirectional flow but seem syntactically equivalent to those coming before and after, their culmination marked by rare interventions—a rest, ritardando, or definitive cadence. Jonathan Kramer describes such textures as nonlinear and constructed by the listener; Edward Pearsall characterizes them as nondiscursive properties of the music, emphasizing their “intervallic saturation” and “surface attributes.”79

76. Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 137. 77. Hasty, “Rhythm in Post-Tonal Music,” 191. 78. I leave aside the second and third movements in Poulenc’s suite. Both are characteristic of the perpetuum mobile (the third piece more than the second), but the first movement will suffice. 79. Jonathan Kramer, The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies (New York: Schirmer, 1988), 40; Edward Pearsall, “Anti-Teleological Art: Articulating Meaning through Silence,” in Approaches to Meaning in Music, ed. Byron Almén and Edward Pearsall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 44.

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ex. 1.1a . Frédéric Chopin, Piano Sonata No. 2, Finale, mm. 1–3. Presto sotto voce e legato

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ex. 1.1b . Francis Poulenc, Trois mouvements perpétuels, No. 1, mm. 1–4. Assez modéré (q = 144)

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Given Kramer’s formulation, the figural repetition typical of the perpetuum mobile might induce in the listener a sense of stasis, rendering the whole genre a stylistic curiosity, conveying an experience of temporal passage despite itself. The unrelenting rhythmic and textural homogeneity of the Chopin finale could theoretically produce a hypnotic effect, though the music is ultimately propelled forward by its implied harmony, consisting mostly of diminished seventh chords. Kramer notes how Schumann’s Stückchen, from Album für die Jugend (Album for

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the Young), could likewise be heard as static: it never modulates from C major, contains a persistent G pedal point, and features doggedly repetitive rhythms paired with an unchanging texture. But the tonal implications of the piece project a sense of motion despite these apparently static qualities—indeed, “to avoid hearing tonal motion requires special effort.”80 Adams’s Phrygian Gates eschews tonal implications, exhibiting many of the characteristics Pearsall links to nondiscursive music, including a nonteleological structure featuring redundant musical events.81 Yet a sense of movement nevertheless emerges through rhythmic displacement: the right-hand E, heard on the downbeat of measure ten, shifts in relation to the two-note left hand ostinato, becoming the seventh pitch in measure eleven and the fourth in measure twelve. (The piece lacks a meter, but if it were scored in 44, the E would be metrically displaced, falling first on the fourth beat of measure eleven, then on the second half of beat two in measure twelve.) Thus certain aspects of implied motion in the perpetuum mobile have not yet been explained by the gravitational pull of tonality or the compelling interjections of rhythmic and metric anomalies. Why are almost all of these pieces so fast, and why do they pulsate so relentlessly? As listeners, we sense musical motion across a wide range of tempi, and the metaphorical language we use to describe it applies equally to quick and slow pieces, with or without a marked sense of meter. Yet the exemplar of perpetual motion is a fast, pulsating piece with a homogeneous texture and few, if any, pauses—characteristics that subdue the genre’s countervailing tendency toward stasis. T E M P OR A L PAS S AG E A N D A PPA R E N T MOT I ON

Robert Gjerdingen’s solution to the problem of musical motion helps explain the perpetuum mobile’s oddities. For Gjerdingen, much of what we hear in music might be classified as apparent motion—a type of perceptual illusion in which static objects or events are temporally smoothed out or smeared together.82 This auditory illusion would mirror the visual processes taking place when we watch a film: we construct a moving image from a series of still images projected at a rate of (typically) twenty-four frames per second.83 If Eric Clarke acknowledges that musical motion is a “truly perceptual relationship—even though the perceived motion may be illusory,” Gjerdingen asserts that many perceptual experiences are 80. Kramer, Time of Music, 59. 81. Pearsall, “Anti-Teleological Art,” 53. 82. Robert O. Gjerdingen, “Apparent Motion in Music?” Music Perception 11 (Summer 1994): 335–70. 83. Simon Prosser uses the analogy of film frames to suggest that the same processing which gives rise to apparent motion may also explain why objects are perceived as enduring through time. See “Why Does Time Seem to Pass?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (July 2012): 111–12.

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illusory, and musical motion may be one of them.84 His neural network model simulates a variety of perceptual phenomena applicable to musical motion, including auditory streaming, gestalt effects, and dynamic attending. I prefer a different theoretical approach, applying some of the same principles underpinning Gjerdingen’s study to recent philosophical work on temporality and its implications for musical motion. To explain how we experience temporal passage, the philosopher L. A. Paul describes a well-known experiment in which a small dot flashes on the left side of a computer screen, disappears, then returns on the right side of the screen. The dots continue to flash quickly according to the same pattern: left side, right side, left side, right side. If the dots appear spatially proximate and in rapid succession, we perceive a single dot moving from one side of the screen to the other.85 A variation of the flashing dot experiment demonstrates how we experience apparent motion even in the presence of qualitative change. When a red dot flashes on one side of the screen and a green dot on the other, we perceive both the motion of a single dot and a change of color occurring about halfway through the dot’s projected journey across the screen. This “color phi phenomenon” has special relevance. If studies of physical motion typically assume the constancy of a moving object with respect to other frames of reference, music involves qualitative difference, not consisting simply of a single sound moving from one virtual or metaphorical location to another. For Paul, the color phi phenomenon “gives us the illusion of the animated character of qualitative color change” and suggests how temporal motion might also be an illusion produced when the brain processes similar closely spaced inputs with qualitative differences.86 Extending Paul’s thinking to music, we might experience a sense of motion from temporally proximate musical events (pitches, rhythms) following one another in close succession. These events may be conceived of as intervals or other fundamental units, as Christopher Hasty prefers, or they may be discrete sounds smoothed together by the brain.87 Such a process would be perceptual, not conceptual, though 84. Clarke, Ways of Listening, 63–64. 85. L. A. Paul, “Temporal Experience,” Journal of Philosophy 107 (July 2010): 348. For the original experiment Paul describes, see Max Wertheimer, “Experimentelle Studien über das Sehen von Bewegung,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie 61 (1912): 161–265. 86. Paul, “Temporal Experience,” 348. 87. Gjerdingen and Clarke both point out that in the case of apparent motion, what is moving remains unclear. To understand whether apparent motion includes both self-motion and object-motion, we need more information about the neural, cross-modal processing of movement. Watching a musical performance is a cross-modal experience, and there are studies demonstrating that the visual processing of motion affects auditory processing, and vice versa (though to a lesser degree). For a discussion of recent studies on the cross-modal processing of motion, see Salvador Soto-Faraco and Aleksander Väljamäe, “Multisensory Interactions during Motion Perception,” in The Neural Bases of Multisensory Processes, ed. Micah M. Murray and Mark T. Wallace (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2011), 583–602.

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it may be supported by experiences like cross-domain mapping; no doubt many of our perceptions are linked to metaphorical processes, perhaps including the apparent flow of time itself. Musical motion, if not a purely cognitive effect, may be deemed constructed and embodied, like the apparent motion of objects: both types of perception mediate experiences in the real world, navigating space and time using modified sensory inputs. As Louise Antony notes, illusory perceptions “have exactly the same relation to the world as veridical perceptions,” since both activate our perceptual processing in the same way and are interpreted according to optical laws.88 Indeed, one neuroscientific study showed that the neural complex used to process spatial motion reacted strongly when subjects merely imagined movement.89 If experiments in music cognition reveal a range of influences on our perception of musical movement, including pitch contour and dynamics,90 the dot experiment suggests that we only perceive motion between musical events when they occur in close temporal proximity. Other factors—tonal relationships, for example, or the mapping of spatial, metaphorical, or physical cues onto music— may reinforce illusory motion. But without clear temporal succession, the cognitive impulse to merge discrete musical events breaks down. To illustrate this point more concretely, think of a piece that evokes temporal paralysis—not merely rhythmic or harmonic stasis, but the sense that the restless river of time has iced over. György Ligeti’s Cello Concerto presents a satisfying, if extreme, example. Marked Q = 40, the piece opens with solo cello playing E4 marked pppppppp. When violins and violas join the cello on the same pitch seven measures later (dynamics marked ppppp), we already hear a spatialized approach to temporality, where all times, or no times, exist at once. The first few minutes of the piece confirm this impression, focusing on a single pitch; a tremolo or trill (on E) qualifies as an event. Orchestrational variety provides contrast, new timbres replacing old, though these changes seem disconnected from the correlative processes typically governing musical and temporal experience. Ligeti’s frozen time effectively nullifies directionality, expectation, and change, evoking the “pervasive non-discursiveness” that Edward Pearsall links to musical stasis.91 Messiaen’s Louange pour l’immortalité de Jésus from his Quatuor pour la fin du temps offers a more subtle example of arrested temporal passage. The piano’s rhythmic ostinato starts in the first measure and lasts throughout the piece, much like the isochronal rhythms and textures of the perpetuum mobiles in example 1. 88. Antony, “Openness of Illusions,” 29–30. 89. See Rainer Goebel et al., “The Constructive Nature of Vision: Direct Evidence from Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Studies of Apparent Motion and Motion Imagery,” European Journal of Neuroscience 10 (May 1998): 1563–73. 90. For a survey of these effects, see Zohar Eitan and Roni Y. Granot, “How Music Moves: Musical Parameters and Listeners’ Images of Motion,” Music Perception 23 (February 2006): 237. 91. Pearsall, “Anti-Teleological Art,” 53–54.

Misdirection

43

ex. 1.2 . Olivier Messiaen, Louange à l’immortalité de Jésus, mm. 1–6.

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But Messaien’s ostinato, which unfolds in an exceedingly deliberate tempo, implies neither directionality nor a sense of pursuit. Its pulsing, articulated rhythms initially compel our attention, but as they lull us into somnolence, they seem more like rippled movements cast in bronze, sonic cousins of Umberto Boccioni’s famous sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913). Extended tertian

44

Chapter 1

harmonies in the piano are mostly consonant but tonally aimless. Set against this accompanimental narcotic is a sinuous violin melody whose linearity defies the piano’s apparent temporal stasis. Its second phrase (mm. 4–6) is a sequence of the first (mm. 1–3), the concluding triplet motive sprouting tendrils at rehearsal B before developing into a rising, syncopated figure that brings the first half of the piece to a close. The second half begins by repeating the opening eight measures note for note (in a piece only thirty-three measures long) until the syncopated figure leads to an ethereal apotheosis. Melodic repetition deepens the trance effect, thickening the temporal moment without expanding its reach. Our sense of motion, stimulated by the violin’s linearity, is blunted by drifting harmonies, mesmerizing accompaniment and, most of all, a slow tempo that impedes our ability to construct temporal passage from musical events. M U SIC A L M O T IO N A S A C O N J U R I N G T R IC K

If music is a virtual world, then its apparent motion functions like the illusions of our everyday perceptual experience. Two pieces written in the early twentieth century will help us examine this claim, starting with the first movement of Poulenc’s Trois mouvements perpétuels (1918). The piece seems more inclined toward musical stasis than others of its genre, perhaps because of the left-hand ostinato’s relentless trundling, conveying both harmonic circularity and mechanical indifference to the right-hand melodies (example 1.1b above). While the left hand roughly outlines a BH major seventh chord, three alternating melodic ideas appear in the right hand, shifting between BH major, BH Lydian, and DH Mixolydian, each blithely independent of the ostinato and, it seems, each other. Most of these melodies might be rearranged with little disruption to phrasing order or succession, suggesting formal discontinuities reminiscent of very early moment form.92 When this musical clockwork winds down, the last measure, marked très lent, provides little finality, ending on a diminished FG triad over a BH pedal. Despite these markers of formal and harmonic stasis, Poulenc titled the piece Trois mouvements perpétuels, and listeners—with or without knowing the title— are likely to ascribe qualities of motion (especially mechanical motion) to it. The piece activates our tendency to hear apparent motion within specific musical parameters, which include a base threshold for tempo (quicker is better) and homogeneous contour patterns and textures. Had the trundling ostinato been altered at some point, we might have taken notice of its circularity and prolific repetition, but instead, we accept it as an agent of kinetic motion precisely because of its invariance, like a conveyor belt always looping back to its starting point. 92. Kramer, Time of Music, 201, identifies these examples in the music of Debussy, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Varèse, and Webern.

Misdirection

45

Indeed, the characteristic tokens of perpetual motion remain intact, the ostinato surreptitiously smoothing over formal discontinuities and ambiguous tonal implications, creating the temporal smearing suggestive of apparent motion. By including stylistic features that should interfere with our ability to hear motional effects, Poulenc is like the magician performing blindfolded or in handcuffs, using impediments to cast into relief the illusion unfolding before us. As illusions go, the piece generates about the same level of astonishment as the average card trick, revealing how apparent encumbrances can magnify our perception of apparent motion. Stravinsky’s Petrushka challenges our conventional understanding of time, space, and motion on a larger scale. In the opening of the fourth tableau, repeating triadic oscillations and parallelisms arrest harmonic motion, but the quick tempo, consistent texture, and rhythmic homogeneity imply movement, evoking a paradox: the temporally paralyzed perpetuum mobile. The tempo marking, con moto, nevertheless seems appropriate. Scalar flourishes streak by, their fleeting presence ringing like aural traces of a comet, the kinetic musical surface resembling the humming sound of a concertina or a beehive. The mystery of this music is how it improbably fuses motion with temporal stasis. Gretchen Horlacher, who describes Stravinsky’s superimposed, fixed musical strata as “running in place,” suggests that certain passages in his music may be read as simultaneously dynamic and static.93 As an example, she describes how fixed strata in the third movement of the Symphony of Psalms appear separately but grow closer together through successive entrances until finally overlapping, creating a sense of continuity and movement.94 Horlacher’s notion of running in place also applies to the tensile relationship between stasis and flow in Petrushka’s fourth tableau. Diatonic, oscillating notes in the strings, clarinet, and upper brass establish the tableau’s characteristic buzzing sound (example 1.3, mm. 1–2) before a triadic flourish in the oboe and soli viola pops out of the texture in measure three. The next three flourishes are spaced about two bars apart, appearing first at the end of measure five (oboe, cello, and harp), then measure seven (oboe and harp) and measure nine (oboe, cello, harp). But starting in bar ten, the density of entrances increases: a sweeping upward gesture echoed by a downward glissando (m. 10), a downward flourish followed by an upward sweep (m. 11), and so forth. This music behaves much like Horlacher’s description of episodes in the Symphony of Psalms. But here’s the rub. The background oscillations in the opening of the fourth tableau are made of the same compound material—triads and short 93. Gretchen Horlacher, “Running in Place: Sketches and Superimposition in Stravinsky’s Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 23 (Fall 2001): 196, 199. 94. Ibid., 200–205. Her argument includes a study of Stravinsky’s sketches, evoking what Richard Taruskin describes a “poietic fallacy,” in which “what matters most . . . in a work of art is the making of it, the maker’s input.” See Taruskin, “The Poietic Fallacy,” Musical Times 145 (Spring 2004): 10.

ex. 1.3 . Detailed reduction of Igor Stravinsky, Petrushka, fourth tableau, mm. 7–10.

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Misdirection

47

ex. 1.4 . Registral expansion in Petrushka, mm. 1–11 after rehearsal 83. Oscillations marked by brackets. Top staff should be read from center (mm. 1–2) outward. Bars:

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rhythmic values—as the triadic flourishes themselves. At first it is easy to distinguish foreground flourishes from shimmering accompaniment, but starting in measure five, the range of background oscillations starts expanding: in the top staff of the first violin, for example, it grows by an interval of a second in measures three, five, seven, and eleven, as example 1.4 shows. The first and second clarinets undergo a similar amplification, moving from the range of a second in the first two measures to a fifth by measure nine. Parts of the whirring accompaniment begin to sound melodic, commensurate with the transient flourishes that had possessed greater salience only moments before. The gradual blurring of foreground and background blunts the accumulating density of successive entrances that produced, in Horlacher’s example, a sense of directionality and continuity. Instead, the music offers simultaneities, unleashing its kinetic activity in a temporally fixed context—a different sort of running in place that involves unstable perspectival planes.95 The opening of the fourth tableau evokes the hubbub of the Shrovetide Fair as the sun bends toward evening. But its unrelenting rhythmic homogeneity asserts the unreality of the scene, made rigid and glassy through Stravinsky’s prismatic orchestral surface. Richard Taruskin notes that despite the folk-like elements of Petrushka’s crowd scenes—its persistent diatonicism, “music-box timbres,” and implacable rhythmic propulsion—the effect is “unnatural, inexpressive, toylike.”96 95. Gurminder Bhogal notes how in The Rite of Spring, a textural background similar to that of the fourth tableau seems to “expand and suspend time.” See Bhogal, Details of Consequence: Ornament, Music, and Art in Paris, AMS Studies in Music, ed. Christopher Reynolds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 266. 96. Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through “Mavra,” vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996): 735.

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Chapter 1

A magician in the mise-en-scène renders the usual divisions between fantasy and stage reality suspect; for Taruskin, the puppet’s world, or the “World of Art,” comes to be more real than the scenes of human life glimpsed in the first and fourth tableaux.97 We witness the magician’s spell when he touches each puppet with a flute near the ballet’s opening (nine measures after rehearsal 32). But Stravinsky weaves an additional enchantment—a sensory illusion that questions the status of our spectatorship and participatory freedom. As he exploits our tendency to hear apparent motion in the perpetuum mobile, he also unsettles our perceptions by arresting the music’s (apparent) movement through time, concentrating the fair’s sprawling commotion into a discrete temporal moment. Stravinsky’s gambit prefigures Ligeti’s in the cello concerto, and many works like it, where the illusion of stasis implies a state often described as timeless or eternal—a label we use without fully comprehending what such an experience might feel like. The Shrovetide Fair similarly tests our limits of understanding by using the mediating effects of illusion: some aspects of our perception are veridical (we hear and interpret sound) and some are not (we perceive musical motion in a temporally static context). We are never confronted with something that is altogether real or fake. So it is with the work of art. The magician’s spell raises questions about what we see when we enter the puppet’s world: are these figures truly animated, or has the magician thrown a veil over our eyes, turning the whole ballet into an elaborate trick of perception? We might ask the same questions of a composer, stage director, or librettist. In some respects, the answers matter little. Reality and illusion are so intertwined that we cannot wholly distinguish between them without abandoning the very perceptual equipment that allows us to interpret sensory data. Veridical and illusory perception—like the world of art versus the world of reality— exists on a spectrum. But there are instances when an artist wants us to see the wires and trapdoors, or at least to remind us that they are there. Vladimir Jankélévitch writes that Ravel “wants to seem like a charlatan.”98 In admitting us to the magic show, Ravel, who spent years sharpening his view of art and the world from which it springs, heightens our awareness of both realms. And it is only fitting that we be given fair warning: illusions pose a special challenge to our interpretive volition.

97. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 736. 98. Jankélévitch, Ravel, 98.

2

Emblems of Enchantment

As many of his friends reported, Ravel was more interested than the average adult in fairy tales and childhood amusements. Marie-Rose Veber, Jacques Ibert’s widow, told Roger Nichols that the composer had once disappeared from a party and “was found on the floor in the nursery playing with the children’s toys—alone.”1 Ravel looked after Mimie and Jean, the children of his close friends Ida and Cipa Godebski, while their parents traveled, explaining in letters the stories he told his charges: “not too sad at night to avoid nightmares, gloomy in the morning, to stir the appetite.”2 He wrote the piano duet Ma mère l’Oye for Mimie and Jean to play, basing each movement of the suite on a different fairy tale. I propose Ma mère l’Oye as a starting place for examining transformational illusions in his music, without putting too much strain on the narrative of Ravel as eternal child (which could use some scrutiny). The piece shows Ravel comfortably in his element—not experimenting stylistically, as he would later do in works like Chansons madécasses, but exploring more familiar terrain, where fantasies bloomed alongside waterscapes and alhambrismos. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Ravel produced more pieces of these types than at any other time in his career. In 1905, he wrote the text and music for Noël des jouets (1905), which depicts a crèche comprising toy animals, a Child made of painted sugar, and a Virgin Mary sporting a crinoline. A few years later, he translated the alluring song of a water pixie and the volatile whirling of an imp into the pianistic tour de force Gaspard de la nuit, completed in 1908. He worked on Ma mère l’Oye and 1. Nichols, Ravel, 104. 2. Ibid., 105.

49

50

Chapter 2

Daphnis et Chloé simultaneously in 1909. Daphnis had more in common with a fairy-tale suite than might be expected from a ballet based on a Greek novel; Ravel claimed it represented “the Greece of [his] dreams,” filtered through the lens of French rococo painting.3 Ma mère l’Oye features several conjuring tactics found in Ravel’s fantasy pieces, including two ascending gestures—which I have designated the transformational ascent and the illusion of perpetual ascent—and a number of orchestral effects that make ordinary sounds resonate with supernatural vibrations. Transformation in Beauty and the Beast In 1911, the year after the première of Ma mère l’Oye—performed by the pianists Jeanne Leleu and Geneviève Durony, not the Godebski children—Ravel orchestrated the piece. Later that year, he developed a ballet scenario for it, reordered the movements, and added a prelude, four interludes, and an additional tableau (Danse du rouet et scène). The ballet first appeared in 1912 to general acclaim, most critics finding the music, costumes, and scenery enchanting despite the flimsy livret. The curtain opens on an enchanted garden, where an old woman works at her spinning wheel (Danse du rouet). Princess Florine, jumping rope nearby, stumbles, pricks her finger on the wheel’s spindle, and falls into a bewitched slumber. Unable to revive her, the courtiers express their dismay through a melancholy dance (Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant), which concludes with the old woman casting off her cape to reveal herself as the Good Fairy, attired in duly opulent dress. At her whistle, two “négrillons” appear; she charges them to keep watch over the princess, whom she supplies with pleasant dreams until she wakes up. The ballet movements that follow—Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête, Petit Poucet, and Laideronnette, Impératrice des pagodes—depict these dreams, drawn from fairy tales recorded by Madame (Jeanne-Marie) Leprince de Beaumont, Charles Perrault, and Madame (Marie-Catherine) d’Aulnoy. In the ballet’s final interlude, Prince Charming enters an enchanted garden, and as dawn arrives, Sleeping Beauty awakes. With the Good Fairy offering her blessing on the aristocratic union, the tale ends with orchestral pomp and circumstance, miraculously achieved without the use of trumpets. Above the score of Les Entretiens, the third tableau, Ravel cites three segments of dialogue between Beauty and the Beast from Beaumont’s version of the fairy tale, first published in 1756.4 The first two passages mostly involve deflections and 3. Ravel, “Esquisse autobiographique,” in Maurice Ravel: Lettres, écrits, entretiens, ed. Arbie Orenstein (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), 45–46; “Autobiographical Sketch,” in Ravel Reader, ed. and trans. Orenstein, 31. 4. Beaumont’s version was published under the title Le Magasin des enfants, ou Dialogues d’une sage gouvernante avec ses élèves.

Emblems of Enchantment

51

negations: the Beast counters Beauty’s compliments with self-effacing remarks, and Beauty refuses his offer of marriage. In the third passage, dialogue gives way to third-person narration, describing the moment when the Beast disappears and a handsome prince takes his place, who thanks Beauty for ending his enchantment. In the music, Ravel translates this fairy-tale discourse to the orchestra, using fixed registers and themes to reflect the characters. But his handling of the Beast’s metamorphosis works more like a conjuring trick than an enchanter’s spell, using a sonic cliché—the harp glissando—to multiply its transformational effects. The piece opens with Beauty’s blithely disjunct waltz melody, played with few chromatic alterations by the clarinets in F major. (Example 2.1 shows the first phrase.) Muted strings and harp accompany, joined here and there by woodwinds and horn. After a complete exposition of Beauty’s theme, the Beast responds (rehearsal 2) in the low, guttural tones of the contrabassoon, his motive first lurching through a descending triplet before leaping down from EH2 to EJ1, cello and bass whispering tremolos sur la touche. (Example 2.2 shows the Beast’s first phrase.) At R3, the conversation unfolds in counterpoint, chromatically altered statements of both themes giving way to compressed motivic outbursts rising higher and higher, indicative of escalating disagreement. (The dispute turns on the Beast’s proposal of marriage, to which Beauty responds, “Non, la Bête!”)5 When the diatonic version of Beauty’s theme returns (R4), its jaunty waltz character accommodates the jerky gait of the Beast’s theme, as if the two have reached a sort of rapprochement. But soon enough the pair resumes their argument (R5): chromaticism thickens, melodies shrink to motives, and repetition drives the music upward until it reaches a full stop. A harp glissando signifies the Beast’s transformation into “a prince more handsome than Amor,” and at R6, his theme appears in the high, ethereal register of a solo violin, rhythmically augmented in the first two measures and played using artificial harmonics (example 2.3). Beauty’s theme, by contrast, is nowhere to be found during the sublime moment of enchantment, reappearing thirteen measures after the harp glissando. The Beast’s musical transformation is less straightforward than it seems. His chromatic motive (EH–D-CG–C-B), accompanied by a French sixth chord voiced in whole tones (D–E–AH–BH) in the winds and strings, contrasts jarringly with Beauty’s sprightly, Lydian-inflected F major. By R4 the Beast’s theme, still played by the contrabassoon, seems at ease with Beauty’s F-major melody, conforming to the swaying waltz rhythms in strings and harp. For the Beast’s metamorphosis at R6, we might expect a corresponding thematic transformation, a new key, or perhaps a new melody altogether, and there are, indeed, small but meaningful changes 5. Ravel’s livret includes more detailed interactions between Beauty and the Beast than the Beaumont quotations in the score. See Ravel, Lettres, écrits, entretiens, ed. Orenstein, 383–84, and appendix B, “Ballet Arguments by Ravel,” in Ravel Reader, ed. and trans. Orenstein, 509.

52

Chapter 2

ex. 2.1 . Ravel, Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête, Beauty’s theme, mm. 2–8.

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to the Beast’s theme: solo cello replaces the grunting contrabassoon, playing très expressif in its dulcet register, the diminished octave leap (FJ to FG) smoothed with portamento (example 2.4). Yet apart from its rhythmic elongation, the prince’s melody matches the contours of the Beast’s theme closely, its registral shift functioning mostly as a physical adaptation: a beastly body produces a basso profundo, but a princely voice is surely that of a lyric tenor. In Disney’s 1991 animated film version of the fairy tale, an enchantress curses a selfish, haughty prince with a beastly appearance that he must bear until he learns to love and to be loved in return. Though Beauty’s actions in the film often emphasize her independence—she offers to take her father’s place in the Beast’s castle and rejects a rival suitor, Gaston—the Beast’s tale of transformation remains the central part of the story. (In fact, his journey to redemption would have been at home in a medieval mystery play.) Few such moral dilemmas faced Beaumont’s Beast, a

Emblems of Enchantment

53

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prince cursed for reasons unknown to him and never revealed to the reader. Beaumont portrays the Beast as kind, respectful, and forbearing throughout the tale, with the exception of one incident, when he threatens to kill Beauty’s father for stealing a flower from his garden. In a framing dialogue placed before and after the tale, none of the young female participants mention the Beast’s moral compunctions or his change of character; all agree they would submit to a congenial friendship with him, though not a marriage, one noting that her fear of being devoured would make her perpetually afraid. The theme of redemption only emerges when Beauty douses the sickly Beast with water from a nearby canal—a reference, perhaps, to baptismal cleansing.6 It seems that Ravel’s music adheres to Beaumont’s characterization of the Beast, reflecting changes to his outward appearance with instrumentation and expressive devices while suggesting a fixedness of character through melodic and rhythmic similarity. Ravel could have matched the Beast’s dramatic transformation in scale and theatricality, but he opted for quiet tendresse instead. This is not (or not only) because he preferred understatement to bombast, but also because of how he represented Beauty in the pivotal moment of transformation. Animal bridegroom tales, particularly when told by women, function as a sort of “female pilgrim’s progress,” according to Marina Warner, featuring a heroine who must confront and overcome the threat of the alien groom. In early versions of “Beauty and the Beast,” Beauty—like other plucky female protagonists of her time—resisted the agreement struck between her father and the animal groom. Later retellings of the tale circulated by male authors and publishers focused on the bride’s gradual acquiescence to the match. Beaumont’s version anticipated the Victorian expectations of women and wives, encouraging girls who “find the male spouse a beast, at first” to discover his innate goodness, hidden beneath his “uncivilized exterior.”7 Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film, inspired by Beaumont, extends the notion that the tale is transformational for Beauty as well as the Beast; she must reconcile herself with 6. Marina Warner points out how this moment of Christian cleansing comes from Mme. de Villeneuve’s version of the tale. See From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), 291. 7. Ibid., 294.

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the conventions of marriage by discovering that the Beast is tame, finally accepting him as partner and protector. Indeed, Warner suggests that the film presents “a trial of her limits, not his,” for “he does not have to change at all, except in outward shape; she has to see past his unsightliness to the gentle and loving human being trapped inside.”8 The Beaumont passages Ravel chose as epigraphs resonate with Beauty’s sense of discovery and subsequent change of heart: she finds that there are “many men more monstrous” than the Beast, eventually turning her emphatic refusal (“Non, la Bête!”) into a declaration of acceptance (“Vous vivrez pour devenir mon époux!”) When the Beast transforms and Beauty’s theme disappears, her high register remains, inhabited by a solo violin playing a slight variation of the Beast’s theme. This is the moment when Beauty accepts the Beast—the moment she starts singing his tune. The upward harp glissando directly preceding her song feels extratemporal, sweeping aside the metrical imperatives of the waltz rhythms that had propelled the piece. Fixed identities suddenly seem fluid: as the Beast sheds his animal skin, Beauty transforms into a prospective bride. If the glissando signals the end of his bewitchment, it also announces the start of her domestic life as wife and princess, enabled by her inward metamorphosis. In the conclusion of the piece (from R6 to the end), Ravel thus executes two illusions, one of which is largely concealed from us. First, he uses a harp glissando to represent metamorphosis without designating its referent. We associate the glissando with the Beast because we know he turns into a prince and, moreover, we recognize it as the gesture par excellence for representing transformation. But Ravel’s clues encourage us to think twice about identifying only the Beast’s metamorphosis with the glissando. Similarities between the beastly and princely music indicate how the Beast’s theme already reflects both his fixed inner self and his changing outward aspect. Indeed, one reason his music blends comfortably with Beauty’s F major waltz (R4) is because of the duality hidden within it—both awkward and dignified, kindly and brusque. The Beast’s metamorphosis is thus embedded in his theme, its double function, concealed by the growling timbre of the contrabassoon, present from its very first appearance, rendering the harp glissando superfluous. Beaumont’s tale further mitigates the dramatic impact of the Beast’s transformation by introducing tactics from the magician’s playbook. Once Beauty utters her devotion, she glimpses the castle behind him, where fireworks burst, music rings out, and the windows glimmer with light, as if to welcome guests to a party. As she turns away from the castle to look down at her feet, she realizes that the Beast has disappeared, a handsome prince having taken his place. Misdirected by special effects, she never saw the transformation itself.

8. Ibid., 295.

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The second of Ravel’s illusions involves the relationship between Beauty’s transformation and the Beast’s. Her own metamorphosis—an inward change of heart— is partly practical, Beauty quickly learning to appreciate and appease a spouse who could serve her up for dinner. Yet she also plays a key role in the Beast’s transformation. Often it is not enough, in stage magic or fairy tales, to wish that something is so. Words must be uttered to cast or lift a charm, translating the mute language of desire into an audible cue drifting on currents of air. When Beauty changes her mind, she declares it out loud, her words charged with incantatory power; only after her speech will the Beast regain his physical beauty.9 No musical counterpart exists for her verbal conjuring: just a grand pause once the last climactic outburst subsides, before the transformative harp glissando. But somewhere in that pause, Beauty speaks, and her voice primes the enchanted harp to sound. HA R P I N E S S

It is both accurate and trite to observe that Ravel possessed great skill as an orchestrator. At times, scholars have turned the claim into a critique, typified by Roger Nichols’s view of L’Heure espagnole: “Brilliant though his orchestration is, there is some truth in the oft-repeated comment that the clocks are more human than the humans. In the theatre, it is often hard to disguise a calculating coldness at the heart of the opera or to resist the charge, so unjustly levelled at many of his other works, that here Ravel was a little too clever for his own good.”10 Many of Ravel’s scores, especially those written before the Great War, answer the charge of excessive orchestral cleverness (often leveled by contemporaneous critics) with deflecting, prismatic surfaces—the sort linked to enchantment and illusion in his music. But Ravel’s choice in Les Entretiens to signify transformation with a harp glissando and artificial violin harmonics is worth examining more closely because it rests on established tropes and clichés. The next few sections of this chapter survey a handful of effects—harmonics, glissandos, string tremolos, and strings 9. On the transformative power of language in the fairy tale, see Maria Tatar, “Why Fairy Tales Matter: The Performative and the Transformative,” Western Folklore 69 (Winter 2010): 55–64. 10. Roger Nichols, L’Heure espagnole in Grove Music Online, https://doi.org/10.1093/ gmo/9781561592630.article.O002204 (accessed February 11, 2020). Paul Henry Lang offered a belittling assessment in the same vein, claiming that Ravel “in his later years became a mere orchestrator handling his many-headed orchestra with supreme skill but without much spiritual conviction,” ending his career by “orchestrating other composers’ works (Mussorgsky) or writing stunts appropriate for the modern cinema orchestra (Bolero).” Though Lang’s comment comes from a survey text—a venue demanding blunt generalizations—it should be said that Ravel orchestrated the work of other composers throughout his career. How one might identify a piece orchestrated with spiritual conviction remains an open question. See Lang, Music in Western Civilization (1941), foreword by Leon Botstein (New York: Norton, 1997), 996.

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bowed sur la touche—to show what they had meant in nineteenth-century orchestral music, how they coalesced in Ravel’s compositional lexicon, and how they compared with the orchestrational devices used by Ravel’s contemporaries in their own magical works. The harp, given its wide range of dramatic and cultural associations, is the inevitable starting point. The highly selective survey that follows provides a sense of what this instrument signified to composers and listeners in the mid-to-late nineteenth century—the time when it became synonymous with enchantment. The harp had many long-established historical and poetic associations. It evoked antiquity, Ossianic poetry, and Irish or Scottish themes for FrançoisAuguste Gevaert, who published his Nouveau Traité d’instrumentation in 1885. In Rimsky-Korsakov’s music, the instrument suggested exotic colors and locales, its silvery glimmer amplifying the augmented seconds in Antar and Le Coq d’or (“Hymn to the Sun”), the Spanish tinctures in Capriccio (especially the fourth movement), and the pervasive arpeggios of Scheherazade. French opera composers used it similarly: consider Delibes’s Lakmé (“Blanche Dourga”), Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila (Bacchanale), Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de perles (“Au fond du temple saint”), and Massenet’s Le Roi de Lahore (“Ferme les yeux, ô belle maîtresse”).11 Berlioz found the harp well-suited to supernatural effects and religious rites. Meyerbeer agreed, featuring the instrument in Le Prophète near the end of act 3 (when Jean is declared to be a prophet akin to David, the warrior harpist), and just before the act 5 finale of Les Huguenots, eight harps accompanying Marcel’s celestial vision. It was a near-ubiquitous presence in nineteenth-century ballroom orchestras, as Berlioz’s “Un bal” in Symphonie fantastique attests. In ballet, the harp often introduced a dancer: think of the solo arpeggiations preceding the Rose Adagio in Sleeping Beauty and the “Waltz of the Flowers” in The Nutcracker.12 Outside of France, the instrument’s correlation with bardic poetry emerged in symphonic works by Smetana (Vyšehrad in Má vlast), Sibelius (Barden), and Niels Gade (Echoes of Ossian). Glinka, and later Rimsky-Korsakov, combined piano and 11. Jann Pasler mentions the use of harp and flute—a combination with biblical counterparts, suggesting the cithara and aulos—to evoke India in Lakmé, Le Roi de Lahore, and Les Pêcheurs des perles. Thomas Cooper also considers the harp an exotic marker in nineteenth-century French opera. See Cooper, “Nineteenth-Century Spectacle,” in French Music since Berlioz, ed. Richard Langham Smith and Caroline Potter (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006), 34; Pasler, “Race, Orientalism, and Distinction in the Wake of the ‘Yellow Peril,’ ” in Western Music and its Others, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 88. 12. Roslyn Rensch describes the use of harps in ballet and opera orchestras throughout the nineteenth century in Harps and Harpists, revised ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 173– 77. Remarks on the increased presence of the harp in opera and ballet can be found in Hans Joachim Zingel, Harp Music in the Nineteenth Century, trans. and ed. Mark Palkovic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 53–54.

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harp to imitate the gusli—the favored accompanimental instrument of the wandering poet-minstrels who performed in Russian courts. The harp’s capacity to manipulate perceptions of spatial and temporal distance made it especially appropriate for music with transportive or transformational implications. John Daverio notes how the instrument signaled the threshold between spiritual and mortal spheres, accompanying a procession of ancestral ghosts visiting the title character of Gade’s Comala, “as if to highlight the fact that the spirits emanate from an extratemporal realm.”13 A harp cadenza introduces act 1, scene 2 in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, which takes place near the fountain where Lucia claims to have seen the ghost of an ancestress who was murdered there. In Richard Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung, a single harp near the beginning of the piece suggests the metaphysical threshold at which the dying man is poised, while a pair of harps near the end of the piece points toward his empyreal transformation.14 These examples from Meyerbeer, Gade, Donizetti, and Strauss might seem hackneyed to us now, bringing to mind throngs of beatific angels strumming golden harps from their perch in the clouds. But for each composer, the harp did more than signify divine presence. For Gade, it aided the communion of living and dead souls; for Meyerbeer, it fused Marcel’s vision of heaven with a besieged mortal space, as Catholic zealots enter the church where Raoul and Valentine have just wed. Donizetti’s harp implies a ghostly presence, while also hinting at Lucia’s psychological instability and fixation on the otherworldly; the librettist Salvatore Cammano noted how, just before the mad scene, her deathly pallor renders her “more like a ghost than a living creature.”15 Strauss’s solo harp is like an aural vessel for the dying man’s soul, gliding on the waters leading him from mortality to heaven’s shore. Two similar treatments of the harp may be found in nineteenth-century ballet, appearing at moments of metaphysical contact. Adolphe Adam’s Giselle features harps only in the second act, when the Wilis—the spirits of jilted fiancées— materialize to torment Hilarion and Albrecht, mortals compelled by magic to dance themselves to death. In Swan Lake, rippling harp arpeggios unveil a magical portal of moonlit waters, where Siegfried witnesses Odette’s nightly transformation into a swan.

13. John Daverio, “Schumann’s Ossianic Manner,” 19th-Century Music 21 (Spring 1998): 259. On similar themes in German Romantic repertoire, see Daniel Beller-McKenna, “Distance and Disembodiment: Harps, Horns, and the Requiem Idea in Schumann and Brahms,” Journal of Musicology 22 (Winter 2005): 47–89. 14. At Strauss’s request, the poet Alexander Ritter furnished the program for the piece after it was composed. 15. “Lucia entra . . . coperto di uno squallore di morte, la rende simile ad uno spettro, anziché ad una creatura vivente.” The chorus of wedding guests remarks that Lucia looks as if she has “risen from the grave” (dalla tomba uscita).

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Perhaps one of the best-known uses of the instrument occurs at the end of Das Rheingold, when six harps aurally evoke the Rainbow Bridge that joins the gods’ mountaintop to Valhalla, their web of arpeggiations so dense that it sounds unreal, as if one harp has been sonically refracted into many. Beneath this glittering surface, the cellos uncoil a transformation of the Nature theme from the opening of Rheingold, associating the bridge with the mythic cosmology of the Rhine maidens. The return of Freia, purveyor of anti-aging apples, restores the gods to their former vigor, symbolically consolidated as they cross the bridge. Their passage to Valhalla is not only physical and spatial but temporal and metaphysical, characterized by renewal and timelessness: fallen warriors will resume their lives (and their fighting), and the gods will reign in perpetual youth. To inhabit a mythic or “timeless” realm does not exempt one from causality— not a Norse god, at any rate, who will continue to experience the same desires and squabbles that inevitably lead to catastrophe. The six harps conjured by the Rainbow Bridge (or perhaps the other way around) demarcate a temporal threshold— that of mythic time. But neither the harps nor Valhalla free the gods from temporal succession. The cosmic cataclysm of Ragnarök, the “twilight of the gods,” unfolds through a chronological sequence of incidents that moves from destruction to renewal, combining cyclic and linear models of time. At the conclusion of Rheingold, a seventh harp played offstage (starting in m. 3858) further strengthens the link between harps and temporal passage, accompanying the Rhine maidens as they aim a parting shot at the “false and cowardly” gods crossing the bridge above them. This harp, whose placement offstage suggests receding distance, functions as an unwelcome temporal incursion, raining woe on the gods’ prismatic parade by alluding to the (past) curse that will cause their (future) destruction.16 To review, the harp evokes antiquity, the supernatural, exoticism, religious rites, biblical themes, transformation, temporal passage, magic, and Ossian—in other words, virtually every Romantic preoccupation a budding or experienced nineteenth-century composer might wish to explore. This gross latitude of topics is somewhat mitigated by the harp’s specific link to unreality: for example, the instrument is entirely absent from the first act of Giselle, which takes place in a peasant village, but plays a prominent role in the second act, set near a graveyard inhabited by spirits roaming the mortal realm. The use of the harp to rend a temporal curtain or otherwise manipulate spatial-temporal thresholds is also important. In Rheingold, the Rainbow Bridge is both a supernatural effect and an emblem of transformation: as the gods cross it, they seal an arrangement that exchanges historical for mythic time and aging for endless youth. Examining where the harp isn’t—where it 16. A similar offstage harp effect occurs twice in the third act of Götterdammerung, during the Rhine maidens’ expressive vocalizing. Again, it is associated with warning and foretelling of the future, as when the Rhine maidens proclaim, “We know of the evil that awaits you.”

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might have been used, but wasn’t—helps to clarify the search; so, too, does a focus on convergences, when the harp alludes to multiple topics at once. R AV E L’ S HA R P S A N D T H E R OM A N T I C HA R P G L I S S A N D O

By the middle of Ravel’s career, the harp glissando was already considered a cliché. In 1914, the musicologist Cecil Forsyth, himself a composer, conceded that the device had its place in orchestral writing, but also complained that overuse of this “mechanical sweeping sound at every orchestral crisis becomes tiresome in the extreme.”17 When Berlioz published his orchestration treatise in 1844, harp glissandos were rather scarce. The virtuoso harpist Elias Parish Alvars used them in his solo compositions, but Berlioz tried only once, in the fragment Sardanapale.18 Gevaert, whose influential orchestration texts were admired by Tchaikovsky, Riemann, and Rimsky-Korsakov, doesn’t mention the harp en glissant in his Traité général d’instrumentation (1863), and his 1885 treatise reprints just one musical example of it—the conclusion of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1.19 But by 1914, the harp glissando had become a familiar gesture, and familiarity had bred what it so often breeds. Given Ravel’s inventive treatment of orchestral timbre, we might wonder why he used the harp en glissant so frequently at key moments, considering his contemporaries’ disdain for it. Part of the reason, I suspect, had to do with Rimsky-Korsakov, Ravel’s orchestrational lodestar. In his orchestration treatise, Rimsky describes “artificial effects,” or techniques “based on certain defects of hearing and faculty of perception,” of which one was the harp glissando, whose notes may diverge from the predominant orchestral harmony.20 He notes that a long glissando, “more resonant and brilliant,” is better at achieving the desired effect than a short one, enabling listeners to perceive a gestural sweep despite its dissonant pitches. We might wonder why Rimsky didn’t apply the same thinking to the violin portamento, or to other instruments 17. Cecil Forsyth, Orchestration, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1935), 468. Walter Piston and Gardner Read would express similar opinions. Read claimed that “to the average orchestrator the harp unfortunately means but one thing—glissando, and more glissando!” See Piston, Orchestration (New York: Norton, 1955), 328; Read, Thesaurus of Orchestral Devices (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1969), 250. 18. Hugh Macdonald, trans. and ed., Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise: A Translation and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 79. 19. François-Auguste Gevaert, Traité général d’instrumentation (Paris: Lemoine & Fils, 1863); Nouveau Traité d’instrumentation (Paris: Lemoine & Fils, 1885), 85. Tchaikovsky produced a Russian translation of the 1885 treatise; Riemann translated the second edition into German. See Paul Matthews, ed., Orchestration: An Anthology of Writings (New York: Routledge, 2006), 46. 20. Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Principles of Orchestration, trans. Edward Agate, ed. Maximilian Steinberg (Paris: Éditions russe de musique, 1922), 116.

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that play glissando-like gestures. From a perceptual point of view, it matters little whether a slide is played on an instrument capable of blurring the distinction between pitches (violin, voice) or not (harp, piano): either way, we hear virtually the same effect. A scale played rapidly enough could pass for a glissando and might as well be called one. But I think to Rimsky, a harp glissando seemed “artificial” (or illusory) because it generated an impression of blurred pitches characteristic of the portamento. For such an effect to work, the glissando must be played at a moderately quick tempo; otherwise, the gesture’s discrete pitches will be heard as component parts of scales or arpeggios. To illustrate the distinction, think of the opening measures of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune: the tempo in some performances is slow enough that the harp glissandos lack cohesion, sounding more like delicate arpeggiations.21 But performed at a suitable tempo, Debussy’s harp glissés resemble unbroken waves, notwithstanding the gaps between the half-diminished seventh chords they trace. Perhaps we perceive their flowing continuity for the same reason we construct a sense of motion from discrete musical events: if glissando pitches are arranged in close temporal proximity, we experience them as a motional, composite whole. The illusory qualities of the harp en glissant may thus belong to the larger categorical problem of musical motion, epitomized by the motional stasis of pieces like Poulenc’s Trois mouvements perpétuels and the fourth tableau of Stravinsky’s Petrushka. Yet another reason Rimsky might have considered the harp glissando an “artificial” effect involves the instrument’s acoustic resonance. The vibrant web of overtones created by harp glissés is nearly unmatched by any other orchestral instrument; resonating partials fill the gaps in enharmonic glissandos to reinforce their gestural integrity. The glissando’s ringing overtones seem disembodied, set in motion not by the harpist’s fingers but the instrument’s strings: conjuring without a human agent. Rimsky and Ravel would have recognized the sensual potency of such a sound, even if they knew little of the perceptual mechanisms activated by it. Outside of a theatrical context, the most obvious place to look for the harp glissando in Ravel’s music is the Introduction et Allegro (composed in 1905, premiered in 1907), scored for flute and clarinet, string quartet, and one harp. Although the piece has no explicit mise-en-scène, Michael Puri has read it as a scene of reanimation, the Introduction’s nocturnal qualities yielding to the Allegro’s aubade—a dawn that heralds renewal while pointing toward the inevitable dusk.22 The harp glissando plays a distinct affective and structural role in the piece, whether or not we 21. The trill threshold, or the point at which two alternating tones will blur together, is about ten notes per second. For more on the trill threshold and similar rhythmic and metric phenomena, see Justin London, Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. the first and second chapters. 22. Puri, Ravel the Decadent, 54–58.

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interpret it in a dramatic context. Four ideas occur in the short, twenty-five measure Introduction: a serpentine theme with chromatic motion, given first to the winds; a scalar theme characterized by triplet motion, played first by the strings; a harp flourish comprising arpeggiated diminished seventh chords; and a songlike melody in the cello. (The three initial ideas appear in example 2.5.) The first harp glissando, marked ad libitum, comes two measures before the tempo change to moins lent (R1); once it fades, the wistful character of the opening twelve measures gives way to fluid, fluttering activity, arpeggios scurrying in the violins and doublenote staccato tremolos skittering in the woodwinds, wrapping the cello melody in ripples of sound. In the Allegro (R2), solo harp unveils the first theme, which turns out to be the scalar triplet idea initially played by the strings in the introduction. At R6, a meandering second theme arrives in the woodwinds, quickly assuming a truncated, inert form of itself that passes back and forth from flute to viola and from clarinet to harp. An abridged development section begins at R8 with a mechanized, circular version of the serpentine theme in the first violin and viola, joined by plucked accompaniment in the cello and second violin that rhythmically interlocks like cogs. More developmental twists ensue, including passages of dense octatonicism precipitating a plunging whirligig set ablaze by a harp glissé (R17) and ending with a harp cadenza. In the recapitulation, the harp functions much as it did in the exposition, the piece building in tempo and density to its dazzling conclusion, predictably capped with a glissé. No piece for solo harp would be worth its salt if it failed to include glissandos and harmonics. In his Méthode complète pour la harpe (1844), Théodore Labarre put his charges through their paces with scales, arpeggios, chords, octaves, thirds, and sixths, as well as exercises for glissés, artificial harmonics, and synonyms (enharmonic pitches).23 The harp virtuoso Carlos Salzedo, a contemporary of Ravel’s, started publishing a number of solo and chamber works in the years after Introduction et Allegro, many of them awash in glissandos and other feats of dexterity.24 Ravel’s harp glissés are less significant for their presence than their placement, occurring at structural junctures or affective shifts, as with the glissando just before the moins lent in the Introduction, or the pair of glissés near R11 signaling the change from EH minor to octatonic. In these instances, Ravel turns the compelling, illusory motion of the harp glissando into a form of conveyance. Even the gesture the harpist uses to create it—that “sweeping” motion Forsyth found so irksome— is like a conjuration, drawing from the instrument a sonic counterpart of the harpist’s beckoning fingers. 23. Théodore Labarre, Méthode complète pour la harpe (Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1880). 24. For a list of works, see Dewey Owens, Carlos Salzedo, from Aeolian to Thunder: A Biography (Chicago: Lyon & Healy Harps, 1992).

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ex. 2.5 . Ravel, Introduction et Allegro, mm. 1–4. Très lent q = 40

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But in the development section, the harp glissando serves a misdirectional function, its links to transportive and transformational states used to subvert our expectations. From R8 to R11, mechanical ostinatos and circular fragments propel the music in apparently endless cycles. If the two glissandos before R11 promise to liberate this music from the machine, a new form of bewitchment instead

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emerges—an octatonic harp solo that banishes the melancholy but benign EH minor.25 (Example 2.6 shows alternating fragments in the measures preceding the octatonic intrusion.) Before the solo concludes near R12, another glissando promises deliverance, but again, Ravel denies it. Following a return of the meandering, mechanical music at R12 (odd that it could have both qualities at once), an incursion of octatonic harmonies starts to fuel the machine, propelling it forward and upward with electric energy, the sort of tactic Ravel would use again in Boléro. (The harp glissando’s proximity to string harmonics is worth exploring, as we shall see below.) Let’s return to the moment of transformation in Ravel’s Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête, which launched our lightning tour of the orchestral harp glissé. In addition to the glissando’s illusory effects, Ravel would also have known its specific interpretive associations—or, put differently, its capacity to function as cliché. Derided through much of the twentieth century by writers like George Orwell and Theodor Adorno, the cliché has more recently been acknowledged for its expressive and creative potential. The word’s etymology, derived from the clicking sound of the stereotype in a printing press, speaks volumes about the cliché’s pejorative critical history, linked to the apparent loss of creativity caused by mechanical reproduction.26 But the cliché’s automaticity is an asset, as Ruth Amossy argues: in literature, clichés provoke “an impression of déjà-vu,” making them easily assimilated by readers and providing a “passage through the discourse towards the ‘referent.’ ”27 Passively registered clichés—those that escape our notice—support representational illusion, conveying through shorthand a sense of verisimilitude that harmonizes with our view of reality. Blatantly obvious clichés function intertextually and may even be perceived as quotations. The interpretive processes activated by both types may thus bypass active critical attention, turning clichés into stealth carriers of meaning.28 Consider, for example, the pairing of glissandos with specific physical movements, commonly found in opera and programmatic symphonic movement: Mélisande’s ring dropping into a well, the swirling winds in the Inferno of Liszt’s Dante symphony, Don Quixote falling from his horse, Ulysses shooting an arrow through the rings in Fauré’s Pénélope. At the end of Parsifal’s act 2, a harp glissé sonically mimics the arc of Klingsor’s spear flying through the air, an “oddly 25. On the role of octatonicism in Introduction et Allegro, see Steven Baur, “Ravel’s ‘Russian’ Period: Octatonicism in His Early Works, 1893–1908,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52 (Autumn 1999): 556–63. 26. Tom Grimwood, “The Meaning of Clichés,” Diacritics 44, no. 4 (2016): 91–92. 27. Ruth Amossy, “How to Do Things with Doxa: Toward an Analysis of Argumentation in Discourse,” Poetics Today 23 (Fall 2002): 481; Amossy, “The Cliché in the Reading Process,” trans. Terese Lyons, SubStance 11, no. 2 (1982): 37. 28. Amossy, “Cliché,” 36–38.

ex. 2.6 . Ravel, Introduction et Allegro, mechanistic fragments accompanied by harp glissandos, R10/3–10.

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conventional musical gesture,” James Treadwell observes.29 But for much of the nineteenth century, the privileged position traditionally accorded to immateriality and abstraction, particularly in Wagner’s music, cast a pall over purposeful coordinations of music and gesture, interwoven through opera, ballet, pantomime, and melodrama. Mary Ann Smart notes that while the latter half of the century saw a change in aesthetic focus from the performers’ physical presence to their “aura,” the legacy of musical mimesis lingered on.30 And no wonder: sonic clichés could pack decades of accumulated semantic meaning into a moment, apparently sidestepping cognition to appeal directly to the senses. Not even Wagner could resist their allure. Nor could Ravel, for whom harp glissandos sometimes fulfilled this purely mimetic function. In L’Heure espagnole, Concepcion urges Gonzalve to hide in a clock so that Ramiro can move it (and unwittingly, Gonzalve) upstairs to her bedroom. Ramiro hoists the clock and, in a display of masculine bravado, shifts it from one shoulder to the other with “prodigious ease,” his movements accompanied by sweeping glissandos in the strings and harps. Daphnis et Chloé, a score chockablock with harp glissandos, features one in Daphnis’s “Danse légère et gracieuse”—part of a rising figure paired with Nijinsky’s skyward leap. In Les Entretiens, the glissando signaling the Beast’s metamorphosis may have mirrored a specific physical movement, the dancer perhaps twisting or dropping to the earth. The genealogy of this musical gesture, functioning as an enchantment or a simulacrum of motion, may be traced to late nineteenth-century works featuring magic and metamorphosis, especially prevalent in Russian opera and ballet. In Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty (1890), the Lilac Fairy’s lilting theme recalls a barcarolle, accompanied by arpeggios and strummed chords in the harp. After Carabosse and her toadies disrupt Princess Aurora’s christening, the Lilac Fairy emerges from her hiding place to the sound of glissandos drifting upward, like halos of soft light emanating from a flame, signifying her benevolent power over Carabosse’s curse. (In the ballet’s final act, which celebrates Aurora’s marriage to Prince Désiré, the harp disappears, the fairy’s enchantments no longer being needed.31) A harp glissé mimes a swirling gust of wind in the “Waltz of the Snowflakes” in Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker (1892). Chausson’s symphonic poem Viviane, composed in 1882 and revised in 1887–88, portrays the Arthurian tale of Merlin’s tryst with the titular enchantress. In the “Scène de l’enchantement,” the last section of the piece 29. James Treadwell, Interpreting Wagner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 239. 30. Mary Ann Smart, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 5. 31. Thérèse Hurley suggests that this “supernatural instrument” is replaced in the last act by the piano, an “earthly sound” which pairs nicely with the Silver Fairy—who, according to Marius Petipa, the work’s first choreographer, should evoke the clinking of coins. See Hurley, “Tchaikovsky’s Ballet Music,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ballet, ed. Marion Kent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 168.

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described in Chausson’s programmatic text, Viviane casts a sleeping spell, encircling Merlin with flowering hawthorns to prevent him from leaving her. As the piece whirls to its conclusion, she unleashes a spell to the sound of sweeping harp glissandos—an aural reflection of the hand gestures she would have used to conjure hawthorns from the earth. In Rimsky’s opera Sadko, started in 1894, whole tone glissés mark the first appearance of the Sea King’s supernatural domain, and glissandos accompany Sadko’s first glimpses of the Sea Princess as she and her retinue transform from swans to humans. The pairing of harp glissandos with movement and metamorphosis lingered beyond the nineteenth century, and not just in Ravel’s music. Kashchey conjures a spell to protect his castle from intruders in Rimsky’s Kashchey the Deathless (1902), prompting the disembodied gusli to sound and a snowstorm to begin. Diminished seventh harp glissandos play for seventy-two continuous measures, simultaneously evoking the gusli, Kaschey’s bewitchments, and the whirling snow (a probable reference to Tchaikovky’s “Waltz of the Snowflakes”) that transforms the landscape to an Arctic tundra. In Pénélope (1913), two glissandos appear in the climactic archery contest, the first accompanying the flight of Ulysses’s winning arrow through the rings, the second tracing the shot that slays Eurymaque.32 Both glissandos presage Ulysses’s perceived transformation from beggar to king (though note how Ulysses himself does not change). The flute-playing magician in Petrushka (1911) brings his three puppets to life by tapping them with his instrument, a pair of staccato figures, piped by the orchestral flute and piccolo, for each puppet. But just before these animating musical gestures, a whole-tone glissando in both harps tips us off that a transformation is about to take place. In Miklós Rózsa’s score for the Hitchcock film Spellbound (1945), harp glissandos introduce a visual reconstruction of the Dali dream sequence—an early linkage of harps with dream states in modern media.33 The examples discussed above suggest how the harp glissando functions as a transformative and transportive device, replicating in sound both the harpist’s own gestures and often, in theatrical works, the movements of characters and objects. By the twentieth century, these sonic clichés were charged with intertextual and semantic significance; indeed, some operated at the level of quotation. The transformations of Beauty and the Beast in Les Entretiens show how Ravel’s harp glissandos functioned in multiple contexts, their meaning fueled by passive and active clichés. His fascination with the harp en glissant emerged because of its 32. My thanks to Carlo Caballero for supplying a few much-needed scans of the orchestral score and for discussing the Pénélope example with me. 33. In the film Spellbound, Gregory Peck plays Dr. Anthony Edwardes, who comes to believe he is an imposter who has killed the real Dr. Edwardes and has taken his place. The dream sequence, designed by Dali and edited by art director William Menzies, features odd and surrealist symbols that supposedly provide the key to the imposter’s amnesia and childhood trauma.

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deep roots in nineteenth-century repertoire, not despite them—and some of the earliest uses of the Romantic harp glissando were also among the most novel, as a final example will illustrate. In Rimsky’s opera Snegurochka (The Snow Maiden, 1882), the title character— daughter of Spring and Frost—wants to experience life with the humans in a nearby village. She has, by nature, a cold heart, and finds her expressions of desire unrequited. After pleading with her mother, she receives the ability to love and uses it to return the affections of a suitor she had previously rebuffed. Yet as she declares her love, dawn strikes, and under the sun’s bright rays, she melts. No flamboyant musical gesture mimes her disappearance. Instead, she evaporates as a chorus of onlookers comments in parlando style. Only after the chorus has had its say—concluding with “Snegurochka is no more!”—does the delinquent harp glissando arrive, sweeping down and up, from forte to pianissimo, its last gesture starting at pppp. A lack of established conventions for the orchestral glissando might account for its late appearance: the opera was written nearly a decade before similar theatrical treatments of the harp en glissant. But perhaps the glissando is delayed because Snow Maiden’s disappearance is so strange, so wondrous (the chorus tells us) that it must be experienced twice: first we see it, then we hear it, the harp performing a gesture of transformation that fades to a barely perceptible volume—an acoustic expression of dissolution. If the glissando lacks the immediacy that usually defines transformational moments, simulating Snow Maiden’s disappearance after the fact, it nevertheless serves a transportive function, conveying us to the recent past—the moment in which we watched Snow Maiden disappear. By imbuing the glissando with a sense of retrospection, Rimsky achieves something rare, letting us hear a corporeal transformation enacted postmortem—an effect both marvelous and eerie. Ravel may have heard Snow Maiden when it was performed in French at the Opéra-Comique in 1908, where it was warmly received by many critics, including Arthur Pougin, who concluded that “the visual spectacle is more than rivaled by the aural spectacle.”34 Rimsky’s other music played a formative role in Ravel’s musical education: he heard the piano concerto, Capriccio espagnol, and Antar at the 1889 Paris Exhibition, and knew other Russian works by Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Borodin (Polovtsian Dances), and Mussorgsky (Night on Bald Mountain), the latter two having been orchestrated by Rimsky.35 Whether he heard Snow Maiden or not, he kept his ear attuned to novelties like the post-mortem glissando, adapting them for his own use.

34. Arthur Pougin, “Semaine théâtrale,” Le Ménestrel, May 30, 1908, 172. 35. See details of the programs in Charles Darcours’s reviews: “Notes de musique,” Le Figaro, July 3, 1889, 6, and “Notes de musique,” Le Figaro, June 26, 1889, 6.

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Before the harp became a regular fixture in the orchestra around 1850, composers had other ways of evoking transformation and the supernatural. Handel favored enchanted keys, like E major, and featured plentiful octave leaps in the vocal and instrumental parts of his magic operas; Haydn used a free-fantasy style for charmed moments in Orfeo and Armida.36 In the eighteenth century, scenes of magical transformation often involved a change of mode, and certain instruments, like the flute and recorder, were associated with enchanted sleep—a tactic probably developed by Lully.37 Nineteenth-century Russian composers linked supernaturalism to specific modes or keys, particularly whole tone and octatonic.38 Ravel occasionally used a change of mode for transformational moments, but more often he relied on orchestral effects and temporal shifts to do the job. Harmonics, glissandos, string tremolos (more likely fingered than bowed), and sur la touche bowing figured frequently in his musical illusions, often joined by the harp en glissant. Ravel endowed these conventional gestures with distinctive functions: techniques that might be termed “special effects” thus became effects specially honed for the conjurer’s practice. If the harp glissando is like a flick of the magician’s wand—a precise coup de pinceau—the tremolo behaves like patter, a subtle but pervasive presence. Patter seems to expand time and space, letting the conjurer use stolen moments to stash things in hidden niches and execute secret actions. String tremolos similarly bathe the music in a kind of vaporous ambiance that creates an illusion of temporal suspension. Imagine the main theme of Swan Lake accompanied by sustained string chords instead of tremolos. The water would still ripple under the moonlight (an effect of the harp arpeggiations), but the quivering and shuddering of bird wings would be lost, along with the impression that the lake itself exists, temporally and physically, outside the realm of everyday human experience. At times, the flickering musical surface created by string tremolos can have a mesmerizing effect, allowing covert musical actions to unfold without the listener’s notice. Ravel’s tremolos, like the harp glissando, derive their illusory power and contextual significance from Romantic operas, ballets, and orchestral works. Often, they pair with harmonics—usually in the strings and harp—which are themselves a kind of musical magic: as Carlo Caballero suggests, they “are ‘Geister’ [spirits] in relation

36. David J. Buch, Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests: The Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Musical Theater (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 159–66, 184. 37. Ibid., 37, 193, 203–4. 38. See Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 267, 275. Simon Morrison, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 161, notes that octatonicism in Rimsky’s music “is aligned with malicious forces, the preternatural, and the exotic.”

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to their ‘Grundton’ [fundamental].”39 As I briefly survey the use of tremolos and harmonics in nineteenth-century music, keep in mind that Ravel would have heard or even studied all of the examples below. String tremolos have been around as long as opera and, as Gevaert and Berlioz claim, have been most effective when evoking solemnity, agitation, trouble, and terror. Within and outside dramatic contexts, tremolos played at a low volume, whether bowed or fingered, also suggest mystery and circumspection. In the upper registers of the violin, they create a “glittering sensation” (for Gevaert) and an “angelic and ethereal” effect (for Berlioz).40 Forsyth notes that bowed and fingered tremolos, rarely used side by side, appear in succession in act 1 of Die Walküre, producing “different mental effects,” which we might examine more closely.41 As the first act opens, Siegmund, fleeing enemies and a violent storm, stumbles across Hunding’s lodging in the forest. After relating his tale of woe to Hunding and Sieglinde, he finds himself alone, cinders crackling in the nearby hearth. He cries out for his father (“Wälse! Wälse!”) and asks for the sword he was promised. Bowed tremolos punctuate both of these moments—fortissimo for the cries, piano for the query. The smoldering embers of the fire disintegrate, casting a glowing light on the trunk of the ash tree to reveal the hilt of a sword. As the light appears, Wagner swaps the single-note bowed tremolos for fingered tremolos in the violins, played in thirds, softening from forte to piano. The tremolos persist as Siegmund questions the source of the blinding light and wonders what sort of object it illuminates. As his attention turns back to the piercing gaze of Sieglinde, the bowed tremolos return in the violins, first piano, then pianissimo. Thus compressed in Siegmund’s monologue are three expressive uses for the tremolo: drama (Siegmund’s cries to his father), mystery (Sieglinde’s gaze and the nature of light), and the supernatural (the hilt of Nothung). In Debussy’s music, the tremolo often conjures nothing beyond the style that is uniquely Debussy’s. Tremolos ripple throughout La Mer, quiver beneath the flute solo in Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, shimmer sympathetically with the female voices in Sirènes, bounce along in Jeux. They belong to no specific milieu, neutralizing some of the topics and clichés that held sway in Romantic orchestral music. By the fin de siècle, this was also true of other effects once considered unusual or discretionary. Forsyth claims in 1914 that playing sur la touche is, “as a rule, left to the judgment of the conductor,” and for much of the nineteenth century, it was.42 Yet Debussy started adding this indication to his scores in the 1890s (it appears in 39. Carlo Caballero, “Silence, Echo: A Response to ‘What the Sorcerer Said,’ ” 19th-Century Music 28 (Fall 2004): 166. 40. Gevaert, Nouveau Traité, 31. 41. Forsyth, Orchestration, 362. 42. Ibid., 337. Forsyth’s commentary on sur la touche effects again points up the persistent lag between orchestral practices and their codification.

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Faune, among other pieces), and Mahler noted am Griffbrett in the string parts of most of his symphonies, beginning with the first (1889). The use of harmonics underwent a similar transformation. Ernest Guiraud, who taught composition at the Conservatoire, claimed in a treatise he published shortly before his death in 1892 that violin harmonics “are rarely used in the orchestra,” requiring composers to possess an extensive knowledge of instrumentation.43 The 1933 revision of the same treatise, by Henri Busser, shows how commonplace such effects had become, offering no cautionary warning to the novice and pointing out how violin harmonics produce a “delightful timbre” with an “aerial, lunar” sound. Orchestration treatises, as a rule, are famously behind the times, dispensing advice from long-established composers and teachers who rely on musical examples often decades old. (Berlioz’s and Rimsky-Korsakov’s treatises are notable exceptions, both positing technical possibilities the composers themselves never realized.)44 But treatises are nonetheless useful for distinguishing between conventional and novel practices: they show, for example, how string harmonics, which populated solo literature in the nineteenth century, were far less common in orchestral music. When harmonics did appear in these contexts, it was usually to characterize the supernatural, or the féerique, as it was called in French treatises. Berlioz, Gevaert, and Forsyth, who span seventy years of orchestrational advicegiving, all point out the crystalline, flute-like timbre of violin harmonics, Gevaert and Forsyth perhaps following Berlioz’s descriptive lead. In France, the nineteenth-century archetype for féerique effects was the Queen Mab scherzo from Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette (1839). The scherzo begins with a flurry of buzzing, hyperkinetic activity, leading to a violin trill marked pppp that conjures an expectant moment—the fairy equivalent of a fanfare, annunciatory but virtually imperceptible. From the trill emerge hushed violin harmonics, producing what Francesca Brittan calls a “scratchy shimmer” that musically enacts the figure of Mab herself.45 The use of pervasive string and harp harmonics was sufficiently novel that Berlioz needed no additional effects, like sur la touche bowing. (In fact, he used this indication just once, in Le Jeune Pâtre breton.46) Berlioz’s recherché timbres brought out the descriptive eloquence of music critics, who zealously catalogued the scherzo’s various effects.47 But by the end of the century, novelty had started to lose its novelty: harmonics, once the sonic emblems of fairies, enchanted objects, and celestial beings, acquired a coloristic function, much like Debussy’s all-purpose tremolo. They could still fulfill gestural or dramatic 43. Ernest Guiraud, Traité pratique d’instrumentation (Paris: Durand, 1892), 6. 44. On this point in Berlioz’s music, see Macdonald, Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, xv. 45. Francesca Brittan, “On Microscopic Hearing: Fairy Magic, Natural Science, and the Scherzo fantastique,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64 (Fall 2011): 552. 46. Macdonald, Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, 20. 47. Brittan, “Microscopic Hearing,” 548.

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roles, like the string glissandos in Rimsky’s Christmas Eve, acoustically simulating Vakula’s flight to St. Petersburg as he clings to the devil’s back. But they might also be simply suggestive, creating an exotic or mysterious ambience, as do the violin and viola harmonics in the second movement of Rimsky’s Scheherazade—a trend that gathered strength over the course of the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century glissandos, tremolos, harmonics, and sur la touche bowing all contributed to the development of Ravel’s emblems of enchantment. Yet even as he mined the quarries of Romanticism for sonic gems, he sought to excavate new ground. His conjuring of the féerique might seem familiar to us now—clichéd in an unproductive sense—because it has been copied so effectively by composers of film music and animation soundtracks. But comparing Ravel’s music with three examples from Florent Schmitt, Paul Dukas, and Claude Debussy will reveal that his choices, which today seem inevitable, were anything but. Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salome Ravel’s friend Florent Schmitt, a fellow composer and member of the Société des Apaches, attended the Paris premiere of Richard Strauss’s Salome at the Théâtre du Chatelet in May 1907.48 Only a few months later, Schmitt was working on his own musical version of the tale, commissioned by the impresario Jacques Rouché for the American dancer Loïe Fuller. At first a pantomime featuring Fuller (1907), and later a symphonic poem (1910) of condensed musical material for a much larger orchestra, Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salome echoes Debussy and Rimsky as well as Strauss. The dramatic scenario for the pantomime—a poem by Robert d’Humières— was reprinted as a preface to the revised orchestral score. In the poem’s second section, “Les Enchantements sur la mer,” Salome has disappeared, and Herod, watched warily by Herodias, finds himself adrift in thoughts of lust and fear. Mysterious lights flicker on the accursed sea like projections on a magic mirror, reflecting the silent drama playing out in the minds of the depraved pair. The music, the poem tells us, comments on this “demonic phantasmagoria,” an allusion to the ghostly theatrical spectacles popular in the nineteenth century. The mysterious lights are easy enough to “hear,” musically sketched by the feathery strokes of bowed tremolos in the violins and violas, the trilling of a triangle adding a silvery glimmer. A lilting, muted horn motive has a gently declarative air, recalling Debussy’s use of horns in Prelude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Sirènes, and De l’aube à midi sur la mer. Harp arpeggios waft in to complete a Rimskian blend of mystery, sensuality, and enchantment. But Schmitt achieves this atmosphere using 48. For a lengthy review of Strauss’s Salome in Paris, see Paul-Émile Chevalier, “Semaine théâtrale,” Le Ménestrel, May 11, 1907, 146–48. See also Clair Rowden, “Whose/Who’s Salome? Natalia Trouhanowa, a Dancing Diva,” in Performing Salome, Revealing Stories, ed. Clair Rowden (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 88.

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only the bowed tremolo—no harmonics, no sur la touche bowing, and no glissandos on any instrument. Soon there are signs that Schmitt’s sea is less placid than it seems: bursts of electrifying chromaticism, shrieking woodwind scales, and multiplying trills interrupt its voluptuous ebb and flow. The music shifts from evocative to descriptive, closely tracking the frenzied phantasms crowding Herod’s feverish brain. The dissonance and orchestral bombast at rehearsal 41 (marked violent) recall Strauss’s Salome and the climactic moment at the end of De l’aube à midi sur la mer, when a trumpet fanfare blares above cymbal crashes, two-handed harp glissandos, and a thundering bass drum. Debussy’s strings and woodwinds alternate third-related chords (BH minor and DH without the third), while the timpani sounds a surrogate tonic and dominant (F and BH, though the piece will end in DH major). Schmitt’s timpani thumps out a tritone (E and BH) as the BH major seventh chord in the strings and woodwinds dissolves into grating dissonance—BH in the bass against B and E, joined by chromatic turns in the clarinet, sarrusophone, and low strings. His phantasmagoric sea accumulates volume and density, as if Debussy’s breaking waves have been transported to the stifling, unstable atmosphere of an alien planet. The transformation from benign to malevolent enchantment unfolds in just a few minutes—a startling effect that incorporates few signs of Ravelian conjuring. Though La Tragédie de Salome came to be known as a symphonic poem, its enchanted aura betrays its origins as a vehicle for Fuller—a “fairy” who spoke sweetly and gently, but also a scientist and a magician, Jules Claretie asserted in Le Temps. Having studied the effects of light in a laboratory, Fuller used stage projections to evoke various natural and hallucinatory effects (a storm, moonbeams, glittering waves, a sea of blood). She had been evicted from her apartment when her electrical experiments caused an explosion—had she not been so well known, Claretie says, she would have been taken for an anarchist.49 Like any magician, Fuller carefully guarded her secrets, employing her own crew of electricians instead of relying on the house staff for her shows.50 Reluctant to commit lighting cues to paper, she instead communicated them to technicians while onstage, using a system of heel taps. She filed patent claims in the United States and abroad for stage devices she had designed; one such apparatus allowed the dancer to perform while “apparently suspended in the air”—an “illusionary effect” created when a

49. Jules Claretie, “La Vie à Paris,” Le Temps, November 8, 1907, 2. Fuller includes a lengthy excerpt of Claretie’s essay in her autobiography but mistakes the publication date, citing November 5 instead. See Fifteen Years of a Dancer’s Life, with Some Account of Her Distinguished Friends, introduction by Anatole France (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1913), 281. 50. Rhonda K. Garelick, Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 33–34; Frank Kermode, “Poet and Dancer before Diaghilev,” Salmagundi 33/34 (Spring/Summer 1976): 38.

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glass pedestal is lit from below.51 Just as magicians courted the otherworldly, Fuller’s act was designed to “dismantle fleshly reality” or “deny the laws of physics.”52 Critics described her as “playing with fire,” her fingertips a “source of supernatural light,” amplifying Schmitt’s musical effects through her somatic illusions.53 Paul Dukas’s L’Apprenti sorcier Paul Dukas’s best-known piece on magical themes appeared in 1897, when Ravel was preparing a return to the Conservatoire, having been dismissed two years earlier after failing to win a prize in any of his classes. In L’Apprenti sorcier, Dukas adopts techniques from Berlioz’s Queen Mab scherzo, using string and harp harmonics in the slow introduction and its return, right before the two-measure tag at the very end. As with parts of the scherzo, L’Apprenti sorcier’s breakneck speed affords little opportunity to dwell on novel timbres. The reanimation scene (plus retenu, R42), where the ungainly contrabassoon initiates a four-note fragment of the broom motive, is considerably slower than the rest of the piece, but instead of a transformative moment signaled by glissandos or harmonics, Dukas offers a process of grotesque rebirth that mirrors the hydra’s: lop off one head, and two grow in its place.54 Perhaps bewitchment—if that is what a spell gone awry should be called—requires a different brand of musical magic from more beneficent incantations. Dukas’s solution to the problem of perpetual reanimation is an “involuntary repetition”55 resembling Ravel’s merging of machines and magic in Boléro (discussed in chapter 3). The implications of this potent alliance emerge at R6, when the broom first starts to wobble after the apprentice casts his spell: as Caballero notes, one group of instruments plays quarter notes on the downbeat (F and AH), while another group plays eighth notes on beat three (AH and C), making the “already hobbling motion of the long-short rhythm . . . further disconnected, as if the triad were being subjected to an on-off switch.”56 The effect also implies the broom’s defective mechanization, the apprentice’s botched conjuring having created a magical machine—but one that will not answer to him. String tremolos and harp glissandos indeed underscore the frenetic din throughout L’Apprent sorcier, 51. Marie Louise Fuller, Mechanism for the Production of Stage Effects, U.S. patent 513,102 filed January 23, 1894. For more on Fuller’s patents, see Ann Cooper Albright, Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), 185–89. 52. Garelick, Electric Salome, 34. 53. Fernand Nozière, “À travers les revues,” Gil Blas, November 10, 1907; Claretie, “La Vie à Paris,” 2. 54. On the relationship between Goethe’s poetic scenario and Dukas’s music, see Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 30–60; also James Parakilas, Ballads Without Words (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1992), 220–25. 55. Caballero, “Silence, Echo,” 163. 56. Ibid., 164

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but they lack the rich semantic contexts Ravel furnished for these effects in his music. La Boîte à joujoux Debussy’s La Boîte à joujoux, an embryonic predecessor of Ravel’s opera, L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, was based on a livret by André Hellé, after his children’s book by the same title. Though Debussy finished the piano score in 1913, he struggled with the orchestration; André Caplet completed the task in 1917, shortly before Debussy’s death.57 The ballet involves the misadventures and romantic entanglements of a doll, a cardboard soldier, and a polichinelle, all inhabitants of a toy box (a scenario reminiscent of Petrushka). After the prelude, during which the characters are asleep, one of the dolls awakes, her movements tracked first by pizzicato cello, then by off-kilter dotted rhythms in piano, bassoon, and strings. As she grows more animated, the tempo of the music keeps pace. She flips a light switch to the sound of strident string and piano tremolos before turning her attention to the phonograph. She touches the machine, and a piano glissando tumbles out, followed by the blaring of a popular tune fragment in the oboe and English horn. The music wakes Pierrot, Arlequin, and Polichinelle, and hijinks in the toy shop ensue. Popular musical styles strut, twirl, and frolic throughout the ballet, which runs long on farce and short on sentiment. Nevertheless, an array of long-standing musical topics mingles with snatches of contemporary tunes. Marches characterize the soldier and his regiment, and a pastoral air emerges in the third tableau, a drone in the low strings accompanying a rambling English horn solo that sounds more modern than archaic despite its perfect fourths. Transformational motifs could have been used at many key moments, but Debussy and Caplet avoid them. The doll wakes up in the first tableau with no fanfare from the orchestra, nor any indication of a transformed state of being. The few harp glissandos in the ballet are typically mimetic, underscoring a physical action or gesture, as when Polichinelle administers a swift kick to the soldier. Perhaps the most charmingly Debussyian moment occurs right at the end of the section the composer himself had orchestrated, when a piano glissando mimics the doll turning on the phonograph, and the phonograph music, in turn, awakens the others. Here, animation occurs by proxy: piano stands in for harp, and instead of waking the toys, the glissando begets more music—this time an orchestral simulation of a phonograph tune, packaged so that the toys can hear and understand it.58 57. For a chronology of the composition, orchestration, and early performances of the piece, see Simon Morrison, “Debussy’s Toy Stories,” Journal of Musicology 30 (Summer 2013): 424–59; also Robert Orledge, “Another Look inside Debussy’s ‘Toy Box,’ ” Musical Times 117 (December 1976): 987–88. 58. Had Debussy been inspired by Satie’s Parade, which premiered in May 1917, he might have substituted the orchestral simulation with music from an actual machine. He did imagine puppets performing the ballet, as Morrison points out in “Debussy’s Toy Stories,” 424.

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These examples from Schmitt, Dukas, and Debussy/Caplet may not represent the whole gamut of French orchestrational practices on enchanted or bewitched themes, but they provide evidence that Ravel’s approach to musical conjuring, however commonplace it has since become, was stylistically distinctive in its time, imprinted with signature flourishes. His novel musical enchantments were also legible to audiences bred on the music of Berlioz, Wagner, Rimsky, and the composers of popular French ballets. The orchestral effects sampled here provide context for understanding how Ravel heats long-standing conventions to the melting point, brewing new combinations to delight the palate. Yet even though Ravel cultivated an opulent orchestral style in the early twentieth century, he deployed it with discretion: pieces with mythical or fanciful themes, like Daphnis and Ma mère l’Oye, flaunted all of the effects they could handle, while Valses nobles et sentimentales, orchestrated the same year that Daphnis was completed, has comparatively few of them. Nor does every special effect bring a conjuring trick to mind, as is shown by comparing one of the interludes in Ravel’s fairy-tale ballet Ma mère l’Oye with its final tableau, Le Jardin feérique. The Enchanted Garden The interlude between Petit Poucet and Laideronnette, the fourth and fifth tableaux in the ballet Ma mère l’Oye, unfolds a virtual catalogue of magical effects. After the first violins play a fragmented variation of the wandering music from Petit Poucet, the strings hover on a chord of mostly harmonics, producing a white tone almost devoid of vibration. The harpist’s left hand insinuates a pentatonic cadenza, harmonics evoking the candied twang of the guqin (a Chinese zither), while the right hand sweeps through glissandos ad libitum, celesta adding clusters of tinsel to the texture. When the orchestra reenters, the strings resume their sustained harmonics, eventually dropping out to leave the first violins alone on an airy tremolo, still played with harmonics and accompanied by the xylophone. Violins exit the tremolo with a two-octave glissando that spills over the first half of the measure; violas and cellos repeat the gesture over the measure’s second half to produce a cascading waterfall effect. Just before the flute begins its own cadenza, the second violins and violas initiate another tremolo, this time bowed sur la touche. To wrap up the interlude, the cellos take up a sur la touche fingered tremolo, the basses play a sustained harmonic, and the harp glides through yet another glissando for good measure. As a demonstration of enchanted effects, the interlude could not be more complete: its tremolos, glissandos, harmonics, sur la touche bowing, and passages of apparent metrical freedom are sequenced for our delectation, like courses served à la russe. Its generic chinoiserie—pentatonics, harp harmonics, tinkling celesta, and rattling xylophone—establishes the mise-en-scène for the upcoming pas de deux between Laideronnette and the amorous green serpent, indulging exotic and erotic fantasy in a manner typical of French aesthetics in Ravel’s time. Yet if this

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interlude is a wondrous sensory creation, its devices are not. While resplendent beauty need not justify its existence, neither does it present puzzles for us to solve—at least, not in this case. The final tableau, Le Jardin féerique, is a different story. In the interlude preceding it, we first hear echoes of a hunting horn, the clattering of strings col legno, and glissandos from the low to high strings, alighting on harmonics. Next comes a murmuring fingered tremolo in the first violins, divisi a tre, piccolo and flute imitating birdsong as a solo violin lingers on a whispered harmonic. We realize it is a daybreak scene, even though it lacks the liquid woodwind arpeggios and harp glissandos in the corresponding item of Daphnis, on which Ravel may have worked while orchestrating Le Jardin. Nevertheless, the two scenes have many motifs in common, including string harmonics and birdsong in the upper woodwinds, suggesting the hazy aura of a spring or summer morning—and Ravel’s mornings bear more than a passing resemblance to his musique féerique. As lower strings join the fingered tremolos in the first violins, the birdsong in Le Jardin grows insistent, marked by dotted rhythms, trills, grace notes, and arabesques. These aren’t the demure twitterers of fairy-tale lore, but their more bellicose cousins, which perhaps peck holes in tree trunks and park benches in the Bois du Bologne. We first heard their raucous chirping in the prelude to the ballet, along with string harmonics, fingered tremolos, harp glissandos, and bowing sur la touche that conjure up the enchanted mise-en-scène of the opening Danse du rouet. This simulated birdsong is the veridical element in Ravel’s illusion, imitating what we know to be real. At the key change, seven measures before Le Jardin begins, the dissonant fog of tremolos enveloping the birdsong gives way to a wistful D minor seventh chord with a 2–1 suspension in the violin solo, echoed more slowly in the lower strings. An upward harp glissando glides in with this new harmony, preparing a return of the second phrase from Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant, the second tableau in the ballet. Had the princess awakened with that glissando, no one would have been surprised: such is the power of a well-placed, satisfying cliché. Instead she rouses herself after Prince Charming arrives in the enchanted garden, accompanied by his “walking” music, its steady quarter-note pulse persisting, in melody or accompaniment, throughout the piece. The princess’s waking upends the dramatic conceit of the middle three tableaux: the Good Fairy, architect of Sleeping Beauty’s dreams, no longer furnishes the fanciful scenes we witness during her slumber. Yet even after her enchantment ends, the music of Le Jardin is marked by a distinctive sign of Ravel’s conjuring—specifically, an illusion of perpetual ascent, or the impression that the music follows a steady upward curve that seems to culminate in a sonic apex. The graphic overview of Le Jardin feérique in example 2.7 shows a series of ascents unfolding with the pace and flow of a leisurely walk, their mimetic empha-

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sis more apparent when compared with another musical promenade, Frederick Delius’s A Walk to the Paradise Garden (1901), which defers its simulation of movement until the conclusion.59 Ravel’s Le Jardin establishes a processional gait in the opening measures, the melody climbing gradually from C4 to G5 by the end of the third phrase. A second ascent unfolds, more rapidly and directly, in the phrases immediately following (measures 14–23), doubling the range of the opening ascent to three octaves (D3 to E6). Having reached these heights, Ravel elects to climb further. Solo violin begins an elaboration of the piece’s opening motive on E6 (measure 23), joined by the celesta an octave higher. Four ascending figures, grouped as triplets and eighth-notes, fill in the circuitous melody, the concluding triplet tracing a downward arc that ends on A5 in the violin and A6 in the celesta. 59. In the graph, all of the pitches contributing to ascents and descents are represented as structurally equivalent. Each beam corresponds to a section of the piece; some beams contain multiple phrases, others a single extended phrase.

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Though this passage can seem like a divagation, arresting the piece’s skyward climb with motivic repetitions and melodies twisting back to their starting points, it also reinforces the sense that Le Jardin is continuously rising, aided by techniques Ravel has introduced in the piece’s opening. The simplest way to convey a sense of rising motion is through direct ascent, placing pitches of increasingly high frequency in close proximity and relying on our long-established tendency to map pitch frequency to spatial domain. Ravel uses this type of ascent three times in the piece, creating clear upward trajectories through predominantly stepwise motion beginning in measures fourteen, thirtysix, and forty-four (see example 2.7 above). But the ascent that opens the piece is more complex, combining circuitous upward motion in the first and second violins with a direct ascent in the cello. (The viola’s ascent is neither wholly direct nor circuitous.) This passage recalls the first two phrases of Ravel’s string quartet (example 0.1 in the Introduction), where a serpentine melody in the first violin, paired with predominantly scalar motion in the accompanying voices, created the impression of an unbroken, symmetrical ascent and descent. In Le Jardin, an overriding sense of ascending movement similarly obtains as the cello rises quickly through the octave, reaching its goal near the end of the first phrase. (The graph in example 2.8—a reduction in the loosest sense of the term, representing nearly every pitch—eliminates rhythm and a few repetitions to show the upward curve of the melody, bass, and inner voices.) The cello’s rising gesture primes us to hear ascending movement despite the upper voices’ elliptical contours.60 The priming effect of the opening phrase, followed by the direct ascent beginning at R1, generates a feeling of rising composite motion, its continuity across sections reinforced by the near-continuous presence of quarter-note pulses mimicking a walking gait. At R2, the meandering violin and celesta melody extend this illusory ascent through octave convergence, an effect often combined with pitch circularity to reinforce a sense of ascending movement. In contrapuntal music, pitch circularity occurs when a rising figure contracts and begins anew at an octave convergence point; Ira Braus cites examples of it in the music of Orlando Gibbons, J. S. Bach, and Domenico Scarlatti, among others.61 A pedal sequence from Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E minor, BWV 548, for example, features rising scalar lines culminating in leading tones that resolve down by seventh instead of up by second, the octave convergence collapsing more than two and a half octaves into a much 60. I’m grateful to Bruno Alcalde, a former colleague of mine at the University of Richmond, for discussing this example with me. 61. Ira Braus, “Retracing One’s Steps: An Overview of Pitch Circularity and Shepard Tones in European Music, 1550–1990,” Music Perception 12 (Spring 1995): 324–29. Braus cites examples of more complex pitch circularities in modern repertoire, including Berg’s Wozzeck, Bartók’s second violin concerto, Prokofiev’s fifth piano concerto—all of which were written after La Valse, which contains some of Ravel’s most ambitious illusory ascents.

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smaller registral space. Bach’s illusion of continuous ascent is enhanced by the flow of sixteenth-note scales dashed off in the right and left hands—a musical analogue to the spinning barber’s pole. Ravel uses registral convergence without corresponding pitch circularity to suggest a perpetually rising contour at a point that might otherwise seem to meander. (He would repeat this effect on a more ambitious scale, with pitch circularity, in La Valse.) At R2, the elliptical melody played in octaves by celesta and solo violin concludes its first phrase with a descending triplet. The celesta completes this gesture by falling to FG6, the first note of the subsequent phrase, while the violin leaps up to join it, creating a fused timbre that sounds improbably high— still well within a violin’s range, but possessing an ethereal quality that seems to need extra scaffolding. (Solo viola enters to provide it.) This merging of registers creates an impression of rising motion that tempers the melody’s digressive tendencies and highlights the apex of the piece (D7) at R3, where violin and celesta reenter one octave higher than the viola. (In example 2.9, a right-facing arrow indicates the registral convergence in the second system, while the peak is marked “apex.”) From such a height, the piece has nowhere to go but down. Ravel obliges in prevaricating fashion: the series of descending octaves from B6 to B4 (starting one measure after R3) is immediately counteracted by a scalar ascent beginning in the violas, rising from G3 to D6 over four measures. A downward-sloping variation of

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ex. 2.9 . Ravel, Le Jardin féerique, mm. 23–34. Registral convergence in m. 27, apex in m. 33.

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the walking melody that follows (R4) unfolds in contrary motion with a bass line harmonized by parallel seventh chords. At junctures like these, the priming effect created by the direct bass line ascent in the opening measures pays off: rising parallelisms counteract the melodic descent to create a neutral surface for the piece’s final ascending gesture, which unfolds three octaves in woodwinds and strings, compressing the rising curve that opens Le Jardin feérique from thirteen measures to six. Its peak remains a fifth below the piece’s apex (G6 versus D7), but it seems we have only just reached the summit—a spatial illusion wrought in sound. We cannot survey the territory we have traversed and note with certainty that there is a mountain peak still higher than the one on which we stand. Ravel might have achieved a similar effect by constructing a true ascent, combining rising melodies with successively higher modulations, but such a blunt instrument of enchantment would have

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been more truncheon than magic wand. Better to evoke the alchemy of apotheosis through subtler means. Nothing is subtle about the dual-handed fortissimo harp glissandos closing the piece (beginning at R5). Horns and upper woodwinds accompany, imitating a trumpet fanfare—there are no trumpets in Ma mère l’Oye—and the piece concludes with the ringing, jangling din of celebration, made radiant by celesta and glockenspiel. The reason for celebration is clear, but the function of enchantment in Le Jardin feérique is less so. For the fairy-tale couple at its center, enchantment is a state of being: everything they say and do takes on a charmed character. But now that Beauty has been liberated from her sleeping spell, the need for the Good Fairy’s magical intervention has been mitigated; her diverting dreams have already vanished. Though the Good Fairy’s craft borrows minimally from theatrical conjuring, she recalls the figure of the composer, presiding over the garden and giving shape to the dreams that unfold therein. For listeners, the illusion of the garden holds a double charm, animating the elusive fantasies of our childhood while inhabiting the enchanted sphere of art. The harp glissandos marking the close of Le Jardin thus celebrate not only the marriage of the prince and princess, but the union of spectatorship and artistic creativity—that delicate synthesis of interpretive freedom and willfully suppressed volition that enables us to immerse ourselves in the art world while remaining (partially) conscious of our choices. Ravel’s emblems of enchantment persist throughout Le Jardin, with or without the dramatic pretext of Beauty’s dreams, because they denote the artistic illusion in which the piece itself is wrapped and presented. Beauty’s enchantment ends at sunrise; ours ends as we leave the fairy-tale Eden. SL E E P I N G B E AU T Y A N D T H E W H I R LW I N D O F D E AT H

This chapter wouldn’t be complete without a harmonizing gesture. I offer two: first, a brief exploration of Rapsodie espagnole, then a study of selected passages in Daphnis et Chloé. Both pieces feature high concentrations of Ravelian effects, from harp glissandos and sur la touche bowing to string tremolos, harmonics, transformational ascent, and altered temporality. Written in close proximity between 1907 and 1912, they also show Ravel at the height of his powers, weaving the luxurious textures and piquant harmonies for which he became known in the early twentieth century. When Rapsodie espagnole premiered in 1908, complaints surfaced about its excessive reliance on effects. Pierre Lalo predictably lamented the piece’s lack of musical substance and its vision of Spain doled out in “dribs and drabs”; so did Gaston Carraud.62 But even Ravel partisans like Jean Marnold felt that despite its 62. See Pierre Lalo, “La Musique,” Le Temps, March 24, 1908, 3; Gaston Carraud, “La Rapsodie espagnole,” La Liberté, March 17, 1908.

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myriad enchantments, Rapsodie was “nothing more than a simple piece of effect, likely to be applauded by anyone.”63 The piece’s cyclic repetitions of material migrate from the first movement (Prélude à la nuit) to the second (Malagueña) and the fourth (Feria). The third movement, Habanera, started out as a piece for two pianos composed in 1895, sharing with the other movements a stylistic patina of hispanisme, but no thematic material.64 Ravel had little to say about Rapsodie over the ensuing years and overlooked it entirely in the autobiographical sketch dictated to Roland-Manuel in 1928, where he noted other major works composed around the same time, including Ma mère l’Oye, Gaspard de la nuit, and L’Heure espagnole. Nor did he mention it in an interview with Olin Downes in 1927, though Downes, in his commentary, described the “macabre shadow and blaze of the orchestral Rapsodie espagnole”—an apt phrase capturing both the piece’s spirited display of exotic curiosities and its ominous, Poe-inspired atmosphere.65 A descending four-note ostinato opens Prélude à la nuit. Played pianississimo by muted violas and first violins, the ostinato gets pushed toward the footlights, while thematic material languishes in fits and starts. As the piece unfolds, the ostinato, joined by flashes of sur la touche tremolo, saturates the texture, leading us to wonder whether we have confused background and foreground. When the strings finally sweep in at R4 with a sensuous, ingratiating melody, we hear it etched against an equally captivating accompaniment (example 2.10). After mutating from four notes to three, the roaming ostinato is finally interrupted, first by a fluttering, arpeggiated cadenza played by two clarinets, then by a duo bassoon cadenza, joined by high muted trills and eerie artificial harmonics in the violins— a combination perhaps inspired by Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. The piece sputters along from there, seeming disoriented, rescued by the attacca entrance of the Malagueña. Contrabass quickly establishes a new dance rhythm, while other gestures typical of Ravel’s festive alhambrismo take over: jittery triplet figures in the strings, vertigo-inducing chromatic waves in the woodwinds, and a muted trumpet theme, articulated with terse bravado. But after the piece builds to a climax, the English horn intones an improvisatory cante jondo, sapping the dance rhythms of their vigor, and soon thereafter, the ostinato from Prélude sneaks in, putting an end to all the fun (including the chattering castanets). A similar pattern unfolds in Feria, where a jittery woodwind motive alternates with swirling arpeggios and glissandos, building to a series of conventionally Spanish themes in the trumpets, strings, and yes, castanets. At R12, a change to 63. Jean Marnold, “Musique,” Mercure de France, April 16, 1908, 723. 64. Puri, Ravel the Decadent, 50, theorizes that the Habanera functions as a model for the Prélude and Rapsodie as a whole. 65. Downes, “Man and Musician,” in Ravel Reader, ed. and trans. Orenstein, 452. The cited portion of the interview does not appear in Ravel’s Lettres, écrits, entretiens.

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triple meter and très modéré tempo brings a new affect, its pensive character and temporal lassitude an arresting contrast with the exuberant tumult of the opening. English horn takes the lead with a meandering serenade melody; between phrases, the orchestra’s tempo ebbs and flows, each measure alternating between au mouvement and ralenti, much like Daphnis et Chloé’s “Danse suppliante.” But at R15, we hear something oddly familiar: the sensuous string melody from Prélude à la nuit, momentarily unshackled from the relentless ostinato. Its freedom is fleeting, the strings barely able to complete a phrase before the ostinato reappears in the flute and harp, this time accompanied by eerie glissandos in the second violins (Example 2.11). Strings and woodwinds regroup, but their melody leads straight to the ostinato, which has spread through the orchestra like a contagion, aided by bowed and fingered tremolos and a sequence of glissandos in viola, cello, and bass. In Feria, Deborah Mawer hears a blend of circus music and whirling, spiraling figures reminiscent of rides at a fairground, evoking the music-hall historian Gustave Fréjaville’s description of the fair as a “formidable factory.”66 This comparison seems right for all three of the newly composed movements, especially considering Ravel’s personal interest in fairground entertainment. Just two years before Ravel composed Rapsodie espagnole, his father, Pierre-Joseph, and brother Édouard exhibited their jointly engineered invention, the “Whirlwind of Death” (La Tourbillon de la mort)—a loop-the-loop automobile spectacle that made its debut at the Casino de Paris in March 1905. Ravel had high hopes for its success, noting that “offers of engagements are reaching us from all sides, especially from America. Perhaps it’s the beginning of wealth!”67 But in its third week of exhibition, the car’s driver, Marcelle Randal, died in an accident described by one newspaper as a “slow suicide.”68 Joseph and Édouard Ravel, along with the directors of the Casino and Mlle. Randal’s manager, were indicted for reckless homicide. The press covered the incident and its aftermath, often naming Joseph personally as the spectacle’s inventor (at times with his last name misspelled as Revel).69 The tragic events of 1905 no doubt cast a pall over the Ravel family that might have lingered for years. In Rapsodie espagnole, sounds of festivity and fairground machinery alternate with passages of eerie reverie, resembling the incongruous effects of L’Heure espagnole, which Ravel had started to compose around the same time. L’Heure combines a frothy sex farce with alienating ruminations on death

66. Deborah Mawer, “Musical Objects and Machines,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Deborah Mawer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 66. 67. Ravel to Jane Courteault, March 27, 1905, translated and quoted in Nichols, Ravel, 60. 68. See “Le Tourbillon de la Mort: un accident prévu,” Le Petit Parisien, April 16, 1905, 1. 69. See, e.g., “Le Tourbillon de la mort,” L’Aurore, April 24, 1905, 3, and a news item describing the indictment in La Rappel, April 25, 1905, 4. Shortly before Pierre-Joseph Ravel’s acquittal, he and his son Édouard applied for a U.S. patent for the machine, which was granted in January 1906.

ex. 2.11 . Ravel, detailed reduction of Feria at R17, cyclic ostinato in celesta, violin, and cello.

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and the nature of body and soul.70 (One character, Don Inigo, climbs into a large clock to hide, saying, “I’m happy to cross your threshold / Between these narrow boards, as if in a coffin.”) Rapsodie seems similarly haunted by the specter of mortality: as Michael Puri suggests, the recurring ostinato from Prélude functions like a memento mori made “all the more striking when set into dynamic contexts such as the Malagueña and the Feria.”71 His claim has greater significance in light of the scandal surrounding the “Whirlwind of Death,” whose morbid consequences may have seeped into Ravel’s musical fêtes and farces. Another hermeneutic window on Rapsodie‘s fits of melancholia involves a different type of fairground entertainment: the Sleeping Beauty. Visitors to European fairgrounds in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would likely have encountered such an exhibit—a female figure lying in a glass coffin, dressed in a white gown, usually placed at the entrance of a space filled with anatomical curiosities as an enticement to passersby. Whether she was a wax model or a real woman feigning sleep was almost impossible to tell: some of the figures were mechanized to simulate breathing.72 Her apparent suspended animation evoked popular fiction featuring “false death, undeath, reversible death, and ambulatory death,”73 including tales like Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” in which a man in a mesmeric trance shows no evidence of a pulse or respiration. Indeed, the purveyors of these mechanized Sleeping Beauties combined two of Poe’s favorite preoccupations: liminal states and the (simulated) death of a beautiful woman, which he considered “the most poetical topic in the world.”74 These motifs, when joined with the whirling movement of fairground machinery, present an enticing lens through which to view Rapsodie’s blending of the mechanical and the bewitched. Thus we might think of the ostinato that opens Prélude à la nuit as a figure neither alive nor dead, or perhaps with mechanical viscera that simulate life, rendered doubly uncanny. When we first hear the ostinato, we cannot decisively classify it as figure or ground, the ingratiating melody in the strings—a musical likeness of sensuality and vitality—enmeshed with it. Resurrections of the ostinato in Malagueña and Feria function like the bewitched multiplication of brooms in L’Apprenti sorcier, exploiting our horror of mechanical animation: if the Sleeping Beauties at the fairground awoke, they wouldn’t owe their consciousness to a princely kiss. The uncertain status of these figures is reflected in the ostinato itself, permanent in its recur70. On this point, see Fillerup, “Purloined Poetics: The Grotesque in the Music of Maurice Ravel” (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 2009), 180–82; see also Steven Huebner, “Laughter: In Ravel’s Time,” Cambridge Opera Journal 18 (November 2006): 227. 71. Puri, Ravel the Decadent, 43. 72. See Kathryn A. Hoffmann, “Sleeping Beauties in the Fairground: The Spitzner, Pedley, and Chemisé Exhibits,” Early Popular Visual Culture 4 (July 2006): 139–59. 73. Ibid., 151. 74. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in Complete Works, 14: 201.

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rent transience—a paradoxical emblem of mortality. Its persistent hemiola, created by four eighth-note groupings in triple meter, constantly shifts position in the measure, falling within and outside the predominant metrical pulse. As Michael Russ notes, the ostinato’s habitual return “creates the illusion that time has reversed,” or perhaps, more tantalizingly, that time doesn’t work the way we think it does.75 This effect of altered temporality deepens in the clarinet cadenza, whose blatant octatonicism recalls the worlds of fantasy and bewitchment in the Russian music Ravel knew so well.76 The cadenza’s rippling arpeggiations are startling incursions, arresting the ostinato’s unflappable progress by rending the fabric of time, much like the transformative glissando near the end of Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête. When the ostinato returns in the celesta (R7), it presides over an atmosphere of singular Ravelian mystery: harmonics ring in the harps, strings play sur la touche tremolos, and violin and cello solos sing the ingratiating melody against the tinkling of the celesta. These effects, together with hushed dynamics, create an illusion of proximity and intimacy, as if we are drawn so close to Sleeping Beauty’s glass coffin that we can see our breath on it. D R E A M S A N D I L LU SIO N S

In the ballet Daphnis et Chloé, the ubiquity of techniques linked to musical conjuring makes them easy to dismiss: how can special effects mean much when they aren’t treated as special? But certain effects, when combined with other transformational or transportive cues, can indeed assume greater salience. The ballet, based on Jacques Amyot’s eighteenth-century French translation of a second-century novel by Longus, takes place in a meadow on the island of Lesbos. Near the edge of a grotto, a group of young worshippers dance and offer gifts to the Nymphs whose images have been carved from a nearby rock. Daphnis tends his flock of sheep nearby, enjoying Chloé’s company. The group proposes a dance contest between Daphnis and Dorcon, the cowherd; when Dorcon loses, Daphnis receives a kiss from Chloé as his prize, sending him sprawling on the grass in ecstasy. Battle cries (heard offstage) announce a band of pirates, who kidnap Chloé despite her appeal to the Nymphs for help. Daphnis finds her lost sandal and, overcome with anguish and fury, faints at the grotto’s entrance. An unearthly light envelops the meadow; as a little flame glows from the head of a Nymph statue, she comes to life, descending from her pedestal. The other Nymphs follow in turn, and the three perform a slow and mysterious dance before noticing Daphnis lying prostrate near 75. Michael Russ, “Ravel and the Orchestra,” in Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Mawer, 125. 76. I say “blatant” because many harmonic and melodic gestures in Rapsodie espagnole make use of octatonicism: the ostinato is an octatonic subset (0 1 3 4). On other uses of octatonicism in the piece, see Baur, “Ravel’s ‘Russian’ Period,” 569–77.

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the grotto. They dry his tears, revive him, and lead him toward a rock, where they petition the god Pan. Gradually the shape of the rock assumes Pan’s form. In the pirate’s camp (scene 2), Chloé repeatedly tries to escape, but Bryaxis, the pirate captain, forces her to dance. As he carries her offstage, manifestations of Pan electrify the atmosphere: tiny flames shoot up, fantastic creatures leap about, and satyrs surround the pirates. The shadow of Pan appears as the earth threatens to swallow the camp, and the pirates flee. Back in the meadow (scene 3), the sounds of daybreak fill the air, Daphnis remaining supine before the Nymphs’ grotto. Chloé returns, and the two embrace. Lammon, an aged shepherd, points out that Pan’s rescue of Chloé was performed in memory of Syrinx, whom he had pursued until she was transfigured into water reeds. After Daphnis and Chloé mime the myth of Pan and Syrinx, they embrace, and the stage buzzes with joyful dancing. At certain moments in the ballet, Ravel heightens our attention by means of characteristic timbral effects. In the Nocturne from the first tableau, when the Nymphs awaken from their stone slumber to give comfort and aid to the young shepherd (R70), the flickers of light that prepare their awakening are reflected—or conjured— by rapid fingered tremolos, played muted, ppp and sur la touche in the violins, violas, and cellos. A solo flute arises from the quivering mists of sound, its entrance punctuated by celesta and harp, the latter playing two of its three notes as harmonics. The flute melody is an octatonic version of the very first theme heard in the ballet, before any of the characters had appeared on stage, where it evoked not only a clear spring afternoon, but a landscape undisturbed by human presence. When the second Nymph awakes (R71), the horn takes up a languorous form of the flute melody; clarinet, accompanying the third Nymph (R72), follows with the most florid variation of the three. As the Nymphs perform their “Danse lente et mystérieuse,” the music bears all the orchestral signs of Ravelian enchantment: strings bowing sur la touche, fingered tremolos, harp harmonics, harp and string glissandos, and natural harmonics played en glissant by the second violins and cellos (an effect Ravel used in Rapsodie espagnole, which Stravinsky had seconded in Firebird).77 The Nymphs have chosen an odd time to wake up. Earlier opportunities had presented themselves: a crowd of worshippers had performed a dance in their honor, and Chloé had cast herself before their altar, seeking sanctuary as pirates pursued her, but neither instance had inspired the Nymphs to show themselves. When they finally do, who is supposed to be seeing them? Daphnis is unconscious when they first appear and notices them only after their dance has ended. He can be the intended spectator only if the Nymphs are an oneiric or visionary experience. Puri suggests that certain dramatic incongruities in the scenario of Daphnis 77. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1: 311, argues that both Ravel and Stravinsky probably borrowed the effect from Rimsky’s Christmas Eve suite.

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may be accounted for by viewing the section from the Nocturne to the end of the second tableau as an extended parenthetical dream sequence.78 Recent philosophical views of dreams grounded in empirical and clinical research are of more help navigating Daphnis’s dream world than sources contemporaneous with Ravel, such as the writings of Freud. Dreams have the feel of virtual reality, but they are not illusions in the strictest sense. For a dream to be an illusion, an external physical stimulus would need to be present, which our brains would then process to generate a percept with altered qualia.79 (I wear rose-colored glasses, I take them off, and the white wall on which I fix my gaze appears pink: this is an illusion. Dreaming about having that same experience is not.) The character of dreams is indistinguishable from waking perception, but philosophers and psychologists usually describe dreams as either hallucinatory—perceptions created without corresponding stimuli—or imaginative, comprising simulated percepts and emotions.80 According to empirical research, some of the characteristics common to most dreams include discontinuity, incongruity, improbability, uncertainty, and vagueness.81 Daphnis’s dream is typical in many respects. The appearance of the Nymphs and the rock’s transformation into the shape of Pan is an improbability, a supernatural effect in a reality not otherwise suffused with mythic forms of enchantment. After Pan’s proxy appearance, the stage falls dark; then, as if from very far away, the sound of voices permeates the shadows—the only time a cappella singing is heard in the ballet (R83). The voices seem to approach us, but since the stage remains dark, we can neither identify the singers nor explain their acousmatic presence (or absence). When lights finally illuminate the stage, we see the pirate camp, humming with activity—though clearly the voices did not belong to pirates, not least because some of them were female. The chorus thus served as a transitional device, bridging an abrupt change of scenery and transporting us from the supernatural realm of the Nymphs to the terrestrial pirate camp. In the dreamer’s 78. Puri, Ravel the Decadent, 127. 79. It is possible for a physical stimulus, like the sound of an alarm clock, to find its way into our dreams, though this does not seem to be typical. Bergson considers dreams to be illusions, because they transform sensory stimuli into visualized projections of the mind. In dreams, “it is as if real things and real persons were there, then on waking all has disappeared, both persons and things.” See Bergson, Dreams, trans. Edwin E. Slosson (New York: Huebsch, 1914), 15–25. 80. For an overview of recent philosophical literature on dreams, see Jennifer Windt, “Dreams and Dreaming,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ed. Edward Zalta (Summer 2015 edition). http:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/dreams-dreaming. The predominant (or standard) view is that dreams are hallucinations, though the imaginative view may be found in Colin McGinn, Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), and Jonathan Ichikawa, “Dreaming and Imagination,” Mind & Language 24 (January 2009): 103–21, among others. 81. For a clear description of these traits, see J. Allan Hobson, The Dreaming Brain: How the Brain Creates Both the Sense and the Nonsense of Dreams (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 5–6, 212, 230–34.

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ex. 2.12 . Ravel, Daphnis et Chloé, graphic overview of chromatic ascent, R89–R92.

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mind, these voices elide spatial and geographical discontinuity and introduce causal uncertainty, both characteristic of dreams. But not everything about Daphnis’s dream is conventional. Most of the time, a phenomenal self participates in the dream scenario.82 When Daphnis first awakes, he experiences simulated embodiment, watching himself approach the rock and fall to the ground before the god’s avatar. (Indeed, in the Nocturne we are able to see more than the phenomenal Daphnis sees, spying the Nymphs before they revive his dreaming self.) Yet the remainder of the dream—the action at the pirate camp—unfolds through Daphnis’s dreaming vision, without his bodily presence. The choral interlude enacts this process of disembodiment: as apparitional voices arise from the darkness, the stage is gradually illuminated, and Daphnis regains his sight metaphysically, seeing beyond, to a place to which his body cannot go. The voices also serve a liminal, transportive function for us, as we traverse the perspectival gap from outside the phenomenal self to within the dreamer’s disembodied vision. After trumpet and horn calls join the chorus, a chromatic ascent begins in the basses (one measure before R89) and gradually sweeps up tenor and soprano, along with the flute (R91) and upper woodwinds, spanning three and a half octaves before its abrupt end at R92 (example 2.12). This transformational ascent, underpinned by a C pedal in the contrabass, completes a modulation from A minor to B minor, the key of the “Danse guerrière,” and places us behind Daphnis’s vision. Ravel achieves other transformative and transportive effects using techniques we have come to expect. Before the swarm of Pan’s minions descend on the pirate camp (beginning at R144), strings play harmonics, glissandos, and fingered tremo82. See Jennifer M. Windt, “The Immersive Spatiotemporal Hallucination Model of Dreaming,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (June 2010): 300; also Inge Strauch and Barbara Meier, In Search of Dreams: Results of Experimental Dream Research (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 113.

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los sur la touche, while the harps sweep through intermittent glissandos. These musical emblems of enchantment suggest a supernatural presence, their transportive qualities implying a shift in setting from the encampment and back to the meadow, where the shepherd lies before the grotto, still asleep. Much of the Nocturne also glimmers with the silvery luster of harp harmonics, glissandos on harp and strings, natural harmonics played en glissant, fingered tremolos, and sur la touche bowing. The sheer quantity and variety of these effects attest to the music’s illusory capacity, reinforced by the otherworldly light enshrouding the meadow and the little flames glowing above the statues of the Nymphs. That such sounds are linked to characters who themselves possess conjuring power raises the possibility that the Nymphs have actually produced them. Each of their actions seems paired with a specific effect: they confer to the sound of lower string glissandos, begin their dance to the accompaniment of harp harmonics and violins bowed sur la touche, and perceive Daphnis in his slumber as violins and cellos glide up and down natural harmonics (accompanied by a harp glissando for good measure). But as the Nymphs dry Daphnis’s tears and revive him, most of these effects withdraw, leaving just fingered tremolos bowed sur la touche. Ravel’s decision to lessen the coloristic saturation at this moment might be explained with a literary analogue. In conventional works of fiction, authors introduce characters and settings with a degree of narrative specificity but provide fewer of these details as the tale unfolds, relying on readers to fill in gaps and smooth over discontinuities of character or place. Authors thus collaborate with readers to create a fully realized mise-en-scène despite selectively withholding certain particulars of the story. Ravel similarly provides a surfeit of detail at the Nocturne’s outset, informing us of the characters’ nature—supernatural, mysterious, capable of conjuring effects— and acclimating us to their environment. The music normalizes as we grow accustomed to the Nymphs’ enchantment, the fingered tremolos and occasional sur la touche bowing becoming synecdoches. Or perhaps the effects can be thought to continue without our hearing them: after a time in the Nymphs’ realm, we become inured to the sounds of their conjuring. If Ravel limits the variety of effects as the Nymphs invoke Pan, he changes tactics when the rock face begins to assume the god’s form (R81). A transformational ascent, similar to the chromatic a cappella ascent bridging the first and second tableaux (R83), signals that the supernatural is afoot. Murmuring fingered tremolos emerge from divisi cellos and violas; the second and first violins, also divisi, soon join them with the same figures, tracing a whole-tone ascent sandwiched between two half steps (G–AH and FG–G). Near the end of the three-octave climb, Pan’s jagged motive in the trombones, bassoons, and harp emerges like sound materialized—a dense mass flattening the vaporous scrim of tremolos. Ravel conjures the image of Pan so effectively, we scarcely notice that the god himself has

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escaped our view. In fact, no one ever sees Pan in the ballet—not even the pirates who provoke his ire and who, surrounded by an advance party of satyrs, flee at the sight of his menacing shadow, etched against the looming mountains. In the ballet, Pan has a flair for the dramatic that he lacks in Longus’s telling. If Ravel’s Pan relies on otherworldly manifestations, his novelistic counterpart turns up in person, in Bryaxis’s dream, full of complaint. On stage, Pan appears as a transfigured sculpture, a shadow, an impersonated figure in the pantomime between Daphnis and Chloé, but never as himself, even though Ravel’s signs of enchantment are rarely more sure than when they signal the god’s presence. We never doubt Pan’s power to command the supernatural or intimidate his foes, but perhaps we should. If Daphnis has only dreamed of Pan’s intervention, then the god may never have been involved in Chloé’s rescue. When the couple are reunited, Daphnis notices that Chloé wears a crown, revealing his dream, according to the livret, to be a “prophetic vision” affirming Pan’s intervention (R166). Yet this, too, is circumstantial evidence. In other mythological tales, Pan often appears as himself or as a transfigured animal, but in Ravel’s Daphnis the goat-god becomes a conjurer—a figure who pretends to otherworldly privilege with fantastic and diverting effects, like the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. Ravel’s musical characterization of Pan, or what we see and hear of him, cloaks the god in emblems of enchantment to convince us of his illusory power. Yet all of Pan’s power is not lost. If the dream has neutralized his metaphysical capacities, it has not affected his ability to move us by other means. His dazzling displays may be illusions—at least for us spectators, who grasp them as percepts— but they also simulate our veridical experience of perception. We recognize the aural and optical signs of enchantment using the bottom-up processing that produces sensory illusions, but we decipher them with top-down cognitive processes, including expectation and pattern recognition. Past experience with musical enchantment, wrought by Ravel or a composer with a similar bag of tricks, informs our belief that Pan wields supernatural power within the tale. His enchanted aura is like the straight stick that appears bent underwater—not a deception or an error of judgement, but the natural result of our sensory processing. How we perceive Pan is thus partly beyond our control; Ravel, expert simulator that he is, is counting on this. If Pan’s illusions reproduce aesthetic experience, they differ from everyday perception in one crucial way. We are awake to artistic illusions, aware of their power to charm, influence, and misdirect. Sensory perception is typically not an act of will, but aesthetic perception involves agency and requires lucidity: we must wish to be a part of it. Pan casts his spell; Ravel gives him the magic words. We are wise to their schemes, and gladly choose to believe.

3

The Machine Bewitched

When automatons strike us as uncanny, it’s usually because they are doing something thought to be exclusively the domain of beings who think and feel. The blend of human and mechanical qualities in Robert-Houdin’s Pastry Chef imperiled conventional perceptual schemata; like other automatons (both real and fake), it was an “ultimate categorical anomaly.”1 Listening to and analyzing music involves a similarly nettlesome process of sorting and assessment. Taxonomies of genre, instrument, style, cultural tradition, performance practice, geographic region, race, gender, and ethnicity help us ascribe meaning to what we hear, while also spawning additional categories in self-recursive fashion. The topical groupings that have come to define Ravel’s music, as summed up by Peter Kaminsky, include classicism, masks (or disguise), artisanship, artificiality, imposture, virtuosity, coldness (or irony, objectivity), and ornament.2 I would add machines to the list, given that much of Ravel’s music has been judged by scholars and critics to be mechanistic in its processes and machine-like in its aesthetic identity. But just as Robert-Houdin’s clockwork bakery hid his son Eugène inside it, Ravel’s mechanical music often conceals a human element.

1. The phrase “ultimate categorical anomaly” is from Minsoo Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 36. For an overview of categorization models, see Evan Heit, “Knowledge and Concept Learning,” in Knowledge, Concepts, and Categories, ed. Koen Lamberts and David Shanks (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 19–24. 2. Peter Kaminsky, Introduction to Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music, ed. Peter Kaminsky (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011), 2–3.

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I should like to dispose of one point before seeking to categorize Ravel’s musical mechanisms. Ravel wrote several pieces with a clear mechanical heritage— perpetuum mobiles in all but title, like the third movement of the Sonatine, the piano parts in Chanson du rouet and “Chanson de la mariée,” the third movement of the Violin Sonata, which is titled “Perpetuum Mobile,” and the Toccata in Le Tombeau de Couperin.3 The sense of automation and propulsive motion in these pieces stems from a rich musical lineage linked to the perpetuum mobile of scientific myth (discussed below). But at the moment, these are not the mechanical pieces that interest me. I would like to focus instead on how we might look beyond the perpetuum mobiles to other musical machines, considering how they generate the sort of perceptual confusion that the Pâtissier inspired in Robert-Houdin’s spectators.4 When scholars speak of the mechanical in Ravel’s music, they might be referring to any number of works—Boléro, L’Heure espagnole, Le Gibet, Rapsodie espagnole, Le Tombeau de Couperin, the G Major Piano Concerto—anything characterized by obsessive repetition or apparently automated impulses. Imitations of mechanical sound occur in L’Heure espagnole (set in a clock shop) and L’Enfant et les Sortilèges (which features a singing clock as a character); simulations of automata may evoke the natural world, as the oscillating grace notes and repeated sixteenth notes figures in “Le Grillon” do, suggesting the perfunctory mechanization of the cricket.5 Those pieces governed by repetition tend to be treated as theoretical abstractions of machines, or as proxies for any musical phenomenon that seems, in some sense, automated. The “ostinato machine” Deborah Mawer describes in Boléro illustrates this trope, the piece “convey[ing] the properties of machines” while remaining ephemeral and intangible, both self-generating and self-contained.6 If the ostinato machine refers to anything beyond its own mechanical processes, it is typically to other musical machines that are likewise immaterial and autonomous. But scholars have also grown increasingly interested in the relationship between mechanization and embodiment. Mawer’s exploration of musical and choreographic relationships in Boléro mitigates mechanical abstraction, while Daphne Leong and David Korevaar show how pianistic choreography—the physical movement of fin3. Daphne Leong and David Korevaar discuss mechanical motion in the Toccata in “Repetition as Musical Motion in Ravel’s Piano Writing,” in Unmasking Ravel, ed. Kaminsky, 115–16. 4. Bhogal, Details of Consequence, 155, uses the same phrase, “perceptual confusion,” to describe other aspects of Ravel’s music, especially pieces written before the Great War. 5. The menagerie of clocks, automata, and boldly ironic characters in L’Heure espagnole troubled some critics, among them Pierre Lalo, who complained that the opera lacked sentiment and suffered from a “mechanical coldness.” See Lalo, “La Musique,” Le Temps, May 28, 1911, 3. Steven Huebner surveys these types of critical reactions to the opera in “Laughter: In Ravel’s Time,” 226–27. 6. Mawer borrowed the phrase “ostinato machine” from Derrick Puffett, who applied it to Debussy’s music. See Mawer, “Musical Objects and Machines,” 64.

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gers, arms, and hands—shapes various types of musical motion in Ravel’s piano music, including the dance-like and mechanical. But if Leong and Korevaar illuminate hidden relationships between pianistic gesture and mechanical movement, they say little about the nature of the Ravelian machine itself. Carolyn Abbate comes closer to the mark, examining mechanical and organic hybridity in both the music (specifically in Le Tombeau de Couperin) and the composer himself.7 Michael Puri remarks that in Daphnis et Chloé, the “idyll/bacchanal dialectic . . . mobiliz[es] and undermin[es] boundaries between the human and the machine,” but does not pursue the matter further.8 Roland-Manuel pointed out Ravel’s tendency to transpose human and mechanical qualities, evident in the way he turns his human characters in L’Heure espagnole into figurative marionettes while endowing the clocks with “an immortal soul and a tender heart.”9 This view, echoed in modern scholarship, proposes that the boundaries separating human from machine are distinct and fairly easy to spot. But what if Ravel’s mechanisms are human? And what if, instead of alluding to mechanical processes, his musical machines function like real machines? In this chapter, I offer readings of Ravel’s music that treat mechanization and embodiment as not merely coterminous but coincident, unfolding through narratives of transformational illusion. The difference is slim but significant. In a coterminal relationship, machines and humans are separate entities, and the qualities associated with each may be superimposed or transposed. But a coincident relationship challenges notions of human agency and identity in three key ways: first, by revealing tensions between human cognition, behavior, and movement; second, by suggesting that the body is an “open” system with porous boundaries, permitting continuous change and supplementation; and third, by exploiting the illusions that conceal our own automaticity from us. Three pieces—the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, the Concerto for the Left Hand, and Boléro—will provide a lens through which we may examine these themes. Written after the war and in close chronological proximity, these pieces feature transformational arcs (human becoming machine, machine becoming human) that are subsequently eroded, confounding the notion that bodies and machines are separable. Each also reclaims the machine from a martial context, shifting the entanglement of noise, machines, and human bodies—a reality that Ravel and his fellow soldiers had experienced during the war—from the battlefield to the concert hall, where the survivors explored the purpose and significance of machines anew. Both piano concertos disclose tensions between human automaticity and human agency. Ravel was never a great pianist, but he was good enough to have experienced the kinesthetic automation constituting much of piano technique, 7. Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 213. 8. Puri, Ravel the Decadent, 121. 9. Roland-Manuel, “Maurice Ravel ou l’esthétique de l’imposture,” 20–21.

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especially in pieces founded on systematic processes, like fugues. Piano playing, by blending mechanical precision and expressivity (or a simulation thereof), reflects the embodied mechanization that characterizes much of human thinking and behavior. Ravel’s concertos feature orchestral and piano music redolent of these mechanical processes, exemplified by repetition, rotational structures, and apparent perpetual motion. The second movement of the G major concerto appears to become a whirring machine via transformational ascent; the physical disability inscribed into the title of Concerto for the Left Hand is seemingly remedied via prosthesis. In both pieces, narratives of illusory transformation unfold through machine-like motions and gestures. The potency of these transformations rests upon assumptions we make about how human bodies function and, in particular, how we insist upon self-perceptions that render us distinct from (and in control of) technologies and stimuli in our environment. Boléro echoes this theme of embodied mechanization, particularly in the way it manifests the sensual qualities of dance within a rigorous, motoric musical structure. Originally written as a ballet, the piece lost most of its extra-musical significance when it became a fixture in the concert hall, where it has been seen as Ravel’s machinist experiment, a paean to maximal effects achieved through minimal means. Yet its quasi-programmatic narrative of transformation has remained intact—a result, no doubt, of the piece’s transposition from C to E near the conclusion, which can still astonish repeat listeners. For many critics, Boléro’s blatant mechanical rehashing of themes suggests indifference and dehumanization, perhaps lessening its potential to express a distinctly human automaticity. But instead of understanding Boléro as a simulation of automated processes, the piece might be said to function as a specific kind of machine—one that obeys the laws of thermodynamics and manifests the mechanized qualities of human movement and behavior. Pointing out humanity’s inherent automaticity is nothing new. In the eighteenth century, perceptions of the body as machine derived from Newton’s deterministic universe, where time was theoretically reversible and mathematical laws governed relationships between force and various types of motion. For Julien Offray de La Mettrie, a devotee of Newton’s, the body’s powers of perception, cognition, and action could be wholly reduced to mechanical processes.10 Eighteenthcentury inventors sought to create automata that could simulate the physiological self-regulation of organisms, whether human or animal. The human body, that “quintessential perpetuum mobile,” inspired pursuits of the elusive self-moving machine.11 (They were so popular, and so relentlessly futile, that in 1775 the 10. On the relationship between Newtonian thought and La Mettrie’s theories of human physiology, see Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 103. 11. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 51.

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Académie des sciences declined to review any new schematics, putting a damper on the search—at least in France.) These eighteenth-century machines, shorn from the context of the perpetuum mobile, are the sort of objects scholars often have in mind when they think of Ravel’s musical automata: glittering objects that twirl or sing or dance a jig (or eat and defecate, as the case may be). Ravel encouraged such perceptions, populating L’Heure espagnole with automata that would suit Vaucanson’s workshop and adorning his home in Monfort l’Amaury with trinkets, bibelots, and mechanical toys. But I do not mean to conflate Ravel’s interest in curios and automatons with the impulses motivating large-scale “mechanical” works like Boléro. His self-avowed interest in eighteenth-century objects and décor notwithstanding, Ravel’s musical machines—and by extension, the musicians and dancers animating them—have more in common with nineteenth-century philosophical and scientific models of automation, which newly defined connections among the human body, machines, and the cosmos.12 Unlike the perpetuum mobile, which regenerates energy in a closed, self-regulating system (whether in music or in the schematics of wild-eyed inventors), Ravel’s music expends and transforms energy. Its operational processes often adhere to the principles set out by Hermann von Helmholtz, who delivered a lecture to the Physical Society of Berlin in 1847 describing what would later be formulated as the First Law of Thermodynamics: within a closed system, energy can be exchanged or transformed, but it cannot be created or destroyed. To understand thermodynamic principles at work, we need look no further than Ravel’s own family. His father was a mechanical engineer who had built a steam-powered, three-wheeled automobile around 1868.13 To fuel the car, a compressed mixture of fuel and air detonated, throwing a free-moving piston that started the engine cycle. (The engine itself rotated, like the ones that powered aircraft during the Great War.) Potential energy becomes kinetic via thermal energy conversion. Because an engine cannot operate at 100 percent efficiency—a limitation explained by the Second Law of Thermodynamics— some of the heat gets transferred to a heat sink, with no energy lost. The emergence of thermodynamic principles had implications beyond the fields of physics and engineering. Helmholtz helped to popularize the linkage of human labor, industrial productivity, and the motor—in particular, the steam engine.14 He also introduced a new understanding of the relationship between 12. Ibid., 52. 13. Pierre-Joseph exhibited two types of gas engines—oscillating and rotary—at the 1878 Paris Exhibition. For a nontechnical description of these rotary and oscillating engines, see Bryan Donkin, A Textbook of Gas, Oil, and Air Engines, or Internal Combustion Motors without Boiler (London: Charles Griffin, 1894), 54–55. 14. The path to Helmholtz’s theory was paved by others, including Sadi Carnot, who published his treatise on a theoretical heat engine in 1824 (Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu). On the relationship between thermodynamics, human labor, and the motor, see Rabinbach, Human Motor, 56–61.

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organic and industrial forces that would later be experimentally confirmed. He applied the principle of work or energy (Kraft) equally to animals, machines, and humans, suggesting that there was “no discontinuity between the processes of the human organism and the physical and chemical processes operative in the rest of the universe.”15 Once society accepted this interdependent economy of labor—a “transcendental principle,” as Helmholtz put it—the pursuit of the perpetuum mobile, he thought, would come to an end.16 Thermodynamic laws, which bind human and machine through the common principle of Kraft, provide a different way of conceptualizing musical motion and transformation in Ravel’s music. The piano concertos demonstrate how the repetition and sequencing of specific musical gestures might reveal the pianist’s organic mechanization, while Boléro can be said to function as a type of motor, subject to laws of energy conservation and entropy. These pieces link machine technology in the early twentieth century to Ravel’s own experiences during and after the Great War, illuminating a dichotomy in his thinking. Though he increasingly acknowledged the destructive power of machines, he sought to reclaim them from this context, focusing on their capacity to repair (and improve upon) a lost civilization. In this sense, Ravel’s approach to machines and human automaticity differs from that of the Futurists and Vorticists in the prewar years, who conceived of the mechanized human body in aggressive, martial postures. In a poem by the English Vorticist Jessica Dismorr, for example, the just-born narrator delights in her body, the “new machinery that wields the chains of muscles fitted beneath my close coat of skin”17—imagery evoking weaponry and suits of armor. Ravel, by contrast, evokes the hybridized, extended body whose automaticity ensures its ever-renewing capacity for change. Postwar Machines and Ravel’s Motors Engineers, chemists, and mechanics were central to the war effort, developing new technologies and refining existing machines, such as armored cars and aircraft.18 15. Andreas Killen, “The Second Industrial Revolution,” in The Fin-de-siècle World, ed. Michael Saler (New York: Routledge, 2015), 50. 16. Of course, it didn’t. See Philip Rowland, “The Undying Lure of Perpetual Motion,” Popular Science, October 1920, 26–29; also Robert L. Park, Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 106–8. For an account of the practical and philosophical differences between the eighteenth-century machine and the nineteenth-century motor, see Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 71–72. 17. Jessica Dismorr, “Monologue,” in Blast, no. 2 (July 1915): 65. 18. On the role played by machines and specialized workers in World War I, see Barton C. Hacker, “The Machines of War: Western Military Technology 1850–2000,” History and Technology 21 (September 2005): 255–300.

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In the postwar years, machines and technology acquired a dystopian pallor for some—especially the Dadaists, who had long taken a cynical, ironic view of industrialization, and the Futurists, whose romantic ideals of masculine mechanical action were shattered by wartime losses.19 But for others—especially politicians and social scientists—industrial development promised to ease the burdens of modern life and to fortify the state against future military incursions. Jules Amar was one of many scientists who, in theorizing the human body as a machine subject to the laws of thermodynamics, hoped to maximize worker efficiency and reduce fatigue. His book Le Moteur humain et les bases scientifiques du travail professionnel (The Human Motor, or the Scientific Foundations of Labor and Industry, 1914) describes, among other things, the motoric function of musculature, the locomotion of the body, and the “yield” of its work, or the ratio of energy produced to energy expended.20 The mass production of consumer durables after the war enabled both the wellheeled and the middle class to snap up new home appliances like vacuum cleaners and toasters, usually designed to simplify domestic life for women. Any lingering disenchantment consumers might have felt about technologies once used to kill was countered by postwar marketing appeals that cast the home appliance in fanciful, even magical, terms. In a French advertisement for the Electro-Lux vacuum cleaner, a woman straddles the machine as if it were a broom taking flight—an image aligning its technological powers with those of sorcery or witchcraft.21 At a Paris exposition of household appliances, one spectator remarked that the “magical machines . . . have their own poetry . . . conceal[ing] a felicitous simplification of life.”22 In artistic circles, mechanical imagery had emerged before the war, around 1910, in the work of Cubists, Futurists, and Vorticists. After the war it remained, for some, a key source of inspiration.23 Le Corbusier suggested in Vers une architecture (1923) that if the war was regrettably an “insatiable client, never satisfied,” the air19. Some prominent Futurists and Vorticists died in World War I; others were wounded or had limbs amputated. Apollinaire died of influenza on Armistice Day. See Ana Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism, and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 36. 20. Jules Amar, The Human Motor, or the Scientific Foundations of Labour and Industry, trans. Elsie P. Butterworth and George E. Wright (London: Routledge; New York: Dutton, 1920). In some respects, Amar adopted the principles of Taylorism, which enjoyed brief popularity in Europe. On Taylorism in France, see Rabinbach, Human Motor, 244–53. 21. Robert L. Frost, “Machine Liberation: Inventing Housewives and Home Appliances in Interwar France,” French Historical Studies 18 (Spring 1993): 117–18. 22. Gaëtan Sanvoisin, “Une Parisienne à l’Exposition des arts ménagers,” Le Gaulois, February 19, 1927, 1. 23. On the importance of machines to modern art before and after the war, see Robert L. Herbert, “The Arrival of the Machine: Modernist Art in Europe, 1910–1925,” Social Research 64 (Fall 1997): 1273– 1305.

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planes employed to fight it had at least “mobilized invention, intelligence, and daring.” The same spirit that had met the technological challenges of the war, he claimed, had also built the Parthenon. Machines might resemble organic creatures in their shape or function, but they must be appreciated for their own utility: one must “learn not to see in an airplane a bird or a dragonfly, but a machine for flying.”24 In other words, the machine’s existence was not predicated on or justified by nature. Given the destruction wrought by war machines, it is easy to imagine the 1920s unfolding quite differently, a distrust of mechanization overriding scientific and economic development. Georges Duhamel exemplifies how such a future might have looked if enacted on a large scale. Before the war, Duhamel had extolled the virtues of urbanization and worked for a pharmaceutical laboratory. But after serving four years as a medical officer in the French army, where he witnessed the mechanization of war up close, he advocated the retour à l’homme, embracing a Gallic pastoral ideal.25 In Duhamel’s largely autobiographical collection of tales, Civilisation, 1914–1917 (for which he won the Goncourt prize in 1918), wounded soldiers are “parts of the military machine,” packed into ambulances where doctors can evaluate them. Duhamel’s language ruthlessly correlates limbs and bodily processes to mechanical components: “If the part is seriously out of order, [doctors] do what they can to set it right; if the human material is not absolutely worthless, they patch it up carefully, so as to get it back into service at the first opportunity.”26 Those who lived but could not be repaired went home, paralyzed, dismembered, or maimed to such a degree that they could not resume any familiar form of work. Once home, wounded soldiers were outfitted with prostheses when supplies allowed. Amar provided manufactured arms featuring hooks, pliers, or magnets in place of simulated hands. He also supplied a main de parade, or “show” hand for leisure activities. Yet while the mechanical contraptions worn by amputees offered them a sense of physical restoration, fellow citizens projected fears of technological encroachment onto their reconstructed bodies. By supplying limb replacements, Amar offered an alternative vision of how the male worker might productively contribute to society. The prosthesis, Roxane Panchasi argues, undermined notions of the masculine body as natural and complete; someday, the body itself might be disposable. Soldier amputees reflected the man-machine hybrid, both 24. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture (1923), trans. John Goodman (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007), 161. 25. Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 82. 26. Georges Duhamel, Civilization, 1914–1917 (1918), trans. E. S. Brooks (New York: Century, 1919), 274–75.

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“the dream and the nightmare of industrial production, its rationalization, increasing mechanization, and automation.”27 Ravel never suffered severe physical injury during his tour of duty and only served at all because of his persistence. Before tales of loss and horror from the front accumulated, he had campaigned for a military commission of some sort, hoping his slight build might befit a pilot. After taking a battery of tests and negotiating with the Air Force, he was ultimately rejected. He took daily driving lessons and was finally dispatched to Verdun as a part of the Thirteenth Artillery Regiment, evading German bombardments while driving a truck he had christened Adélaïde. In letters to friends, he gave the impression that life in the barracks was akin to a rustic day camp, with all the pleasures and doldrums implied by such a place. His preoccupation with regular postal deliveries and creature comforts— especially appetizing food, or the lack thereof—was typical of soldiers. But at times Ravel exhibited a guileless sense of curiosity, even exhilaration, about his plight; after a close escape from shelling, he wrote, “I can assure you, I’m enjoying it enormously.” Ravel was “strangely excited by the adventure of it all” and “amazed at his own sangfroid,” Roger Nichols deduces from this bravado, but he also notes that Ravel’s letters to his mother offered a “carefully edited version of his adventures,” featuring jokes about his truck, and so forth.28 Moreover, French soldiers knew that censors read their mail looking for anything that might compromise morale or embolden enemy sympathizers.29 Plenty of Ravel’s letters describe perilous assignments. Once he spent a week driving day and night without headlights, dodging shrapnel, until his truck lost one of its wheels; he “played Robinson Crusoe” for ten days before his rescue.30 On one mission, he suggested that not even ambulance duty might have left him more exposed, writing, “several times I drove right through the shells, thinking I had been spotted.”31 Another mission kept him from immediate danger, but nevertheless left an evocative impression of horror: I saw a hallucinatory thing: a nightmarish city, horribly deserted and mute. It isn’t the fracas from above, or the small balloons of white smoke which align the very pure sky; it’s not this formidable and invisible struggle which is anguishing, but rather to feel alone in the center of this city which rests in a sinister sleep, under the brilliant 27. Roxanne Panchasi, Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France between the Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 19–21, 23. 28. Nichols, Ravel, 183. 29. Frans Coetzee and Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee, Commitment and Sacrifice: Personal Diaries from the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3. Nicknamed “Dame Censure,” French censorship of correspondence was instituted in late 1915, several months before Ravel had arrived in Verdun. 30. Ravel to Major A. Blondel, May 27, 1916, in Ravel Reader, ed. Orenstein, 167–68. 31. Ravel to Lucien Garban, May 8, 1916, ibid., 165–66; in Lettres, écrits, entretiens, ed. Orenstein, 154.

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Ravel had nearly been killed by war machines many times, and like his compatriots, he deeply lamented the price France had paid for victory—not only the grievous loss of life, but also the wounds inflicted on the nation’s cultural patrimony. Yet despite his war experience, his fascination with machines remained undimmed. Édouard Ravel, the composer’s younger brother, summed up Maurice’s lifelong interest in motors, mechanized objects, and industrial processes a few years after the composer’s death: My brother admired everything which was mechanical, from simple tin toys to the most intricate machine tools. He would thus spend entire days, around the new year, on the main boulevards, in front of street vendors’ stalls, and was delighted to come with me to factories or to expositions of machinery. He was happy to be in the midst of these movements and noises. But he always came out struck and obsessed by the automation of all these mechanisms.33

Their father, Pierre-Joseph, took Maurice and Édouard to tour factories when they were children. In 1905, Ravel visited a massive foundry while on vacation in Germany; in 1928, during his American tour, he took an excursion to the Ford motor plant in Detroit. Across decades, the lure of mechanical contraptions persisted, apparently unchanged. But in the postwar years, Ravel’s enthusiasm for factories and machines grew tinged with evangelical zeal. He not only explained some of his own music using mechanical metaphors, but also preached the gospel of trains, planes, and motors to his peers. After first proclaiming Boléro to be an “experiment in a very special and limited direction” that implied “no picturesque intentions,” Ravel described, both privately and publicly, how he had conceived of the piece by observing factories.34 He reportedly explained to René Chalupt that the paired A and B themes in the piece resemble links on a chain, or the systematic organization of the factory assembly line.35

32. Ravel to Jean Marnold, April 4, 1916, in Ravel Reader, 162–63; in Lettres, écrits, entretiens, 151. 33. Édouard Ravel to Jacques Rouché, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, February 19, 1940, in Ravel Reader, 328; in Lettres, écrits, entretiens, 288. 34. See Ravel’s interview with Calvocoressi, “M. Ravel Discusses His Own Work,” in Ravel Reader, 477; an unsigned interview in the Evening Standard titled “Factory Gives Composer Inspiration,” in Ravel Reader, 490; and Tony Aubin, “Concerts-Colonne,” Le Ménestrel, October 17, 1930, 433, where Aubin quotes Ravel. 35. René Chalupt and Marcelle Gerar, Ravel au miroir de ses lettres (Paris: Laffont, 1956), 237–38.

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Ravel’s most extensive commentary on machines comes from a 1933 article published in New Britain.36 The fragmentary structure of the article suggests editorial intervention, but the buoyant tone is Ravel through and through. In it, he points out how cities “are said to ‘hum’ with traffic, machinery to ‘purr,’ ” producing sounds that might be translated into music.37 Increasingly, he suggests, more composers will be inspired by the noise of their daily surroundings, echoing Luigi Russolo’s earlier, similar advice, but without the literalism of a noise orchestra.38 “Surely,” he claims, “the sound of battle is no more inspiring than the hum of a vast machine”—a remarkable, if restrained, affirmation of warfare aesthetics from a composer who once joked grimly that his own military service would leave him shell-shocked.39 Ravel’s pairing of battle sounds with mechanical humming is no coincidence: machines and war would always remain entangled, to some extent, in this veteran’s mind. But to artists and listeners still suffering from war-induced aversions to technology, he offers an antidote: think of all the great pieces of music inspired by combat, then try to claim that machines shouldn’t inspire composers. Machines could impart new meaning to the phrase “art of war,” if composers could only salvage them from a military context. At one point in the article, Ravel explains the acoustic appeal behind a day in the life of a factory: engines churn, bells clang, and “piles of finished goods pay tribute to the efficiency of the mechanism and to the greatness of the brain that conceived it.” Dusk arrives, the workers stream out the factory doors, and the lights extinguish, as the “noise of toil” gives way to “stillness and desolation.” Mawer suggests that by contrasting noise and commotion with desertion (or void), Ravel hints at the “dark underside of mechanisation,” the “man as automaton imprisoned in a factory.”40 Her characterization recalls a scene in Fritz Lang’s 1926 film Metropolis, in which factory workers walk in lockstep, eyes downcast, into their industrial prison. Ravel, who had seen the film, indeed drew aesthetic inspiration from the grim “day shift” scene, but not in the way Mawer imagines. According to Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, he was impressed by “its new way of presenting the massed movements of humanity” and had imagined staging crowd scenes similarly in Jeanne d’Arc (a projected opera he had never realized).

36. Deborah Mawer examines this source closely in “Musical Objects and Machines,” in Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Mawer, 59–62. 37. Ravel, “Finding Tunes in Factories,” in Ravel Reader, 398–99. 38. Luigi Russolo, “The Art of Noise” (1916), trans. Barclay Brown (New York: Pendragon Press, 1987), 28. 39. Nichols, Ravel, 183. 40. Mawer, “Musical Objects and Machines,” 61. Mawer also evokes silence when describing this contrast, but Ravel does not use this word.

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This is no call for bleak visions of industrialization in Ravel’s fictional factory— not when the composer classed those he frequented as a child in the same category as the Spanish folk songs his mother sang as lullabies, both serving as his “first instruction in music.”41 Certainly there are instances when Ravel’s mechanical repetitions express horror (think of Le Gibet), but his description of a bustling factory stands counterpoised to the absence of workers, the vitality and allure of industry relying on the interactivity of human and machine just as they exist in Helmholtz’s ecosystem of labor, which reflects the causality and reciprocity of natural forces.42 Flying machines had caught Ravel’s notice by the 1930s, if not before, providing the initial burst of inspiration for an unrealized (and apparently unsketched) piece: a symphonic poem about the origins of aviation, variously titled Dédale 39 and Icare. Manuel Rosenthal suspects that this “airplane in C” (as Ravel called it) was inspired by the memory of the composer’s father, who had been fascinated by those first motorized flights.43 (Both projected titles suggest that father-son relationships were indeed on Ravel’s mind.) Ravel was preceded in musical aeronautics by Henry Deutsch de la Meurthe, the French oil magnate, whose pieces with industrial and aerial themes included “En Dirigeable” (1908) for piano, which featured programmatic labels like “Dans le hangar,” “Mise en marche du moteur,” and finally, “Arrêt.—Lancement des guide-ropes.”44 Had Ravel completed his musical flight itinerary, it seems doubtful he would have pursued a course similar to Meurthe’s—or to Arthur Honegger’s in Pacific 231, which evoked the roaring engine and clicking wheels of a locomotive hurtling down the tracks. (This despite Honegger’s periodic disavowals of such imagery, insisting instead on a more conceptual design for the piece.)45 For Ravel, “the agitation of a great engine set to music would be quite unlike the actual sounds of the struggle”46—or should be, anyway.

41. Olin Downes, “Maurice Ravel, Man and Musician,” in Ravel Reader, 450; “Maurice Ravel, l’homme et le musicien,” in Lettres, écrits, entretiens, 355. 42. That is, a heat source (the sun) is needed to create vapor in the atmosphere, which later cools, producing rain and snow; this precipitation, in turn, creates water, which later evaporates, beginning the cycle again. See Helmholtz, “On the Conservation of Force,” in Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, trans. E. Atkinson (New York: D. Appleton, 1885), 362. 43. Arbie Orenstein, “Ravel and Falla: An Unpublished Correspondence, 1914–1933,” in Music and Civilization: Essays in Honor of Paul Henry Lang, ed. Edmond Strainchamps, Maria Rika Maniates, and Christopher Hatch (New York: Norton, 1984), 349; Rosenthal, Ravel, 179. Rosenthal noted that Ravel did not want the piece encumbered with mythological overtones: Icare merely referred to the name under which the plane was registered. Ravel also mentioned an airplane symphony in “Finding Tunes in Factories,” in Ravel Reader, 400. 44. Glenn Watkins, Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 187. 45. Arthur Honegger, I Am a Composer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1966), 100. 46. “Finding Tunes in Factories,” in Ravel Reader, 399.

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Perhaps a Ravelian approach to musical aviation might resemble Glenn Watkins’s interpretation of the Toccata from Le Tombeau de Couperin. Ravel completed the piece in November 1917, each movement of the dance suite memorializing friends who had been killed in action. The fact that he returned to composing it after a fallow spell suggests it held personal and artistic significance for him; that he orchestrated four of the movements two years later shows his prolonged interest in a piece both he and the public associated with the war. Watkins is not the first commentator to hear the mécanique at work in the Toccata, though he observes how its mechanical processes hint at something beyond the theoretical abstraction of the perpetuum mobile. Sixteenth-note rhythms extending to the heights and depths of the keyboard’s range evoke musical emblems of war, and more specifically, of flight in combat, suggesting “the steep ascent of aircraft followed by the plummeting dive; a series of swooping spirals; the hypnotic regularity of the engine and propeller, and . . . a rain of meticulously coordinated and deadly machine gun fire.”47 The relentless hammering of sixteenths finally gives way, near the end of the piece, to a thirty-second note rest in the right and left hands, made conspicuous by a fermata. This “topos obligé of mechanical music,” as Abbate puts it, is usually considered a sonic replication of the machine’s breakdown. But Watkins hears in the plane’s stalled motor the agency of the pilot, who has chosen to kill the engine for strategic purposes. An exuberant cascade of notes immediately follows the pause, overriding any potential mishaps: not only does the plane’s motor function, it enables the pilot to ascend to new heights. The fermata thus functions as a “symbol of the pilot’s control over the machine.”48 Watkins’s interpretation of the Toccata accommodates a striking feature of Ravel’s machines. They are strange. Their perceived malfunctions, like the Toccata’s fermata, are not due to mechanical glitches or defects, as is conventionally the case in machine-like music. Sometimes these malfunctions are not mechanical in nature at all. Vladimir Jankélévitch makes a memorable claim about Ravel’s music: pieces bound by bewitchment, most typically those locked in motoric repetition, must be delivered by a “magic spell.” To wit, he points out how the transposition near the end of Boléro “suddenly shatters the spell . . . steering the music toward its liberating coda, without which the mechanical bolero would constantly be reborn from itself.”49 No doubt he imagines liberation in the manner of Dukas’s L’Apprenti sorcier, the magician’s stentorian command (naturally expressed by trumpets) bringing the mayhem to a halt. But is Ravel’s machine broken by a spell? Not a wrench in the gears, or an electrical short? Jankélévitch poses a magical solution to a musical and technical problem: for him, transformation is the answer, not more tinkering with 47. Watkins, Proof through the Night, 178. 48. Abbate, “Outside Ravel’s Tomb,” 496; Watkins, Proof through the Night, 190. 49. Jankélévitch, Ravel, 96.

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tools. Mechanical processes may seem independent and self-regulating, but they are, in fact, shackled to their schematics. To free them requires the presence of the supernatural, or at least the appearance of it—he does not say which. SL E IG H T O F HA N D I N R AV E L’ S G M AJ O R P IA N O C O N C E RT O

To explore Ravel’s machines in an illusory context, we’ll begin with the middle movement of the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (called here the G Major Piano Concerto), which explores the theme of mechanization and embodiment with few explicit references to the Great War. Ravel worked on this piece and the Concerto for the Left Hand simultaneously, though the pair, once born, could not have had more different personalities. Evidence of their shared musical DNA is heard in jaunty syncopations, occasional blue notes, and a brassy extroversion typical of the “American” sound of the 1920s. In 1932, the diminutive Marguerite Long premiered the G Major Concerto, each precisely articulated finger betraying her claveciniste technique; the following year the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, described by one reviewer as a “blond giant,” gave the Parisian premiere of the Concerto for the Left Hand, which he had commissioned, the right arm of his suit coat dangling empty at his side.50 Although the G Major Concerto involves neither a poetic text like Gaspard de la nuit nor a mise-en-scène, like Ravel’s various ballets, the language of conjuring turned up in several reviews of the piece. Émile Vuillermoz called its vivacious, nimble character a form of enchantment, noting how its diverse ingredients, from the “nostalgically altered blues scale” to the “pointillism of a toccata,” produced a “phantasmagoria of effects.”51 Adolphe Boschot pointed out that concertos, generally speaking, are vehicles for pianistic virtuosity—especially in cadenzas, which bring to mind the moment at the circus when the orchestra stops playing while the “animal trainer, equilibrist, or trapeze artist is about to execute a difficult and perilous trick.”52 (After the cadenza, as after the trick, the orchestra would respond by playing forte.) But much of the concerto’s virtuosity redounds to its composer, leaving Boschot to wonder which aspect of Ravel he should admire more—the musician or the prestidigitator? For Robert Brussel, the piece avoided the displays of artifice in Tzigane (with its “deceptive pleasures like those of magic goblets”) and Boléro, where Ravel could be “proud to have succeeded in his prestigious sleight of hand, with nothing in his hands or pockets”—yet another reference to RolandManuel’s 1925 essay, “Maurice Ravel ou l’esthétique de l’imposture.” Ravel’s every 50. Roger Crosti, “Orchestre symphonique de Paris,” Le Ménestrel, January 27, 1933, 33. 51. Émile Vuillermoz, “La Musique,” Candide, January 21, 1932, 11. 52. Adolphe Boschot, “La Musique,” L’Echo de Paris, January 18, 1932, 5.

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move was both explicable and justifiable, his enchantments serving a purpose beyond merely showing off.53 René Dumesnil invoked the composer’s status as the “prince of imposture” who presented the illusion of following the beaten track but then, like a hare in a paper chase, nimbly slipped away. Three critics described the spirit of the concerto as “malicious.” Dumesnil evoked the wit of Voltaire.54 Of the concerto’s three movements, the first is influenced by Gershwin and the Basque region, while the third sounds as if it might have sprung from an animated cartoon. Sandwiched between them is a curious adagio critics described as “Handelian” and “inspired by the spirit of Bach”55 (perhaps the Bach of the Italian Concerto). Its sentimental lyricism caught many critics off guard, seeming virtually unprecedented in Ravel’s oeuvre. For Henry Prunières, the Adagio’s revelatory emotion nearly stripped the composer of his impassive mask, revealing a “marvelously human and sensitive artist.”56 Dumensnil noted similarly that the second movement, where Ravel “lets his heart speak,” should insulate him from the charges of insensitivity often (and unjustly) leveled against him.57 Gustave Samazeuilh concurred, claiming that listening to the second movement was like hearing “an intimate confession of the heart.”58 The verdict was in: Ravel was human. Thus two predominant critical views of the concerto emerge: Ravel’s escamotage versus his emotional unmasking. Of course, the magician who seems to display his intimate self to strangers is a practiced theatrical artist, his persona so natural that few rarely think to question its credibility. We need only recall Robert-Houdin’s memoirs to find a ready example of a conjurer who offered reminiscences and trade secrets to the world through a deliberately performative text. Indeed, the stagey sentimentality of the Adagio conceals a sleight of hand so audacious, and yet so quiet, that it seems to have passed unnoticed by most listeners and scholars. The piece opens with the left hand playing a waltz-like bass in E major with the eighth notes grouped by two instead of three, subduing the oom-pah-pah effect to the point that, in most performances, it is scarcely perceptible.59 The melody—longbreathed, pensively meandering, and reminiscent of a sarabande or a baroque 53. Robert Brussel, “Les Concerts,” Le Figaro, January 18, 1932, 4. 54. See René Dumesnil, “Musique,” Mercure de France, February 15, 1932, 183. 55. Henri Sauveplane, “Les Arts,” Esprit, May 1, 1933, 265; Paul Bertrand, “Concerts divers,” Le Ménestrel, January 22, 1932, 35. 56. Henry Prunières, “A New Piano Concerto by Ravel,” New York Times, February 14, 1932, X7. 57. René Dumesnil, “La Musique,” L’Esprit français, June 1, 1932, 299. 58. Gustave Samazeuilh, “Chronique musicale,” La Revue hebdomadaire 2 (February 20, 1932): 358. Samazeuilh pointed out the second movement’s incongruity but did not link it to conjuring. See “Ravel en pays basque,” La Revue musicale 19 (December 1938): 202. 59. Daphne Leong and David Korevaar, “Repetition as Musical Motion in Ravel’s Piano Writing,” in Unmasking Ravel, ed. Kaminsky, 118–24, describe the structure of the movement in terms similar to my own.

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aria—extends for thirty-two measures, containing rhythmic and melodic motives but no significant internal repetitions, and no rests until after the F# trill at rehearsal 1 (example 3.1). The combination of triple meter, sustained bass notes, and elongated, contemplative melody evokes Satie’s Trois gymnopédies, though Ravel never mentioned them as precursors, noting instead the influence of Bach and Mozart.60 Once the piano settles on the two-measure F# trill, solo flute enters with what sounds at first like an accompanimental figure; only at the cadence two measures later does it become clear that the flute is extending the piano melody—a trick Ravel may have learned from Haydn, who achieves a similar effect in many of his string quartets.61 The melody finally reaches a close with a cadence on D# major at R2. Here the piano introduces another theme, its rhythms and intervals related to the opening melody but not derived from it. Dissonant sparks flare up between the theme and its accompaniment, and by R4, the placid sarabande is replaced by woodwind figures rising stepwise in sequence—an initial gesture toward a transformational ascent. The waltz bass in the pianist’s left hand remains undisturbed, as if unaware of the burgeoning disquiet, though the right hand takes up oscillating triplet sixteenth notes whose large-scale contours trace a wave-like undulation. By R5, the ornamental right hand combines repeating notes with descending scales; these figures gradually ascend, urging haste upon the rising eighth-note tri60. In an interview, Ravel claimed that the bass accompaniment in the second movement suggested Bach, while the melody recalled that of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. See “Ten Opinions of Mr. Ravel,” in Ravel Reader, 494. 61. Roy Howat describes this “dovetailing” in The Art of French Piano Music: Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, Chabrier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 41.

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ads in the strings. The compression of phrase lengths from R2 to R3, observed by Leong and Korevaar, continues at R5 in the right-hand figures, which first articulate phrases of three quarter-notes’ duration, then two (beginning three bars after R5), then one (four bars after R5; see example 3.2). The alignment of waltz bass rhythms with right-hand figurations changes over three consecutive measures before settling into a stable pattern at the climax, three measures before R6. As triplet thirtysecond notes ring out in the highest register of the piano yet heard, fleeting harmonic collisions appear between the orchestral triads and the ornamental piano figures, a G pedal tone in piano and bassoon knitting the parts together. But at the climax, the pedal cleaves in two: G# vaults above G in the cellos, dueling pedals scraping against one another until they resolve in E major, one measure before R6. The ascent complete, now all is well. English horn takes up the piano’s opening theme, the waltz bass persisting in the left hand while the right hand embroiders an obbligato line, maintaining the thirty-second note rhythms from the climax without giving any slack. Ravel neatly truncates the divagations of the opening theme by clipping eight measures from its center and stitching the remaining parts together. (Measures 19–28 in the piano are eliminated in the oboe solo.) The piece unwinds smoothly and methodically, like thread from a spinning wheel. Perhaps it hardly occurs to us that the piano has had no share of the melody in this section—that in fact, the piano has not played a melody since the midpoint of the piece (measure 57), and will not do so again before the movement ends. Such an omission would be less striking in other genres, like variation sets, where melodies are routinely overtaken by skeins of filigree: think of Chopin’s Berceuse, in which sixteen variations unfold over a left-hand ostinato.62 Fauré’s solo piano music often features ornamental figurations that might blur the distinction between melody and accompaniment—especially, as Gurminder Bhogal notes, in the Third Barcarolle, an important precursor for Ravel and Debussy.63 Marguerite Long premiered many of Fauré’s piano works and was associated with them throughout her life, even playing them publicly in her eighties.64 Ravel’s right-hand embroidery thus emerges from a stylistic triangulation, linking Ravel to Fauré, his former teacher, and to an interpreter favored by both composers. Yet in the concerto repertory, I can think of no precedent for Ravel’s treatment of the piano in the second half of the Adagio. Pianists sometimes play the metaphorical second fiddle for phrases or sections of a concerto, reeling off arpeggios, scales, and ornaments to adorn a theme or fill out an orchestral texture—a technique at which Saint-Saëns was particularly skilled, as the second movement of his 62. Orenstein, Ravel: Man and Musician, 205, considers Berceuse a potential model for Ravel’s Adagio. 63. Bhogal, Details of Consequence, 124. 64. Cecilia Dunoyer, Marguerite Long: A Life in French Music, 1874–1966 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 185.

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Piano Concerto no. 5 in F Major, “L’Egyptien,” attests. After opening the movement with a series of exotic themes unified by their generic banality, he introduces a melody worthy of Don José or Faust in the left hand of the piano, right hand accompanying with sixteenth-note figurations. (This occurs when the time signature changes from 2/4 to 3/4 and the tempo switches from Andante to Allegretto tranquillo quasi andantino.) When the cellos and first violins take up the melody, the piano’s left hand moves seamlessly into an accompanimental role, doubling the right-hand figurations at the octave. To transport the melody to operatic heights, Saint-Saëns transfers it to the piano’s treble register, maintaining the rippling arppegiations in the left hand. The exchange of roles between orchestra and piano is fluid and uneventful, without a moment’s confusion about which instrument is doing what. Ravel, by contrast, keeps melodic material away from the soloist for the entire second half of the piece, without even a brief reprise at the end. We never miss the melody because it never really leaves: the English horn smoothly takes over from the piano, the ease and beauty of this melodic relocation quelling questions about the solo piano’s function, which should be our central concern. M A R G U E R I T E L O N G : L A F E M M E - M AC H I N E

Indeed, the permanence of this role reversal between piano and orchestra suggests not merely a transfer—from soloist to accompanist, and vice versa—but a wholesale transformation of musical identity. When the pianist’s right hand abandons the melody at R4 for figurations evoking a fiendish orchestrion (or a music box rewired by the impish hands of Scarbo), Leong and Korevaar suggest that the piece turns into “a kind of infernal musical mechanism.”65 By R6, it becomes a “quietly purring” machine, the right hand simulating the tiny cylinder and comb of a music box. The waltz bass, which gains in volume but otherwise carries on unaffected, seems to be the lone remnant of the pianist’s humanity, the only organic part in the machine. But the waltz bass is, in its way, more fundamentally reliant on pattern and repetition than the mechanical right hand. If it represents the organic body of the piece, it nevertheless gives a convincing imitation of a machine, bringing to mind Carolyn Abbate’s pithy remark about Ravel’s own mechanical proclivities—“Ravel is a machine, and happily so”—which echoes Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi’s notion that “artificiality is natural to M. Ravel.”66 Ravel had imagined (optimistically) that he would perform the concerto himself. We might thus read into the piece his reputation as an organic automaton—less a Swiss clockmaker than a timepiece with a cardiac pulse. I find this approach less fruitful, and less interesting, than its alternative: focusing on Marguerite Long, the concerto’s first interpreter, whose playing Henry Pru65. Leong and Korevaar, “Repetition as Musical Motion,” in Unmasking Ravel, ed. Kaminsky, 123. 66. Abbate, In Search of Opera, 213; Calvocoressi, “Maurice Ravel,” 785.

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nière compared in a denigrating review to “a well-regulated machine.”67 Critics usually admired Long’s interpretations of Fauré, and composers like Ravel sought her out for the daunting task of introducing new works to the public. She was best known for a style of playing called jeu perlé, which involved striking each note cleanly and evenly, creating perfectly formed beads of sound connected like pearls strung on a necklace.68 This style was not unique to Long, nor to French pianists: Charles Timbrell traced it back to Friedrich Kalkbrenner, and Beethoven noted in a letter to Carl Czerny how some passagework may sound “ ‘like a pearl’—but occasionally we like to have a different kind of jewelry.”69 Yet by the twentieth century, jeu perlé was linked to French pianism, advocated by Saint-Saëns, Isidor Philipp, and Long herself, whose “pearly” sound, produced with high fingers and active hands, became her signature. Her playing could, at times, contrast unfavorably with that of contemporaries like Alfred Cortot, whose grand adumbral sound was achieved with arm and shoulder weight.70 Prunières looked forward to hearing the concerto in “all its splendor,” when it might be performed by someone like Cortot, Gieseking, Horowitz, or Magda Tagliaferro—pianists with an expansive style (and, in some cases, an eccentricity) that Long generally lacked.71 She was the ascetic, steel-fingered Kalkbrenner to Cortot’s Chopin. Prunières further congratulated himself for having been able to appreciate the concerto in spite of Long, who “played conscientiously, with agile fingers, like a good piano teacher, without a shade of imagination, poetry or sensibility.”72 This is a gendered critique, diminishing Long’s stature by evoking an image of the spinster next door who teaches the neighborhood children how to bang out “Ode à la joie” on a rattling Boisselot. But it also casts a sideways glance at pedagogical practices generally: a “good piano teacher,” in Prunières’s estimation, is one who improves a student’s physical dexterity but does nothing for her artistic imagination. In the early nineteenth century, the means by which dexterity might be improved included new devices like Johann Bernhard Logier’s chiroplast, an assemblage of wooden clamps, wires, and brass panels suspended from a rod, completed in 1814. Such devices contributed to the increasingly popular notion 67. Prunières, “New Piano Concerto,” X7. 68. Charles Timbrell, French Pianism: A Historical Perspective, 2nd ed. (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 2003), 38, 94. 69. The Letters of Beethoven, trans. and ed. Emily Anderson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1961), 743. 70. Students of Long and Cortot contrast their pianistic approaches in Timbrell, French Pianism, 93–111. 71. Prunières, “New Piano Concerto,” X7. Robert Philip compares recordings of Cortot playing the Concerto for the Left Hand in 1939 with Long’s 1932 recording of the G Major Concerto and prefers Cortot’s “singing” sound to Long’s, which seems to “hum to itself.” See Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 168. 72. Prunières, “New Piano Concerto,” X7.

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that piano technique could be learned through the systematic use of mechanical equipment. Students at Logier’s academies, which sprang up shortly after he started to market his invention, drummed out exercises in concert, like cadets marching in formation, or perhaps, more fittingly, like an orchestra of automated puppets.73 For a time, the chiroplast gained the endorsements of prominent pianist-teachers like Kalkbrenner, Clementi, and John Cramer.74 But mechanical contrivances were not the only source of mid-nineteenthcentury anxieties about piano teaching. Heinrich Heine worried that incessant piano practice would spawn a generation of musical automata because the “fortepiano is killing all our thinking and feeling.” Evidence could be seen in pianists’ “technical perfection, the precision of an automaton, the self-identification with strings stretched over wood.”75 Heine was not only concerned that interminable hours of piano practice would make pianists stupid or empty-headed, but he also seems to envisage that extended contact with the instrument might engender a loss of humanity, the physical boundaries distinguishing pianist and instrument melting away. Eduard Hanslick admonished budding virtuosos to “play less piano, learn something!”76—as if the training of fingers and hands were a practice wholly disengaged from the thinking brain. Both Hanslick and Heine’s criticisms allude to a redistribution of musical labor that grew increasingly apparent after 1850, when pianists took up fewer “creative” activities, like improvising and composing, in place of specialized “reproductive” tasks, such as interpreting the music of others.77 In economic terms, the pianist became an “exchangeable worker” who could be assigned particular technical and expressive tasks.78 In his early career, Franz Liszt established the popular vision of the Romantic piano virtuoso, his every gesture conveying a range of emotions, from ecstasy to torment, but his was not the only image of virtuosity to appeal to the public imagination. Kalkbrenner, a “machine-tooled pianist” in Alan Walker’s description, “would 73. On Logier’s chiroplast, see Arthur Loesser, Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954), 295–301. 74. Kalkbrenner later renounced Logier’s machine in favor of his own less despotic guide-main but still claimed that nearly every aspect of piano technique could be studied by “mechanical means.” See his Méthode pour apprendre le piano-forte à l’aide du Guide-mains, new ed. (Leipzig: Kistner, n.d.), 3. 75. Henri (Heinrich) Heine, Lutèce: Lettres sur la vie politique, artistique, et sociale de la France (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1855), 305. 76. Cited in Katherine Hirt, When Machines Play Chopin: Musical Spirit and Automation in Nineteenth-Century German Literature (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 119. 77. This division of labor is discussed in many sources, but Martin Gellrich and Richard Parncutt provide a historical overview in “Piano Technique and Fingering in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Bringing a Forgotten Method Back to Life,” British Journal of Music Education 15, no. 1 (1998): 6–8. 78. Nicholas Ridout, “On the Work of Things: Musical Production, Theatrical Labor, and the ‘General Intellect,’ ” Theatre Journal 64 (October 2012): 403.

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fig. 3.1 . Caricature of Sigismond Thalberg, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

sit motionless at the keyboard like a general behind the front lines following the progress of a battle.”79 And Sigismond Thalberg, Liszt’s chief pianistic rival, was best known for producing the illusion that he had three (or more) hands, achieved by spinning arpeggios around a melody played mostly by his thumbs. A caricature of Thalberg from around 1840 turns the pianist into a multi-limbed machine: three right arms “appear to rotate like a sprocket,” as Richard Leppert notes, while a fourth rests in Thalberg’s pocket, awaiting substitution in the event of a mechanical breakdown (figure 3.1).80 His face wears an expression that might befit a dozing spectator, 79. Alan Walker, Franz Liszt, vol. 1, The Virtuoso Years (New York: Knopf, 1983), 161–62. 80. Richard Leppert, “Cultural Contradiction, Idolatry, and the Piano Virtuoso: Franz Liszt,” in Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano, ed. James Parakilas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 275.

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taking little interest in the extraordinary display of showmanship issuing from his own body. For Leppert, the “freewheeling, seemingly unpredictable improvisercomposer virtuoso”81 had to function with mechanical precision, maintaining a performance schedule that might send the sturdiest of machines to the scrap heap. Even the periodicity and repetition typical of piano practice itself has something automated about it—indeed, pianists learn the filigree in the right hand of the Adagio through a great deal of repetitive practice. This dichotomy between artistry and technical execution defined much of nineteenth-century piano criticism, pithily summarized by Algernon in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest when he remarks, “I don’t play accurately— anyone can play accurately—but I play with wonderful expression.” Prunières’s preference for Cortot over Long is yet another sally in the same conflict. Had Long wanted to alter his opinion of her playing, she would have had a number of factors working against her, including her technical pedigree and her piano teaching, notwithstanding the fact that many male virtuosos of her generation also took students. Her pedagogical method, Le Piano, was not published until 1959, but it, too, would have given Prunières cause for concern. In French method books, the word for technique is mécanisme, which appears in Kalkbrenner’s Méthode (1831), Félix Richert’s L’Art du jouer du piano (1864), and, of course, in Czerny’s Études de mécanisme, Op. 849 (1856). Long designates technique using this same word, but also describes the pianist’s hands and fingers as “miraculous mechanical muscles,” saying the hand is a “marvelous mechanical tool.” Like an increasing number of twentieth-century piano pedagogues, she explains the physiological aspects of technique by likening body parts to machinery (as suggested by the phrase “motor skills”). The very qualities Prunières dislikes about Long tip us off to the transformational effect midway through the Adagio, revealing Ravel’s novel solution to the long-standing critical problem of pianistic virtuosity. To Ravel, it doesn’t matter whether Long has a brain, a soul, or just an assemblage of fast-moving fingers. Her humanity already depends upon her automatism. Musicians know from years of practice that bodies often perform most efficiently when they circumvent conscious thought.82 Moreover, the body’s autonomic nervous system, responsible for respiration, cardiovascular activity, and digestion, among other things, carries out

81. Ibid., 273. 82. From a psychological perspective, Timothy D. Wilson writes, “It is well known that people can perform many behaviors (e.g., riding a bicycle, driving a car, playing the piano) quickly, effortlessly, and with little conscious attention. Once we have learned such complex motor behaviors, we can perform them better when we are on automatic pilot and are not consciously thinking about what we are doing.” See Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 52.

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essential functions without our conscious awareness.83 If we lose a phone number in the circuitries of long-term memory, we might be able to recall it through mechanical action, our fingers tracing numbers on a key pad; kinesthetic memory kicks in when cognitive retrieval fails. Long’s crime, for Prunières, was not automatism: even his beloved Cortot possessed that. It was her inability (or unwillingness) to hide it. Ravel may have favored a performer like Long precisely because she unveiled the hidden automaticity of human behavior. The mechanical qualities of her performance mirrored the Adagio’s illusion of mechanization, which begins with a musical reference to close-bodied coupling and ends with music-box figurations suggestive of automation. The textural shift in the piano from cantilena to mechanical passagework—a loss of melodic content never to be regained—coincides with the transformational ascent at R4, which signals that the piano (and pianist?) will turn into a musical machine. But the waltz bass, wedded to the music-box filigree throughout, suggests a commingling of human and mechanical that cannot be easily disentangled; like the magician’s pseudo-machine, the music induces a sorting error, asking us to falsely categorize it as one or the other. Even the waltz bass, an emblem of sensuous organicism, is a simulation of human automaticity, its repetitions evoking the preconscious, programmed, and involuntary. It seems that the pianist transforms, but she has been a hybrid all along—a “magicienne du clavier,” as Samazeuilh describes her, performing and embodying automation.84 Ravel delivered the concerto to Long on November 11, 1931—Armistice Day.85 Several years prior, he had dedicated the final movement of Le Tombeau de Couperin to Long’s husband, Joseph de Marliave, who had been killed in the war; Long had premiered that piece, too. The organic-mechanical hybridity of the Adagio offers a vision of aesthetic beauty for the postwar machine—a peaceable rival to instruments of destruction. Ravel had explored similar themes before the war, most notably in L’Heure espagnole, where the mechanical quirks of its human characters are played for laughs (though not very boisterous ones). But in the postwar years, it would not be enough to show that machines are just like us. To redeem them in the eyes of skeptics—those who rejected industrial technology in favor of the pastoral retour à l’homme—they must be shown to be a part of us, and we a part of them.

83. Sometimes bodies don’t carry out these functions as they should, producing dysautonomia, or dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system. 84. Samazeuilh, “Chronique musicale,” 358. 85. Jillian Rogers, “Mourning at the Piano: Marguerite Long, Maurice Ravel, and the Performance of Grief in Interwar France,” Transposition 4 (2014): paragraph 19 (http://transposition.revues.org/739).

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V I RT U O SI T Y A N D P R O ST H E SI S

When Paul Wittgenstein premiered the Concerto for the Left Hand in France, critics could hardly keep themselves from seeing what wasn’t there. Often they referred to Wittgenstein as a “pianiste mutilé,” though some went further: Roger Crosti charged that “Mars has devoured the arms of melody.”86 Wittgenstein could have outfitted his right arm with a main de parade like the sort Jules Amar distributed to war amputees, which would have peeked out from his right suit coat sleeve, filling the perceptual void. But had he done so, the critical response to him would likely have been the same: his disability was inscribed into the title of the piece he had commissioned. Critics lauded his ability to “pass” as a two-handed virtuoso by overcoming his bodily limitations, thus disconnecting the spectator’s aural and visual experiences.87 Wittgenstein’s claim to pianistic virtuosity derived partly from his repertoire, which included selections from Leopold Godowsky’s Studies on Chopin’s Études— specifically the two-handed scores arranged for the left hand alone. Pianists study these pieces at their peril, the technique required to master them begging for otherworldly assistance, divine or diabolical. By playing them, Wittgenstein aligned himself with conventional ideals of pianistic virtuosity, a “superembodied or even disembodied mode of musicality,” as Blake Howe suggests.88 Effusive reviews of Wittgenstein in the English-language press embroidered themes of triumph, heroism, and redemption: the pianist bravely overcame the misfortunes of war by doing with one hand what most pianists could not do with two. Never, these critics assured us, did he present himself as a sideshow, a circus freak, or a figure of pity. These anglophone reviews, culled mostly from newspapers in the United States, echo attitudes held by certain postwar medical and welfare groups whose exhortations suggested a virtual erasure of disability: in Britain, it was asserted that the war-wounded should “Carry on” and be “Recalled to Life.”89 But in francophone criticism, there seem to be few allusions to Wittgenstein’s one-handed pianism as potentially monstrous or freakish, whether through direct reference or vehement 86. “Mars a dévoré le bras du chant”: Crosti, “Orchestre symphonique de Paris,” Le Ménestrel, November 10, 1933, 438. See also, e.g., Roger Lesbats, “Musique,” Le Populaire, January 25, 1933, 4; Alfred Bruneau, “Courrier des théâtres,” Le Matin, January 23, 1933, 5; Constantin Photiadès, “L’Hiver musical à Paris,” La Revue de Paris, March–April 1933, 947; Roger Crosti, “Orchestre symphonique de Paris,” Le Ménestrel, January 27, 1933, 33. For less charged reviews, see the list of concerts in L’Echo d’Alger, September 12, 1932, in which Wittgenstein is described as the “pianiste à seule main,” and Frank Choisy, “Le Mouvement musical à l’étranger—Grèce,” Le Ménestrel, December 2, 1932, 494, which refers to him as a “pianiste manchot” (one-handed pianist). 87. Blake Howe, “Paul Wittgenstein and the Performance of Disability,” Journal of Musicology 27 (Spring 2010): 141–42. 88. Ibid., 144. 89. Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body, 23.

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protestation to the contrary. This disjuncture in critical opinion between France and the United States reflects differing postwar experiences. The United States joined the war in 1917 and suffered around 116,000 deaths out of a population of just over a hundred million; about 4,400 U.S. soldiers experienced some type of amputation, whether minor (e.g., a finger) or major (e.g., a leg).90 In France, losses from the Great War were catastrophic: nearly 1.4 million dead, a higher proportion when compared to the national population than that of any other major power, with five deaths for every nine soldiers mobilized. After the war ended, more than 300,000 French men were classified as mutilés de guerre.91 Institutions like the Musée du Val-de-Grâce were created, in part, to instruct the French public about the role of injury and dismemberment in the war effort. The museum, housed in a Paris military hospital, displayed imagery and objects relating to surgical reconstruction, including prostheses, photographs, and moulages (casts made from wax or plaster). Amy Lyford describes how pairs or groups of moulages were arranged in sequential order: a grisly facial injury on the left and a reconstructed face on the right, suggesting to the viewer that the moulage is “a stage in recovery rather than a fact of physical trauma.”92 When the museum opened to the public in 1916, a newsreel company filmed crowds thronging the galleries, the event covered in major newspapers like Le Figaro. Its exhibitions helped to normalize the harrowing effects of traumatic injury, but only within a corrective context. If in France, the prominent image of the soldier-amputee might overshadow others with physical disabilities, injured veterans in the United States would have been just one group of many vying for services and visibility. (In 1930, the estimated number of crippled children alone was around 365,000 in the United States.)93 Moreover, the release of Tod Browning’s Freaks in 1932 linked the American amputee to the freak show as surely as French institutions like the Musée du Val-de-Grâce connected dismemberment to patriotism and national reconstruction. Though the film recorded box office losses and was quickly withdrawn by MGM, prospective audiences would have learned about it through major news publications, advertisements breathlessly exclaiming how the film featured circus 90. Bernard D. Rostker, Providing for the Casualties of War: The American Experience through World War II (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corp., 2013), 136. 91. Golan, Future Tense, 16; also Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 33. 92. Amy Lyford, Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetic of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 53. 93. White House Conference on Child Health and Protection: Preliminary Committee Reports (New York: Century, 1930), 453. The survivors of amputations during the Civil War (who numbered in the tens of thousands) would no longer have been a familiar sight after the turn of the century. Beth Linker provides facts and figures on the prosthetics industry between the Civil War and the Great War in War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), esp. 98–103.

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performers, not actors in prosthetics and makeup.94 Little wonder that the vocabulary of freakishness—or the artful avoidance of it—differentiated North American from French reviews. Yet another difference involved the figure of Ravel himself, a celebrity in France and a virtuoso in his own right. René Dumesnil suggested that the concerto “awakens the idea of acrobatics,” but acrobatics for whom?95 We might assume Wittgenstein, but in fact he was thinking of Ravel, who wrote “for five fingers a work that was just as musical and complete as that for two hands.” Alfred Bruneau linked Wittgenstein and Ravel to musical gymnastics, pointing out how the pianist’s “prestigious virtuosity” was matched by the “suppleness of imagination that drives the author in his work and realizes the acrobatic.”96 Constantin Photiadès asked how the “enchanter of Gaspard de la nuit, Miroirs, and the sparkling Toccata . . . [could] compose a text in which the absence of a hand is scarcely felt?”97 Ravel assessed his task similarly in an interview with Calvocoressi: “In a work of this kind it is essential to give the impression of a texture no thinner than that of a part written for both hands,” noting how the second theme was “treated pianistically as though written for two hands.”98 (Prokofiev and Britten had contrasting views of their own left-hand concertos, also commissioned by Wittgenstein.) Michael Russ described Ravel’s illusion of two-handed pianism as “a good conjuring trick,” and Roland-Manuel agreed, noting the presence in the concerto of an “enchanted hand” (main enchantée).99 Ravel had consulted left-handed works by Saint-Saëns, Scriabin, and Alkan, but his approach to texture and technique most closely resembles the illusion of three-handed pianism popularized by Thalberg.100 His adaptations to Thalberg’s formula are surprisingly slight: melodies appear in the thumb of the left hand as the fingers play arpeggiations beneath it, amplified by the damper pedal, and large chordal leaps aid the impression of two hands playing

94. Joan Hawkins, “ ‘One of Us’: Tod Browning’s Freaks,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 265. The film All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) offered a contrasting cinematic portrayal of the amputee. 95. René Dumesnil, “Musique,” Mercure de France, March 1, 1933, 444. 96. Bruneau, “Courrier des théâtres,” 5. 97. Photiadès, “L’Hiver musical à Paris,” 947. 98. M-D. Calvocoressi, “M. Ravel Discusses His Own Work,” Daily Telegraph, July 11, 1931, in Ravel Reader, 477; Ravel, “Concerto for the Left Hand,” in Ravel Reader, 396; “M. Ravel parle de son œuvre,” in Lettres, écrits, entretiens, 364. 99. Michael Russ, “Ravel and the Orchestra,” in Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Mawer, 126; Roland-Manuel, Ravel, 6th ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 128. Roger Crosti, “Orchestre symphonique de Paris,” 33, viewed the apparent two-handedness as less a conjuring trick than a miracle of nature: “Erda, patient and industrious: one hand had become two, of which one sings and the other accompanies.” 100. Nichols, Ravel, 319.

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in discrete registers.101 By molding virtuoso practices like the three-handed illusion to Wittgenstein’s body, Ravel seems to accept a model of virtuosity that relies on apparent physical accretions. But consider what is thought to be normative for pianistic luminaries. Ivan Raykoff describes the Romantic virtuoso as a “technically and discursively constructed body whose performances are alternately freakish and phenomenal, perfect and suspect.”102 Spectators often felt that two-handed virtuosos possessed three hands or more, as the Paderewski caricature reproduced as figure 3.2 attests. Howe describes these virtuosos as “superembodied,” but Wittgenstein needs more than the normalizing musical prosthesis Howe proposes. He needs to claim the label that reviewers in the English-language press had labored so diligently to avoid: freak. Indelicate, yes, but it captures what many spectators thought of Romantic virtuosos and their musical progeny. Howe further suggests that disabled bodies must be transformed, “othered,” or “enfreaked” through a process that accommodates their deviation.103 But how does a pianist become “enfreaked” when virtuosos themselves are deviations from the norm? If Wittgenstein cannot adopt the sort of freakery that seems more ennobling than degrading to the artist, then he cannot “pass” as an able-bodied virtuoso. Instead, he might transform to suit the normative perceptions of spectators without relying on a musical prosthesis, thus substituting the narrative of “heroic overcoming” for a magic trick that makes unexpected use of the main enchantée. This transformative effect is founded upon alternative models of virtuoso pianism, linking Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand to narratives of technology, machines, and cultural rebuilding in the postwar years. To understand how it works, we need to examine the structure of the piece first, focusing on textural and motivic relationships between piano and orchestra. R AV E L’ S MOT OR S

The concerto unfolds in a single movement that draws on the structural elements of sonata form, beginning with the sort of creatio ex nihilo effect that launches La Valse. Against a backdrop of low, sustained open fourths, divisi contrabasses play arpeggiations across open strings, producing a flickering sense of movement. In the third measure, the buzzing contrabassoon enters with a theme whose dotted rhythms and introductory function recall the French overture. This dotted theme 101. Daphne Leong and David Korevaar discuss specific performance challenges posed by the concerto in “The Performer’s Voice: Performance and Analysis in Ravel’s Concerto pour la main gauche,” Music Theory Online 11, no. 3 (September 2005). 102. Ivan Raykoff, Dreams of Love: Playing the Romantic Pianist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 202. 103. Howe, “Paul Wittgenstein,” 171.

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leads to a ponderous three-note motive in the horns (one measure after R1) that leans into BH, the “blue” seventh of the C major harmony rippling below. At R3, Ravel shrinks the dotted theme to an insistent motive concentrated in the woodwinds, countered by trumpets blithely unwinding the “blue” motive. The jangling interaction of these two ideas, together with the rapid, widely spaced arpeggiations in the viola and second violin, creates a pulsating sound that glows with kinetic energy until the grand pause at R4. That is the act the piano must follow. To measure up to such splendor, only a cadenza will do. The soloist obliges, offering the requisite leaps and arpeggios, then taking up the first theme, played with ceremony and grandeur, voiced much like the piano accompaniment in “Le Paon” from Histoires naturelles (which itself alludes to the pageantry of the baroque overture). At R5, the orchestra sweeps in on a piano glissando, revisiting the first theme with reinforced bombast, including fanfares—not the illusory ones heard here and there in Ravel’s music, but the unmistakable type blared boldly by trumpets and horns. From the opening of the piece to R6, Ravel establishes both the soloist’s virtuosity and the piano concerto’s prestige as a genre, reminding us that it (the concerto) was many times the musical offspring of Romantic composer-pianists like Beethoven, Brahms, Saint-Saëns, and Liszt. A mood of triumph pervades the exposition, from the trumpet fanfares to the appearance of the first theme, which rises from the shadowy depths like a majestic whale. Nothing in the sound of Wittgenstein’s performance suggests physical disability; indeed, one critic ascribed superhuman ability to the pianist, claiming that Wittgenstein seemed to have four hands.104 If Ravel had set out to compose a musical narrative of “heroic overcoming” for Wittgenstein, he could not have found within his stylistic language a clearer mode of expression. The change of tempo to allegro at R14 marks the beginning of the development section. Pizzicato strings and brass (minus trumpet) articulate the new 68 meter with chords punched on the first and fourth beats, evoking march-like sound and movement. Trumpets play a descending triadic motive (one measure after R14), and nothing much happens until the piano reiterates the motive just after R15, then again at R16. Each time the piano repeats the motive, another concise idea follows it: first the clarinets respond with a nonchalant slurred triplet figure, then the piano plays an extended variation of this figure, responding to its own motivic statement (see examples 3.3 and 3.4). Eight measures separate the first three triadic entrances, the first (in the trumpet) leading to nothing in particular, the second (in the piano) leading to the slurred figure, and the third (also in the piano) to the variation on the slurred figure. This developmental process seems at once additive 104. Ibid., 141.

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fig. 3.2 . Caricature of Ignacy Jan Paderewski. Courtesy of Granger.

ex. 3.3 . Ravel, Concerto for the Left Hand, triadic motive followed by slurred figure at R15.

Pn.

Cl. Va. Vc. Bn.

15 #### 6 & 8

∑

? #### 68

∑

{

. . . nnœœœ nnœœœnœœœ œœœ. œœ. œœ. nœnœ f

∑

p p sf j j ? #### 68 œ ‰ ‰ ‹œœ ‰ ‰ œ ‰ ‰‹œœ ‰ ‰ œœ œJ œœ œJ

j nœœœ ‰

‰

‰

∑

n#œœ œ n œ œ ˙ ™ nœ 6 n˙ ™ 8 3 œj ‰ ‰ ‹œœ ‰ ‰ œj ‰ ‰ ‹œœ ‰ ‰ œœ œJ œœ œJ

2 4 Œ

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ex. 3.4 . Ravel, Concerto for the Left Hand, triadic motive followed by slurred figure variation at R16.

Pn.

16 . # ## # 6 nnœœœ nnœœœ. œœœ. & 8 f

Va. Vc. Hp.

œœœ. œœ. œœ. nœnœ

> j ?##œœœ nnœœœ nnœœœ ™™™ nœœœ ‰ ‰ J mp

j j ? #### 68 œœ ‰ ‰‹œœœ ‰ ‰ œœ ‰ ‰ ‹œœœ œ J œ J

> #œœœ nnnœœœ ###>œœœnœœœ J J

j ‰ ‰ œœ ‰ ‰ ‹œœœ œ J

‰‰

œœœ™™™

œj ‰ ‰ ‹œœ ‰ ‰ œœ œJ

and sequential: the triadic motive—initially heard in isolation—first triggers the slurred figure, then the extended variation of that figure, and finally a replica of itself. In this sense, it displays qualities of organic growth, a root idea unfolding like a flowering vine, successive ideas branching off from it. The accompaniment, typically for Ravel, maintains its perceptual salience: for fairly long stretches it is all we hear, binding otherwise disjointed music that alternates motivic bursts with periodic dormancy. The organic metaphor I applied to Ravel’s motivic development fizzles when extended to the accompaniment, where terse brass and string chords function like the rhythmic hum of a motor. But thinking of the background as motoric makes the motivic processes, which I described as blossoming flora, sound like interlocking cogwheels, the triadic motive and slurred figure functioning as two gears rotating in succession. The first statement of the triads (one measure after R14) fails to propel the slurred figure into motion, but the second statement, following eight measures after the first, successfully activates its companion gear, and the slurred figure comes tumbling out (a relationship illustrated in figure 3.3). This pattern, once established, could potentially continue unabated: the third repetition (R16) follows eight measures after the second, again triggering movement—this time, the longer variation of the slurred figure. But on the fourth repetition, things go awry. The triads enter in the piano one measure earlier than expected, immediately followed by an echo in the trumpets, which in turn sparks movement from a companion gear (the slurred variation). It seems that the early piano entrance is a programming error—that the trumpets, by appearing on time, will keep the cogs clicking into place. Instead, the piano’s early entrance flips a switch, initiating a change of gears, and within a few measures (R17), a scherzo theme unlocks the mechanical repetition. But mechanistic qualities linger. Behind the scherzo in the piano lies the motoric pulsing of chords on the first and fourth beats, beginning in the development and

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persisting uninterrupted for 110 measures, from R14 to R24. The cog-like sequence of motives that initiated the development forecasts the larger architectural structure of the piece, in which sections rotate like companion gears, as shown in figure 3.3. From the triadic motive and its gear mate, the slurred figure (R14–R17), comes the scherzo (R17), which leads back to the triadic motive (R19) to reanimate the scherzo theme (R21)—this time partly in octaves, as if a little cog had joined its elder. Transitional material at R24 introduces Ravel’s favored chinoiserie, pentatonicism glittering in the flute, piccolo, harp, and piano, its deft orchestration barely escaping banality. By R27, the chinoiserie has departed, and when the motoric chords return, they prepare the way for the opening notes of the ponderous “blue” motive (R28) first heard in the horns near the very beginning of the piece. Here, played by solo bassoon, its character seems much transformed: Nichols characterizes the motive— now extended to a theme—as “sneering,” though it bears no ill intent to my ear. Its drawling, bluesy disposition, described by Ravel as “jazz music,” stems from rhythmic elongation, a prominent chromatic pitch (EH in C major), and conventional performance practice, many solo bassoonists using occasional pitch bends or scoops. (Ravel indicates one descending portamento three measures before R29.) At R30, the scherzo returns in the piano, accompanied by sustained and arpeggiated harmonics in the strings. When the blues theme returns at R31, we recognize another cog-like pairing, though its mechanical process soon diverges from what we heard previously. After one rotation, initiated by the blues theme at R28 and triggering the scherzo at R30, the gears mesh and rotate simultaneously, blues overlapping scherzo at R32, R33, and R35. The pattern holds when the scherzo gear catches the triadic cog—a pairing that recalls the beginning of the development, except that the gears now rotate concurrently instead of alternating. Harmonic dissonance and orchestral density grow with each paired repetition, as if the gears’ movement is generating more torque. Viewed in retrospect, the development itself resembles a large pair of cogs, one rotating clockwise (from the triadic motive at R14 through the scherzo and the chinoiserie), the other counterclockwise (from the chinoiserie at R41 backwards through various pairings of the scherzo, triadic motive, and blues theme). Figure 3.4 represents this structural conceit, its forward and retrograde movement corresponding with Henri Bergson’s claim that it is “characteristic of a mechanical combination to be generally reversible.”105 The music that opened the development (R14) recalls the perpetuum mobile— both the musical genre and the chimerical machine that continuously generates its own power. Gears turning in succession imply a repeating mechanical action sustained by motoric accompaniment. One hallmark of a well-regulated machine is 105. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900), trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 83.

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triadic motive R14 +1

triadic motive R15 + 1

slurred figure R15 + 2

triadic motive R16

slurred figure variation R16 + 2

triadic motive + slurred figure R14–R17

scherzo R17–R19

triadic motive + slurred figure R19–R21

scherzo R21

fig. 3.3 . Ravel, Concerto for the Left Hand, mechanical pairings at the phrase and section level.

its capacity to reproduce an action without breaking down; in a musical context, the repetition and circularity of the motivic pairings allude to mechanical processes that might forever renew themselves, evoking the perpetuum mobile. At first the scherzo seems to disrupt these processes at R17, but then it, too, begets cyclic thematic pairings with ever larger gears, the scherzo triggering the triadic motive, and vice versa. Again, the music’s predictability and repeatability suggests perpetual motion, the music (and pianist?) transformed into an impossible machine— until a new gear clicks into place, ending the apparently endless cycle.

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TM+ SF R19–R21 Scherzo R17–R19

scherzo R21– R23 chinois. R25–R27

TM + SF R14–R17

Development, R14–R27 “ghostly” scherzo R30–R31 blues R28–R30

scherzo + blues R31– R39 TM + scherzo R39–R41

chinois. R41–R43

Development, R27–R43

fig. 3.4 . Ravel, Concerto for the Left Hand, structural gears in the development containing smaller section-level gears. TM = triadic motive, SF = slurred figure.

With each gear shift, we may wonder if the music will finally break free from its schematics, becoming the kind of machine engineers can only dream about. But as we wait for some sort of change—whether magic spell or wrench in the gears— another apparent transformation unfolds that neutralizes the narrative of heroic overcoming. This illusory transformation explains why the main enchantée, Wittgenstein’s musical prosthesis, disappears for long stretches during the piece, even though Wittgenstein remains a pianiste mutilé throughout. Comparing exposition to recapitulation reveals how the mechanistic processes of the development launch this transformation. In the exposition at R4, Howe’s musical prosthesis is very

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ex. 3.5 . Ravel, Concerto for the Left Hand, musical prosthesis via the main enchantée in the piano exposition.

œ œœ ™™™ œœœœœœ ™™™™ œœœ œœœ œ œ œ ™ œ

a Tempo (q = 44)

? ## 43 Œ Œ ‰ ≈ œœ #œœœ œ œ R

{

mp

? ## 43 ˙ ™ ˙™

œ ? ## œœœ

? ## ‰ ≈ r œ˙ “‘

{

˙ œœ ™™ œœœ˙˙ œ™

? ## Œ

‰ ≈ œr P ‘ ˙ “

œ ™™ œ œ ™ œ ˙ œœ ™ œ œœ ™ œ ˙ œ™ œ œ ™ œ #˙

{

? ##

‰ ≈ œr P ‘ ˙ “

œœœ ™™™ œ œœ œœœ ™™™ œ ™ œœ œ œ ™ œ œ & œ œ œ # œœ # œœ

œ œœ ™™ œœ œœ ™™ ? œœœ œœ ™™ œ œœ ™™

‰ ≈ œœ ˙ “‘

œ œ œ œ œ™ œœ œœœ œœ œœ œœ œœ ™™ œœœ ™ œ ˙ œ œ œ #œ œ œœœ ™™ œœ ˙˙ œ ™œ ˙

3

œœ œœœœœœœ œœ

3

‰ ≈ œœ œœœ “‘ Œ

Accelerando

‰ ≈ œr ˙ “‘ P

Œ

‰ ≈ œœ œ œ “‘ œ ‰

Kr ≈ ® &nnœœœ nœ

a Tempo f

3 6 6 œ œ œ œ œ œR œ œœ Ô ®≈ ‰ ‰ ≈ r œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ * 6 6 “‘

much in evidence. The left hand presents the first full statement of the dotted rhythm theme, chords and bass notes rhythmically displaced to suggest a twohanded texture. A brief arpeggiated cadenza leads to the second sentence, which splits into three fragments, each prefaced by another cadenza (example 3.5). Melody, accompaniment, and technical displays of virtuosity are compressed into the opening solo passage, the pianist exhibiting total mastery of the instrument. In the remainder of the exposition, we hear the main enchantée, or the musical material suggestive of a second hand—what Tim Armstrong terms a “negative” prosthesis, which “involves the replacing of a bodily part, covering a lack.”106 106. Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 78.

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The recapitulation’s triumphant affect (R46) at first sounds identical in tone to the resplendence and grandeur of the orchestral exposition (R5), adhering to conventions of sonata form: the opening measures of recapitulations often have a deceptive quality, announcing with great fanfare an arrival that sounds just like the departure. The orchestral music at R46 comes from the second sentence of the solo exposition at R4, where the narrative of heroic overcoming was born, but changes to the orchestration suggest that the recapitulation serves a function markedly different from before. Ravel now distributes musical roles more equitably than in the exposition: the melody (and its harmonization) appears in the upper strings, upper woodwinds, horns, and trumpets, while the piano joins the bass part, playing short cadenzas that separate each phrase. Dispersing musical material throughout the orchestra makes sense here: the pianist has already established his technical bona fides. (No need to beat a dead horse—or an aching left hand.) But it is strange nonetheless to withhold the prosthesis that had enabled Wittgenstein’s expositional heroics at the very moment when the concerto proclaims its triumph. The main enchantée’s absence in the opening measures of the recapitulation suggests that Wittgenstein has not transformed into the sort of virtuoso freak audiences had clamored to hear and see. To be sure, the pianist needs sterling technique here but little more; the technically difficult passages contain arpeggios of fourths and fifths, figures the left hand should reliably carry out despite the wide spacings. (A smaller hand might indeed complicate the task, though elasticity in this passage is more important than size.) The left hand stays mostly in its usual register from R46 to R49, without the sort of rapid, disjunct leaps that might mask the right hand’s absence, the treble notes stemming from arpeggiations or glissandos that involve flowing, continuous left-handed gestures. Yet even though the main enchantée disappears after the exposition, it has already fulfilled its function: spectators have witnessed Wittgenstein’s apparent transformation from disabled pianist to able-bodied virtuoso, enabled with illusory prosthetic support. The main enchantée is thus a method, not an effect. It seems like the latter because it is flaunted in the sort of orchestral finery usually reserved for ceremonial occasions (or ironic swipes at them). But as a method, the main enchantée provides cover for the concerto’s illusion of mechanization, which begins in the development, long after we might expect it, the glare of expositional fireworks still lingering in our eyes. That is the last piece of the puzzle to examine. PAU L W I T T G E N ST E I N : L’ H OM M E M AC H I N E

The illusion of mechanization rests on the conceit that a pianist’s hands can be emblems of selfhood. Hand castings of pianists illustrate how this process of signification might work. Castings were exceedingly common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Clara Schumann, Rach-

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maninoff, Anton Rubinstein, Arthur Rubinstein, and Liberace all had their hands memorialized in plaster or bronze, whether or not they had consented to it. (One reason these castings can make people squirm is because they were sometimes taken postmortem.) Before the widespread use of recording technology, hand castings captured “the elusive acoustic traces of a pianist’s playing,” as Raykoff suggests.107 In this sense, they function like relics—objects associated with, or derived from, a figure of cultural or religious significance, urging upon their keeper remembrance, reflection, and veneration. These tangible emblems of immateriality also allude to the bodies that had produced those lost sounds. If the pianist’s hands are a kind of corporeal synecdoche, then the hand casting is a symbolic embodiment of the pianist himself. A casting of Chopin’s hands could thus bring to mind not only the sound of a beloved nocturne but an image of the man who wrote it (or the man as we might imagine him—pale, slender, and elegantly dressed). The title of Ravel’s concerto might well serve as a linguistic hand casting, aligning the main gauche with the war amputee, and more specifically with Wittgenstein. Even though many other pianists have played the concerto since Wittgenstein’s exclusive rights to it expired in 1936—and played it much better than he did—his body, and the wartime wounds that transformed it, remains imprinted on the piece.108 Images of soldier amputees send conflicting and ambiguous messages through an informational shorthand, functioning as “immediately identifiable signifiers and substitutes for the war itself.”109 So, too, does Ravel’s concerto, recalling through Wittgenstein the machinery of war and the challenges of social, spiritual, and physical restoration. But utopian fantasies promoting advances in technology, medicine, and commerce sprang up in the dystopian postwar cultural landscape, linking images of robust masculinity to national rebirth. In the concerto’s development, Wittgenstein avoids creating or becoming one type of fantasy object, the perpetuum mobile. Instead, he undergoes an apparent transformation that evokes postwar utopian ideals, while undermining the sense of physical restoration implied by the main enchantée. To understand how this apparent transformation works, recall the moment early in the development when the descending triadic motive and the slurred figure functioned as gear mates. After a few repetitions of these motivic pairings, the piano’s left hand entered with the triadic motive one measure early (eight meas107. Raykoff, Dreams of Love, 69. 108. He imprinted himself on the piece in other ways, too, altering the piano and orchestra parts. This resulted in the famous exchange reported by Marguerite Long, Wittgenstein telling Ravel, “Performers must not be slaves,” and Ravel purportedly replying, “Performers are slaves.” This impolitic (and perhaps apocryphal) remark is an anomaly. See Long, At the Piano with Ravel, trans. Olive SeniorEllis (London: Dent, 1973), 59. 109. Seth Koven, “Remembering and Dismemberment: Crippled Children, Wounded Soldiers, and the Great War in Britain,” American Historical Review 99 (October 1994): 1193.

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ures after R16), flipping a switch that initiated a change of gears. If the left hand signifies the pianist’s body, then the motivic rotations moving through piano and orchestra suggest the cooperative interaction of human and machine.110 Indeed, the early entrance of the left hand denotes human intervention in a mechanical process, bringing to mind Watkins’s interpretation of the fermata near the end of Ravel’s Toccata. For Watkins, the music’s hammer-strokes evoke a pilot dodging a rain of machine-gun fire, while the fermata represents the strategic choice to kill the plane’s engine, thus demonstrating the pilot’s mastery over the machine.111 Maybe so—but without the plane, the pilot’s chances of escape are slim. Perhaps we might imagine instead how the fermata suggests the cooperative interdependence of human and machine, enhancing the pilot’s odds of survival. In the concerto, the pianist’s left hand similarly introduces human agency to a mechanical environment by initiating an early change of gear, providing an infusion of external energy. The left hand becomes an organic partner to the orchestral machine, an analogue for the devices Ravel’s father and brother built—machines that purr contentedly in factories and obey thermodynamic laws. If the development initiates this coterminous relationship between human and machine, the recapitulation reveals how the parts have fused, the illusion of mechanization complete. The potency of this illusion relies less on the superembodied wizardry of Liszt, Paderewski, and their ilk than on automated models of virtuosity. Romantic pianists, Leppert claims, might all be likened to machines, their extraordinary capabilities rendering them as mysterious as computers and automobile engines once were. But the aesthetics of mechanical virtuosity seem better suited to some performers than others.112 While no machine could replicate Liszt’s gestural idiosyncrasies, Thalberg’s singing tone and technical economy of means blended expressivity with automated precision.113 Even his hair, typically styled in smooth, closely cropped curls, brought to mind a breed of performer different from Liszt, Rubinstein, or Paderewski, pianists whose untamed locks suggested a rare alloy of poetic beauty and volcanic dynamism.114 110. Imagining the orchestra as a machine is easy to do even in live performance: its members—a bodily metaphor evoking parts of a whole—erase their individuality through their homogenous gesture and dress. 111. Watkins, Proof through the Night, 190. 112. Leppert, “Franz Liszt,” in Piano Roles, 273. 113. One reviewer, describing a recital in Boston, claimed that Thalberg “never misses a note”; another suggested that his execution of Beethoven’s third piano concerto was “a miracle of perfection.” See “Thalberg,” Dwight’s Journal of Music 10 (November 15, 1856): 52; “M. Thalberg’s Concerts,” Dwight’s Journal of Music 10 (January 17, 1857): 126. Douglas Bomberger describes Thalberg’s technique and singing tone in “The Thalberg Effect: Playing the Piano on the Violin,” Musical Quarterly (Summer 1991): 198–208. 114. On Liszt’s hair as a symptom of his “visual excess,” see Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 73–92.

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The concerto defines and subsequently dismantles the physical boundaries of normative human bodies through musical processes that evoke a virtuoso of Thalberg’s type. (It should be said that by most reports, Wittgenstein himself was not of Thalberg’s type; he was called “the string breaker” by Theodor Leschetizky, his teacher.)115 Throughout the exposition, music—whether played by the orchestra or the piano—supplies volume and dramatic heft, filling the void of Wittgenstein’s empty sleeve. Separate expositions for piano and orchestra are conventional in the concerto genre, but in Ravel’s piece, they perform the added function of articulating the dichotomy between body (piano) and prosthesis (orchestra). Though this mapping is not binary (the piano music implying a main enchantée is also linked to supplementation), discrete thematic presentations for piano and orchestra allude to the structural boundaries defining bodily limits and their points of contact with prostheses. In the exposition, conventions of concerto-sonata form— material given to piano and orchestra in turn—define the normative human body; in the recapitulation, the interdependence of soloist and orchestra suggests a blending of body and prosthesis, physical peripheries no longer clearly defined. Wittgenstein’s virtuosity has become mechanical—not because it lacks feeling, but because the pianist has fused with the orchestral machine, just as Thalberg once seemed like an organic extension of his instrument. This fusion takes place in the development, perhaps between R30 and R32, sections that open with upward harp glissandos followed by string harmonics. These effects, which seem incongruous given the piece’s stylistic parameters, may function as musical emblems of transformation, occurring at a point when the relationship between human and machine tilts from coterminous to coincident. If the exposition suggests a pianist wounded by war and assisted by prosthetics, the recapitulation seems to render him whole through a process bypassing the usual taxonomies of physical normality. Wittgenstein appears to become a hybrid figure, his body having interfaced with the machine. The recapitulation thus subverts proposed narratives of heroic overcoming and compensation, instead enacting Armstrong’s notion of the “positive” prosthesis, which involves “a more utopian version of technology, in which human capacities are extrapolated.”116 In this sense, the concerto’s triumphant affect arises from rebirth, not restoration, Wittgenstein apparently transforming into a new sort of being—what we might describe today as a cyborg or, to use a term coined closer to Ravel’s time, a mechanomorph.117

115. Nichols, Ravel, 321. 116. Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body, 78. 117. The writer Gerald Heard invented the term in The Third Morality (New York: William Morrow, 1937) to describe a mechanical cosmology and the living creatures encompassed within it.

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A hint of this illusory transformation comes at the very beginning of the development (R14), which initiates musical processes that seem both organic (vine-like) and mechanical (gear-like). Once the transformational process runs its course in the development, Wittgenstein may be seen as the inverse of Robert-Houdin’s Pastry Chef, whose clockwork gears were set in motion by a child’s hands: he is a mechanical hybrid who looks human. When the final piano cadenza arrives in the recapitulation— the longest solo passage, and the one most reminiscent of Thalberg—its opulent arpeggiations seem to suggest the recrudescence of the main enchantée. But we might instead hear in the cadenza the ascendancy of the organic-mechanical hybrid, whose feats rival those of the freakish, superembodied virtuoso. No prosthetic main enchantée is needed when a thinking machine can take its place. The search for the perfect prosthesis—a device combining function, fashion, and technology, while stretching the limits of human potential—would prove elusive in the postwar years. This was not for lack of trying, as Ana Carden-Coyne points out, the prosthetics industry conflating “perfection with normality” and envisioning the possibility of creating a new breed of human being without susceptibility to pain or physical weakness.118 The war came to be understood as a transformative experience for wounded veterans, turning them into “super automata, imbued with bionic masculinity”119—at least for those with access to highquality prosthetic limbs, which could not be manufactured quickly enough. By extension, the war amputee functioned as a living symbol of postwar cultural rebuilding projects with utopian aims: why restore a broken city when a new civilization could be built in its place? “From the ruins of war,” Lyford notes, “new bodies would spring, in some cases becoming more efficient and productive than before.”120 In such contexts, narratives of overcoming were thus displaced by dreams of idealized transformation. In some circles, postwar fascination with technology among politicians, capitalists, and artists also spurred notions of the ideal worker as an automaton, whose productivity rivals that of the machine. Ravel had imagined the industrial sounds of a factory inspiring composers who were impressed by “the efficiency of the mechanism and . . . the greatness of the brain that conceived it.”121 The factory’s mechanomorphic qualities—its reciprocal interrelation of human and machine— was a key attraction for him. The image of Wittgenstein transfigured through musical technology would have held similar appeal. But this interpretation of the concerto risks viewing Wittgenstein as a novelty product of the consumer culture that romanticized the war, co-opting its imagery for leisure purposes and commercial 118. 119. 120. 121.

Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body, 198. Ibid., 196–97. Lyford, Surrealist Masculinities, 54. Ravel, “Finding Tunes in Factories,” in Ravel Reader, 399.

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gain.122 Ravel understood, as well as any composer of his time, the destructive consequences of technology yoked to militaristic aims. His persistent postwar affection for machines suggests a mind divided—aware that they can maim and ravage, yet awake to the knowledge that doing so requires human intervention. He knows that war turns meadows into cemeteries; his mechanomorphic pianist would not exist were this not the case. But neither, too, would his concerto. Ravel may not have fully subscribed to Le Corbusier’s notion that “we all need means of supplementing our natural capabilities,” even decorative objects serving as functional, prosthetic extensions of the body.123 Yet he would have acceded to Le Corbusier’s claim that war has transformational effects, specifically concerning technological advances.124 These seem to have almost always excited Ravel, regardless of their source. In the Concerto for the Left Hand, he found a way to nurture that excitement, creating a fascinating entanglement of bodies and machines, without the cemeteries. The romanticism of Wittgenstein’s perceived transformation—from pianiste mutilé to peerless cyborg—further dissipates when examined in light of contemporary theories on technology and embodiment. For Donna Haraway, the cyborg is an ironic, hybrid figure that challenges the traditional Western dualism of self and other by reifying the permeability of the body, revealing it to be an open network instead of a closed system.125 The cyborg is, to adopt R. L. Rutsky’s explanation, “not a matter of armoring the body, adding robotic prostheses, or technologically transferring consciousness from the body; it is not, in other words, a matter of fortifying the boundaries of the subject. . . . It is rather a matter of unsecuring the subject.”126 For other posthuman theorists, including Katherine Hayles, the distinction between body and prosthesis is a false one: we all must discover how to wield the body, our “original prosthesis”; extending or replacing body parts merely continues a process that began before birth.127 Though such a theory risks minimizing the traumatic effects of severe impairments or catastrophic injury, it promotes the adage that the able-bodied who live long enough will become

122. For more on the “pleasure culture of war,” see Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities (New York: Routledge, 1994), esp. 233–58; also CardenCoyne, Reconstructing the Body, 108–9. 123. Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today (1925), trans. James I. Dunnett (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987/1925), 72–73. 124. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 161. 125. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81, with perhaps the clearest formulation on 177. 126. R. L. Rutsky, High Technē: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 21. 127. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3.

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disabled: they are all temporarily able-bodied.128 It also suggests that the compositional restrictions imposed by writing for one hand might be understood as a simulation of disability—that by “enabling Wittgenstein, Ravel disables Ravel.”129 The experience of disability is thus no longer contained within the pianist’s body, but rather is something shared, acknowledging that all bodies undergo supplementation and replacement. Wittgenstein’s body, divided between organic matter and musical prosthesis, acquires a technological interface (a mechanical partner in the orchestra), making him seem like a new, transcendent sort of being. We perceive this transformation because we make assumptions about the nature of bodies—that they are normative, whole, and healthy, with clearly marked physical boundaries. But no body is completely whole; all are “in the process of becoming,” re-creating themselves in the moment.130 We distinguish between Wittgenstein and his main enchantée because we understand ourselves as divided beings, without recognizing how the self incorporates the technological and prosthetic other. Devices do more than extend our thinking: they expand the boundaries of our minds and bodies. Andy Clark describes how the writer’s pen and paper or the artist’s sketchpad becomes a kind of “transparent equipment,” turning the brain into a system that assimilates both biological material and nonbiological tools.131 Though it may seem that our brains create stores of knowledge that feed our conscious thoughts, much of what we know lives outside ourselves. Think of vision, which consists of an external “database” from which our sensory apparatus constructs an image; note how newborns’ sight must be interactively tuned and shaped by their environment in order to function normally.132 Thus the mind does not exist within the seal of its “biological skin-bag,” as Clark memorably puts it; Jennifer Iverson asserts similarly that “we cannot be outside of this technological supplement because it is us.”133 The perceptual processes that enable us to witness Wittgenstein change from disabled pianist to cyborg include the organic technology needed to collect and interpret sensory data. But 128. This notion is common in disability studies, though my specific reference comes from Brenda Jo Brueggemann, “Disability Studies/Disability Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology and Disability, ed. Michael L. Wehmeyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 288. 129. Michael Davidson, “Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability (in the) Arts,” PMLA 120 (March 2005): 616. 130. Jennifer Iverson, “Mechanized Bodies: Technology and Supplements in Björk’s Electronica,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, ed. Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Neil Lerner, and Joseph Straus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 170. Iverson suggests that Björk’s use of technology transcends dichotomies of body and machine, self and other. 131. Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 38. 132. Ibid., 69, 85. 133. Iverson, “Mechanized Bodies,” 171.

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because we cannot see outside or around these processes, our subjectivity relies on a constructed sense of wholeness—in other words, on an illusion. In Wittgenstein’s transformation from divided self to cyborg, we can see ourselves: both whole and forever incomplete. BAC K S TAG E W I T H B OL É R O

It would be too strong to say Ravel held Boléro in a certain contempt. He did profess some affection for it, claiming it was the one piece in which he had completely attained his goals.134 But many of his remarks about Boléro nevertheless read like self-deprecating punch lines. Roger Nichols summarizes the best of them, starting with Ravel’s response to a woman who shouted “Rubbish!” at the work’s premiere: “She got the message!” To Paul Paray, who asked whether the composer wanted to gamble at a Monte Carlo casino, Ravel said, “I wrote Boléro and won. I’ll stick there.” To Ernest Ansermet’s remark that the piece was very good, he responded, “I really can’t think why.” Perhaps most memorably, he reported to Honegger, “I’ve only written one masterpiece—Boléro. Unfortunately, there’s no music in it.”135 Though Ravel was known to praise or criticize aspects of his own music, Boléro was the only piece he targeted with dismissive, habitual jesting.136 And yet it could be argued that the piece is his most characteristic, marrying two of his lifelong loves—machines and Spanish effects—in a manner reflecting the composer’s personality and genetic makeup. (He was, after all, the son of a Swiss engineer and a Basque fisherwoman.) Certainly it is his most celebrated work today in the popular imagination. Boléro is known for its singularity, but its methods and effects are not unique— either in Ravel’s output or in Western music generally. It weaves an illusion of mechanization, like the two piano concertos, using motoric musical processes that adhere to thermodynamic laws. Instead of simulating machines, the piece is a musical machine reminiscent of human automaticity; to borrow Janet Levy’s description of a pair of Beethoven bagatelles, it doesn’t mime the mechanical but is rather “being mechanical.”137 If Boléro’s apparent focus on timbre and repetition 134. Pierre Leroi, “Some Confessions of the Great Composer Maurice Ravel,” Excelsior, October 30, 1931, in Ravel Reader, 486; “Quelques confidences du grand compositeur Maurice Ravel,” in Lettres, écrits, entretiens, 370–71. 135. Nichols, Ravel, 302. 136. Ravel did describe Pavane pour une infante défunte as an “imperfect and unadventurous work” that suffered from both poor form and “the excessive influence of Chabrier,” but this did not prevent him from orchestrating it in 1910. See “The Lamoureux Orchestra Concerts” in Ravel Reader, 340; “Concerts Lamoureux,” in Lettres, écrits, entretiens, 295. 137. Janet Levy, “ ‘Something Mechanical Encrusted on the Living’: A Source of Musical Wit and Humor,” in Convention in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Music: Essays in Honor of Leonard G. Ratner, ed. Wye Jamison Allanbrook and Janet M. Levy (New York: Pendragon Press, 1992), 230.

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seems extraordinary, especially for its time, it is because Ravel has foregrounded these qualities to conceal other illusory effects, including the extent to which most pieces of Western music rely on similar illusions of structure and motion. In 1931, Ravel gave an interview with Calvocoressi, after Boléro had already grown famous for what may have been, to his mind, the wrong reasons. His effort to correct the record about the piece’s meaning and significance (or lack thereof) has not received due credit for its ingenious misdirection. Though well known in excerpts, Ravel’s comments merit a lengthy quotation in context: I am particularly desirous that there should be no misunderstanding about this work. It constitutes an experiment in a very special and limited direction, and should not be suspected of achieving anything different from, or anything more than, it actually does achieve. Before its first performance, I issued a warning to the effect that what I had written was a piece lasting seventeen minutes and consisting wholly of “orchestral tissue without music”—of one long, very gradual crescendo. There are no contrasts, and there is practically no invention except the plan and the manner of execution.138

Of course, Ravel had taken similar declarative stances before: to listeners who heard La Valse as a life-and-death struggle or a depiction of postwar Vienna, he countered that the work had no “symbolic significance.”139 But his interpretation of Boléro is still more categorical. It reads, moreover, like a perverse version of the salesmanship Haydn had once used to market his Op. 33 String Quartets—the ones written, he had claimed, in an “entirely new and special manner.” Ravel inverts Haydn’s tactic, pointing out what is new in Boléro by enumerating all of the things the piece doesn’t contain: contrasts, “invention,” and ultimately, music. It does feature a “long, very gradual crescendo,” or so says Ravel—accurately, if only partially so. Equally notable is the composer’s use of the term “experiment.” If this word describes the pursuit of new effects—as Haydn once put it, to “observe what produced an effect and what weakened it” —then Ravel conducted many such experiments throughout his career.140 They would have included skirting the margins of tonality in Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé and Chansons madécasses; voicing final syllables usually left mute in Histoires naturelles and L’Heure espagnole; and orchestrating for unusual instruments, like the luthéal in L’Enfant et les Sortilèges and Tzigane, or the sarrusophone in Rapsodie espagnole and the Shéhérazade overture. Rarely, if ever, did Ravel describe these ventures publicly as experiments. Had 138. Calvocoressi, “M. Ravel Discusses His Own Work,” in Ravel Reader, 477. 139. Interview with C.v.W., “The French Music Festival,” in Ravel Reader, 423; “Le Festival de musique française,” in Lettres, écrits, entretiens, 345. 140. Quoted in Karl Geiringer and Irene Geiringer, Haydn: A Creative Life in Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 71.

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Boléro been a flop, he might have rationalized its failure by pointing to its avowedly exploratory qualities, but there was no need to justify the piece on these grounds, since it enjoyed widespread acclaim—enough that he might have felt both gratified and embarrassed by it. Why embarrassed? Not, I think, because he truly believed he had composed a piece that contained no music, but because for the first time, he made his musical processes thoroughly transparent. In a bold, perhaps foolhardy maneuver, he had invited listeners onto a stage rigged with pulleys and trap doors, hoping he could perform his tricks up close without giving away their secrets. (He had tried closeup magic before, but never on an entire piece.) Perhaps this transparent compositional process helps explain his claim that “no single composer likes the Boléro— and from their point of view they are quite right.”141 The piece gave something away, violating an unspoken code of secrecy. Ravel’s interview with Calvocoressi was one of many instances in which he sought to impose a particular vision of Boléro. In the autobiographical sketch dictated to Roland-Manuel, he mentions the piece as his most recently completed work and describes it matter-of-factly as “a dance in a very moderate tempo and absolutely uniform with regard to the melody, harmony, and the rhythm, which is marked unceasingly by the snare drum.” So far, so good. But then he adds, “The only element of variety is provided by the orchestral crescendo.”142 This, of course, is patently untrue; nevertheless, Ravel would repeat it in the Calvocoressi interview, remarking that “there are no contrasts” in the piece.143 These are the sort of definitive, unqualified claims that I wish to subject to scrutiny. Harmonically, the piece comprises alternating tonic and dominant harmonies in C major for 325 measures. The transposition to E major at measure 326 provides harmonic relief for eight bars before the music returns to C. The piece features two themes—the first diatonic, the second with modal and chromatic inflections, both of which cycle in pairs, AABB, until the very end when they occur back to back, AB. Underpinning these themes are two ostinatos: one appears first in the snare drum and surface rhythms, the other in the violas and cellos, articulating the triple meter and tonic-dominant harmony. The structure and proportions of the piece— eighteen thematic statements occurring in eighteen-bar sections—resemble Poe’s poem The Raven, which also contains eighteen stanzas, as Nichols and Michael Lanford have pointed out.144 Further, the obsessive repetitions in Boléro, borne out 141. M. D. Calvocoressi, “M. Ravel Discusses His Own Work: The Boléro Explained,” Daily Telegraph, July 11, 1931, in Ravel Reader, 478. 142. Ravel, “Autobiographical sketch,” in Ravel Reader, 33; “Esquisse autobiographique,” in Lettres, écrits, entretiens, 47. 143. Calvocoressi, “M. Ravel Discusses His Own Work,” in Ravel Reader, 477. 144. Michael Lanford, “Ravel and ‘The Raven’: The Realisation of an Inherited Aesthetic in Boléro,” Cambridge Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2011): 264; Nichols, Ravel, 302.

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through the persistent use of two ostinatos, two themes, and two structural harmonies, recall how Poe claimed to pursue in The Raven “continuously novel effects, by the variation of the application of the refrain—the refrain itself remaining, for the most part, unvaried.” Poe sought unity of effect by attending to the poem’s duration, tone, and structure, as well as the balance between variety and repetition. Ravel’s comments on Boléro admit similar concerns, including a firm sense of the piece’s duration (about seventeen minutes under his baton, though much shorter under Toscanini’s).145 The trouble with the way I have sketched the form of Boléro above is that it only takes melody, harmony, and rhythm into account. Analytical sketches and graphs always foreground certain musical elements while neglecting others, but even given this understanding, a typical formal sketch of Boléro is remarkable for what it fails to include. It reveals so little because the piece inverts the relationship between method and effect, turning the pairing inside out. Our ears are thus drawn immediately to the piece’s method, in which Ravel manipulates repeated and varied elements to generate maximal interest. But this method seems less a means for producing particular effects than it does a general description of compositional process: couldn’t the method of every piece be reduced, in some respect, to the relationship between repeated and varied elements? Thus Boléro is at once compelling and perplexing, varying “nonstructural” musical elements like timbre to challenge how we hear and analyze all sorts of music. Listeners who dislike the piece may feel it wears its gimmickry on its sleeve; in fact, its overt display of method also generates an illusion of static motion (or motional stasis) similar to that found in Poulenc’s Trois mouvements perpétuels and Stravinsky’s Petrushka, discussed in chapter 1. Though it may seem that Boléro is as different from those pieces as a sweater from a sock, all three are knit from the same material. The key difference is that in Ravel’s piece, the yarn is turned inside out. To illustrate how the stitching works, let us first return to the question of Boléro’s form. As many listeners know, the piece begins quietly, with just three instruments, gradually expanding its volume, density, and register as the ostinatos and melodic themes recruit more instruments to their ranks. Thanks to Ravel’s orchestration, no sectional repetition is alike. Even the internal repetitions are continuously varied: different solo instruments and choirs play each A and B, without exception. A map of the piece taking texture and timbre into account would bear little resemblance to the “AABB: repeat” model. Instead, it would look something like 145. When Toscanini conducted the North American premiere of Boléro in 1929, Ravel was displeased with the tempo, which he deemed too quick. He reiterated this complaint in a 1931 interview for De Telegraaf, noting that “Toscanini conducts it twice as fast as it should go, and broadens out at the end, which is not indicated anywhere.” But the problem didn’t begin and end with Toscanini: for Ravel, the piece was “rarely performed the way I think it should be.” See “A Visit with Maurice Ravel,” in Ravel Reader, 474; “Une visite chez Maurice Ravel,” in Lettres, écrits, entretiens, 362.

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this: A1 A2 B1 B2/A3 A4 B3 B4/A5 A6 B5 B6/A7 A8 B7 B8/A9 B9/coda. Perhaps any piece of music (say, a Brahms piano concerto) would benefit from a formal sketch representing conventionally nonstructural elements, revealing hidden relationships through a richer grain of representative detail—a line of thinking running counter to Schenkerian-inspired trends. Indeed, focusing on how texture and timbre articulate Boléro‘s form reveals its singularity to be a contrivance if we remember that the structure of many pieces rests on elements most apparent in the musical surface. Boléro also questions how we represent musical structure in ways that unsettle hierarchical notions of surface and depth, harmony and timbre, structure and ornament.146 Inversions of these hierarchies unfold in various combinations throughout the piece, furnishing a method for its illusion of static motion (or motional stasis). I call this phenomenon an illusion because it constructs a perceptual experience that doesn’t accord with veridical experience. Musical motion, like temporal passage, seems to whoosh by through space—but according to the evidence explored in chapter 1, it doesn’t. Poulenc created apparent musical motion in Trois mouvements perpétuels by rendering the piece’s static qualities less salient, letting its homogeneous texture and moderately quick tempo convey an impression of movement. Stravinsky took a different approach in the fourth tableau of Petrushka, blurring foreground and background gestures to create a glittering, propulsive musical surface that sounds arrested in time, its animated qualities suspended by harmonic oscillations. Ravel incorporates both strategies in Boléro. Overall, the piece’s cycling of themes, enmeshed in surface and background ostinatos, implies stasis, while its variety of orchestral timbres and textures evokes movement. This tension between static and motional elements appears at multiple structural levels in the piece. (Figure 3.5, which illustrates how we might understand these relationships at different points, is a touchstone for the remainder of this section.) Take, for example, the opening measures, where repetition, circularity, and directional teleology all jostle for prominence. We quickly learn that the tonic-dominant progression articulated by violas and cellos is a progression in name only. The palpitations of the snare drum ostinato have a compulsory sort of appeal, but these surface rhythms fade to an agreeable background noise by measure five, when theme A enters—a wholly diatonic creation whose novelty lies in its serpentine shape, sixteenth notes curling around longer pitches like beguiling wisps of smoke. Theme A’s meandering circularity exhibits a number of decorative qualities, as Bhogal notes, including its “unpredictable shifts between short and long durations” that can be variously 146. Bhogal examines figure-ground relationships in the piece in “Orchestral Tissue, Subordinate Arabesques, and Turning Inward in Maurice Ravel’s Boléro,” Music Theory Online 26, no. 2 (June 2020): 10.

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A motional M

B

R H

O

AABB (1-9)

M Tx Tm

R H

O

M Tx Tm

AABB (9-18)

R Tx Tm H

O R

H M

Tx Tm O R

static

Whole piece

A motional M

Tx Tm

R H

O

Tx Tm

M

H

O R

static fig. 3.5 . Static and motional tendencies in Boléro’s A and B themes, first half (repetitions 1–9), and second half (9–18). M = melody, H = structural harmony, O = snare drum ostinato, R = cross rhythms, Tx = texture, Tm = timbre.

grouped in twos or threes.147 But unlike arabesque melodies, whose rhythmic irregularities “elongate our experience of time,” theme A is imbued with directional movement, its duple rhythms becoming most active on the third beat of the measure, propelling the melody forward (example 3.6). Heard in concert with the V-I ostinato, the theme’s undulating shape molds itself to the meter, reinforcing its accenting patterns and promoting a sense of metrical entrainment. Theme B, which first appears in the taut, high register of the bassoon at R2, introduces the flatted seventh (BH) and ninth (DH), the latter implying an excursion to Phrygian mode (especially evident in the embellished descending tetrachord F–EH–DH–C). Like theme A, it snakes and spirals its way around, but rhythmically theme B is more varied and insistent: the syncopated repetitions of DH have an incantatory quality that stretches the temporal envelope despite the osti147. Ibid., 3.

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ex. 3.6 . Ravel, Boléro, first phrase of theme A, mm. 5–12. Fl. solo

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nato’s metric articulations (see example 3.7). Bhogal describes this melody as an arabesque, its key characteristics including metrical ambiguity, conflicting duple and triple rhythmic groupings, and a “balanced registral motion” concluding with a gradual descent.148 If the accompanying snare and V-I ostinatos frustrate linear teleology, implying circularity and stasis, theme B’s rhythmic variety generates interest and directional thrust, as do the cross-rhythms between melody and snare ostinato (also present, to a lesser extent, in theme A). Even though a succession of solo instruments performs the first repetitions of A and B, these changes of timbre are perhaps not compelling enough to achieve attentional salience over the melody—yet. Thus from the opening to the end of R3 (after the second B of AABB concludes), the melody and its cross-rhythms seem motional, while texture, timbre, structural harmony, and the ostinatos themselves feel static, as figure 3.5 shows. One limitation of the way I have represented the motional and static qualities of Boléro’s themes thus far is the way it reduces perceptual experience to strict temporal parameters. We are constantly modifying our expectations as we listen, and each new percept, as David Lewin notes, carries within it qualities of other percepts, like the anticipation or realization of particular harmonies. It is thus impossible to identify a specific musical event without taking into account what precedes and follows it; grouped together, these events form a perpetually recursive sequence, or an infinite loop.149 If Boléro highlights this perceptual problem through its figure-ground fluidity, it also supplies the very solution to the infinite 148. Ibid., 6. 149. See David Lewin, “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception,” Music Perception 3 (Summer 1986): 330–31. For an explanation of Lewin’s thinking in somewhat plainer language, see Brian Kane, “The Madeleine and the Rusk: From Morgengruß: to ‘Phenomenology,’ ” in David Lewin’s Morgengruß: Text, Context, Commentary, ed. David Bard-Schwarz and Richard Cohn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 137–38.

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ex. 3.7 . Ravel, Boléro, first phrase of theme B, two measures after R2.

> 3 & 4 bœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ bœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ Bn. solo

mp

> > œ bœ-. œ-. œ-. œ-. b-œ œ- œ- œ œbœ œ œ œ bœ œ bœbœ œœœ œ & J J > 3

-. -. bœ œ ‰ b œ œ J ˙

j ‰ œ

loop that Lewin himself would propose: an external interruption in the form of the E major transposition. (Lewin, who describes the cycle of Siegmund watching Sieglinde watching Siegmund in Die Walküre, notes that four Wagner tubas also “make an excellent external interrupt.”) We’ll turn to Boléro‘s cataclysmic ending in a moment, but for now, I simply wish to note the difficulty in isolating our perception of discrete musical elements, given their sonic and temporal commingling. Despite this, I think we learn something important about how Boléro works by comparing those elements of the piece that seem generally “fixed” with those that seem generally “fluid.” If we accept the assignment of static and motional concurrences in the first AABB statement as proposed in figure 3.5, then we can see how musical elements in different sections of the piece might shift our perceptions of motion and stasis. Dipping into the piece selectively cannot replace a diachronic hearing, in which our expectations alter moment to moment, but sampling the piece can suggest the totality of our impressions at that point—a limited yet clarifying window into our perception of musical processes.150 Let’s take as an example the section beginning at R7, when the piccolos, celesta, and solo horn play theme A, while the snare drum, horns, and flutes accompany with the ostinato. This is the fifth time we have heard theme A, its intriguing contours and constantly changing instrumentation keeping it from wearing out its welcome. It still has motional qualities, both for the first-time listener (who might be holding out hope that it will change) and for the repeat listener (who knows the piece is about halfway finished). Cross-rhythms between melody and surface ostinato might continue to appeal to some listeners, but for others, their salience might be starting to fade. (Figure 3.5 shows how these rhythms might be static, motional, or switching between the two.) Timbre and texture begin playing struc150. What constitutes a point in time? I’m thinking of the specious present as described by William James, typically considered a temporal interval with brief extension. See James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt, 1918), 605–42.

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tural roles, the music having already cycled through solos in the soprano and tenor saxophones and the oboe d’amore before reaching the peculiar combination of horn, celesta, and piccolo at R7. We are starting to recognize that the usual modes of musical locomotion—harmonic progression, for example—cannot be relied upon in this piece. Such impressions are likely to be reinforced as the piece unfolds, with one exception: the harmonic stasis created by the V-I ostinato will be undermined by multilayer harmonizations that intensify passing dissonance, producing an elevated sense of urgency. Comparing our impressions of Boléro in the first minute of listening to the last, we find that its motional and structural elements have inverted: melodies and cross-rhythms that first propelled the piece become fixed, like comfortable room furnishings, while timbre and texture—elements conventionally serving a decorative or marginally structural role—end up providing the only dependable, directional teleology in the piece. But whether we are listening to the beginning or ending of Boléro, we experience an illusion of static motion or motional stasis. (I use both phrases because the noun in each receives more weight.) Throughout the piece, we sense movement without passage. The elements creating this impression change from section to section and moment to moment, existing in a state of equilibrium: if one tilts toward motion, another drifts toward stasis. Over the course of the piece, timbre and texture wriggle to the foreground, becoming structural elements suggestive of motion; melody and harmony balance them out, retreating to the static background. Boléro’s conspicuous method demonstrates how most pieces of Western music are shaped by the relative emphasis given to various musical elements, making the difference between Boléro and any other piece one of degree, not kind. This inversion of structural elements also relates to Ravel’s use of musical ornament in his piano and orchestral music. Bhogal asks of ornament, “What does the decorative decorate when it is no longer rendered peripheral or subordinate?”151 Her question is less semantic than conceptual, capturing the sense of disorientation listeners experience when confronted with music that upends binary systems, like center and periphery or surface and depth. The structural inversion in Boléro is remarkable because it remains consistent with the aesthetic values Ravel had cherished early in his career, despite his salesmanship about the work’s eccentricities. In prewar pieces like Miroirs, Gaspard de la nuit, and Daphnis et Chloé, Ravel creates “perceptual confusion,” as Bhogal describes it, ornamental incursions saturating the musical surface with overwhelming rhythmic and metric instability.152 Boléro, written more than two decades later, upholds similar principles in a wholly transparent way, as if Ravel had set out to write a primer for the contrarian composer on how to topple the musical hierarchy in seventeen minutes or less. Misdirectional cues 151. Bhogal, Details of Consequence, 6. 152. Ibid., 155.

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aside, it is more similar to the waterscapes and jeweled curios of Ravel’s early career than we have assumed. M AC H I N E S R E A L A N D I M AG I N E D

Few music critics described the early ballet productions of Boléro in mechanical terms. The spectacle of the dancer Ida Rubinstein atop a table, her sinuous movements enticing the male dancers encircling her into a foot-stomping frenzy, led them rather to speak of “feverish obsession,” “vertigo,” and “infectious madness.”153 The language of magic and sorcery turned up in reviews of concert and ballet performances alike: the piece was an “incantation,” an “extraordinary suite of musical mirages” that “partakes of magic,” its composer a “magician of the orchestra.”154 When Ravel conducted the piece at the Concerts-Lamoureux in early 1930, Pierre de Lapommeraye described how, at the summons of the composer’s baton, each instrument emerged in turn “as if from a trap door,” gradually bringing forth a hallucinatory vision of dancers overtaken by vertiginous intoxication; only Ravel kept his composure (sang-froid). The whole spectacle was, Lapommeraye concluded, “a very fine effect.”155 André George thought of Boléro as a rather obvious sleight of hand for the “magician of Daphnis,” who usually resorted to less elementary means. But he nevertheless found the trick compelling because he avoided linking “his sense of reason to his sense of pleasure.” (Behold, Robert-Houdin’s clever man.)156 Most of these critics were having their say before Ravel’s media campaign had started in earnest. In 1930, the composer suggested that Boléro’s repetitions occur “to the point of obsession, without any picturesque intention.”157 In two later interviews, he claimed machinist origins for the piece, noting how he would enjoy seeing it performed with a factory in the background—perhaps not a picturesque scenario in a traditional sense, but a mise-en-scène nonetheless.158 The notion that he had conceived of the A and B themes as chain links or factory assemblages was reported by

153. See Henry Malherbe, “Chronique musicale,” Le Temps, November 28, 1928, 3; Louis Schneider, “Le ‘Gaulois’ au théâtre,” Le Gaulois, November 24, 1928, 4; Gaston de Pawlowski, “Les Ballets de Mme. Ida Rubinstein,” Le Journal, November 24, 1928, 4. Ravel wrote Boléro for Rubinstein, who had originally wanted an orchestration of six pieces from Albéniz’s Iberia. See Nichols, Ravel, 294. 154. André George, “La Musique: Les Ballets de Mme. Rubinstein,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, artistiques et scientifiques, December 8, 1928, 11; Marcel Belviane, “Concerts-Lamoureux,” Le Ménestrel, October 24, 1930, 446; Henry Prunières, “La Musique en France et à l’étranger,” La Revue musicale, (January 1929): 243; Aubin, “Concerts-Colonne,” 433. 155. Pierre de Lapommeraye, “Concerts-Lamoureux,” Le Ménestrel, January 17, 1930, 27. 156. George, “La Musique,” 11. 157. José André, “Maurice Ravel and His Boléro,” La Naçion, March 15, 1930, in Ravel Reader, 468. 158. “Factory Gives Composer Inspiration,” in Ravel Reader, 490; “Finding Tunes in Factories,” in Ravel Reader, 400.

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René Chalupt and cannot be corroborated elsewhere.159 However, Ravel did write to Roland-Manuel in October 1928, noting that he needed to complete Boléro “using the same material that you assured me Prokofiev employed in Le Pas d’acier”— which, as Orenstein posits, was probably the relentless ostinatos in “Fabrika.”160 It took about eighteen months for Ravel to start asserting Boléro’s mechanical inspiration publicly and repeatedly, making it easy to overlook the discrepancies that had arisen between critical perceptions of the piece (vertiginous, infectious madness) and those of the composer (obsessive repetition via mechanical process). But Pierre Capdevielle’s analytical essay, published in June 1930, acknowledges the impassive, mechanical qualities of Boléro while questioning the views of critics who described the piece as “hallucinatory” or “phantasmal” (fantomatique): the piece is “too direct, too biting, too real to be spectral or visionary.”161 Rhythm, he claims, is its primary allure, just as in The Rite of Spring or Pacific 231—“stripped down, even banal,” the obsessive force that drives the piece.162 Although he was not the earliest commentator to observe the structural significance of Boléro’s rhythm, Capdevielle is among the first to have discovered its provenance in machines. Similar themes may be found in René Levy’s striking review of the ConcertsLamoureux, published a few months before Capdevielle’s essay. For Levy, the transposition to E major—a “howling of explosive joy from the whole orchestra”— explains the significance of the piece writ large: Early on, the soli of the woodwinds, which introduces the motive chanted by the bolero’s rhythm and punctuated by the harp and snare, represents the dancers, somewhere in a dive in the heart of Spain. And so contagious is their example that little by little, the spectators and listeners seem won over, one after the other, by an epidemic, a frenzy, an ever-growing intoxication of sound, of timbre, of rhythm. . . . And the whole street, the whole town, soon seems to take part in this dance which seizes everyone—those protean but uniformly enslaved puppets—to submit to this extraordinary, mysterious, and irresistible force that is rhythm, of which our whole being is, perhaps, only an emanation. . . . And this final “vociferation” is no doubt just an orgiastic acclamation of the all-powerful motor of life itself.163 159. Chalupt and Gerar, Ravel au miroir de ses lettres, 237–38. 160. Ravel to Roland-Manuel, October 4, 1928, in Ravel Reader, 298; in Lettres, écrits, entretiens, 264. Ravel attended the premiere of Le Pas d’acier; see Mawer, “Musical Objects and Machines,” 61. 161. Pierre Capdevielle, “Deux poèmes choreographiques de Maurice Ravel,” Le Monde musical, June 30, 1930, 249. 162. Ibid., 250. 163. René Levy, “Notes de musique,” La Nouvelle Revue, March 15, 1930, 152–53. “Les soli des bois qui, dès l’abord, exposent le motif scandé par le rythme du boléro qui ponctuent la harpe et le tambour, représentent des danseurs, quelque part dans un bouge au fond des Espagnes. Et si contagieux est leur exemple que spectateurs et auditeurs semblent, petit à petit, gagnés les uns après les autres par une épidémie, une frénésie, une ivresse toujours croissante de sons, de timbres, de rythmes. . . . Et toute la rue, et toute la ville bientôt semble prendre part à cette danse qui s’empare d’un chacun pour le

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At first, Levy’s description of the bolero—magnetic, vivifying, stereotypically “Spanish”—mirrors that of other critics, including those who attended concert rather than ballet performances of it. (Lapommeraye had also projected choreographic imagery onto a concert rendition.) It seems, too, that for Levy the bolero becomes a kind of madness which grips the populace, transforming spectators into dancers scarcely conscious of their movements. But reading Levy’s account in the same way he understood Boléro—from back to front, shaped wholly by its conclusion—suggests a very different interpretation resting upon the “all-powerful motor of life.” The dancing bodies in Levy’s interpretation are machines, the piece’s rhythm functioning like Bergson’s élan vital, a vital impulse common to all living things. Yet in contrast to the Bergsonian view, the bolero rhythm has strong mechanical tendencies; dancers are “uniformly enslaved” not only because of rhythmic contagion, but also because they already possess the qualities of biological automaticity. If Boléro is a machine, then it is, more specifically, a human motor. The motoric qualities of the piece have been noticed before. Deborah Mawer points out, for example, how Boléro presents not a steady crescendo, but a series of dynamic terraces—or, put another way, the “phased depression of a lever” in place of “organic growth.”164 She describes the fixed elements in the piece—melody, structural harmony, and the snare ostinato—as interlocking cogs.165 If these mechanically positioned elements produce an apparently steady crescendo, Ravel is constantly adjusting the relationships between them, often favoring asymmetrical proportions. This pattern is most clearly evident at the beginning of the piece. The snare ostinato struggles at first to gain adherents, pairing with the flute from R1 to R3, departing for the bassoon at R4, then forsaking bassoon for horn at R5. But the structural harmony, played first by the violas and cellos, quickly gathers followers: harp at R2, second violin and contrabass at R4, and first violin at R5. Disjunct expansions and contractions across the orchestra belie the perception of continuous sonic growth—as when, for example, the horn-snare drum pairing at R15 mushrooms into a virtual army at R16, recruiting clarinet, oboe, and half of the second violin, viola, and cello sections. This moment suggests a key shift in the mechanical balance among the cogs, the ostinato saturating the texture and reflecting Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion of a shift from quality to quantity, pairs of instruments accreting a collective mass of sound.166

soumettre, pantin protéiforme mais uniformément asservi, à cette force inouïe, mystérieuse et irrésistible qu’est le rythme, dont tout notre être n’est, après tout peut-être, qu’une émanation. . . . Et la ‘vocifération’ finale n’est sans doute qu’une orgiaque acclamation du tout puissant moteur de toute vie.” 164. Deborah Mawer, “Ballet and the Apotheosis of the Dance,” in Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Mawer, 156. 165. Mawer, “Ballet and the Apotheosis,” 157. 166. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Boléro de Maurice Ravel,” L’Homme 11, no. 2 (1971): 12.

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Placing Lévi-Strauss’s interpretation alongside Levy’s, we might be left with a grim view of mechanization, instrumentalists beginning the piece as individuals but gradually becoming automatons, fulfilling their perfunctory role in the bolero’s vast, indifferent machinery. This view would accord with Lanford’s claim that Ravel “thoroughly dehumanises one of the most sensuously connotative aspects of the bolero” by giving the rhythmic ostinato, traditionally played by a strummed instrument, to the snare drum, long associated with war. Lanford also points out oppositional tensions between the rigidity of the snare ostinato and the melodic curves of theme A, which Mawer relates to the tension in flamenco dance between the “percussive foundation (castanets, guitar, hand-clapping, heel-stamping) and the expressive vocal melody trying to break free.”167 When Boléro ends with a wail on a poisoned plagal cadence, it signals a catastrophic mechanical failure—or, for Mawer, the “destruction of the (inhuman) mechanism and death of the (human) dance.” But instead of observing tensions between human and machine in Boléro, we might identify such tensions within ourselves. The pairing of the snare ostinato with the serpentine curves of the vocally inspired theme A might reflect the biomechanical processes of automation in muscle movement, respiration, or the heart’s electrical system; indeed, the tonic-dominant ostinato on beats one and three resembles the uneven rhythmic intervals of a heartbeat (shorter duration for systole, longer for diastole). Think of the fixed action patterns found in the behaviors of animals and, to a lesser degree, humans: once an external stimulus initiates a pattern, it proceeds through to completion, like an inexorable mechanical process.168 (Try interrupting a yawn.) Orchestral musicians who have played the piece can attest to the way it heightens both our reliance on automaticity and our desire to transcend it. Many of the orchestral parts are difficult, individually and in groups: the bassoonist grapples with a high register, awkward fingerings, and ruthless exposure in the first appearance of theme B, while other instrumentalists struggle with tuning and blending the same pitches across multiple octaves. For the snare drum player, who has spent countless hours perfecting an easeful technique, the piece demands absolute precision and control without respite—a task well suited to an automaton, which might be programmed to increase its volume with each melodic repetition.169 But replacing the snare player with a robot (or a drum machine) would be counterproductive, eliminating the strife between automation and impulse—the near-perfection of a finely honed musical technique and the ever-present possibility that it could fail, leading to disaster, discovery, or both. 167. Mawer, Ballets of Maurice Ravel, 223. 168. I’d like to thank Malcolm Hill, a former colleague of mine in biology at the University of Richmond, who explained to me how fixed action patterns work. 169. Muscles locking or seizing up is a legitimate concern: many snare players drape a cloth over the drum head or wear a piece of felt around their waists to muffle the sound at the beginning of the piece.

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In 1928, there was little precedent for a piece of music whose variety depended almost wholly on changing textures and timbres. (Webern’s Op. 21, with its glimmering Klangfarbenmelodie, was written that same year.) To Ravel’s contemporaries, who were hearing Boléro’s inexorable melodies for the first time, the piece may indeed have sounded bewitched. It may also have seemed reminiscent of the perpetuum mobile, at least until the moment it roared, then ground to a halt. Jankélévitch described the E major transposition, fourteen bars from the end, as if it had sprung from a fairy tale: it “suddenly shatters the spell,” allowing the music to whirl toward its “liberating coda,”170 bringing to mind Dukas’s sorcerer, who declares the incantation that brings the mob of brooms clattering to the floor. A perpetuum mobile would indeed need a magic spell to free it, because such machines cannot exist. But Ravel’s bolero, like the human motor, obeys natural laws; it experiences transformation as a by-product of thermodynamic processes. If we look more closely at Boléro, we see that it bears little resemblance to the musical perpetuum mobile, which tends toward rapid tempos, homogeneous textures, pulsating surface rhythms, very few rests, and a nonlinear structure governed by overarching principle instead of local musical events. Boléro, by contrast, unfolds at a moderate tempo ( = 72), includes two bars of melodic rest between thematic statements, and changes texture with Ravel’s diversifying orchestration. Only the steady rhythm of the snare ostinato and its predominant structural nonlinearity align it with the typical perpetuum mobile. The first law of thermodynamics tells us that energy in a closed system can be transformed but cannot be created or destroyed. Boléro presents three sources of musical energy—the snare ostinato, the tonic-dominant ostinato, and the two melodic themes—that we take as given, as if they had always existed. The second law of thermodynamics asserts that energetic processes have directionality, orderly systems growing increasingly disordered, and not the other way around.171 Most pieces of music comply with the first thermodynamic law, but not the second: they make sense played beginning to end, exhibiting directionality, but also grow more orderly, whatever entropy they accumulate (in the form of harmonic, rhythmic, or metric dissonance) dissipating at the conclusion. Boléro observes the irreversibility principle and gains entropy as it unfolds—not just harmonic dissonance, but noise, density, and eventually melodic dissolution. Of these elements, what cannot be seen in the score is noise, the sonic consequence of music-making, comprising the increasingly volatile collisions of harmonic overtones, the sound of air hissing, bows scraping, and keypads clicking, intensifying as the piece unfolds. A spectro170. Jankélévitch, Ravel, 96. 171. There are cases in which systems become both more orderly and more complex—a developing embryo, for example. The second law requires that entropy increase in the universe, not in every single system.

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fig. 3.6 . Spectrogram of Boléro using the program Raven Lite. X-axis = time scale, y-axis = kilohertz. Image extracted by Benjamin Broening.

graphic analysis shows by just how much: about ninety seconds from the conclusion, the interstitial spaces separating pitches are almost completely filled with atomized representations of partials and noise (figure 3.6).172 Machines lose efficiency and fail because they build up heat and friction as they operate. Human bodies experience a similar process of deterioration: systems weaken and become more susceptible to viruses, contaminants, and injuries. Boléro reflects motoric human processes, and specifically, the strain of reconciling mechanization and consciousness within ourselves. Open up the bolero machine and there will be no wheels, springs, or cogs—only nerves and fibers, blood and bone. Like Robert-Houdin’s Ethereal Suspension, which framed levitation as a medical experiment, Boléro is the sort of illusion that appeals to technology for its effect. But like the Pastry Chef, it presents a mechanical exterior that entangles human and machine. The transformation at the end of the piece, which Jankélévitch describes in magical terms, reflects the moment of realization when we discover that the trick is hiding within ourselves. For Gerald Larner, it is due either to machinist technology or its metaphorical counterpart that “the friction between melody and mechanism finally causes 172. I’m grateful to my colleague Ben Broening, who ran the spectrographic analysis and discussed the graph with me.

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ignition, the tonality lifts off from C major to E major and, as it falls back, the edifice collapses.”173 Suppose we extend Larner’s metaphor. Suppose the clicks and whirs of the industrious bolero machine keep us entranced, until suddenly, something miraculous happens: the machine lets out a groan and abruptly takes flight, a dancing body leaping into the air. In this instance of escape and deliverance, the body breaks away from gravity’s clutches, from mechanical routine. But it lasts only a moment. As Boléro winds to its final paroxysm, it generates heat, evoking the body’s mechanical motion in its feverish, frenzied dancing. Excess thermal energy normally seeps into the surrounding environment, but there is no such release valve in Ravel’s bolero—no heat sink to capture thermal by-products. Friction builds, and the machine’s gears squeak and grind; the dancing body labors and overheats. Melody liquefies, harmony sours, noise thickens like gelatin; the human motor breaks apart. Ravel had never realized his symphonic poem of flight, Dédale 39 (or Icare), but in Boléro, he captures the wonder of organic and steel machinery, bound up in the lure of technological transcendence. No matter how perfect the machine, the magic of flight has its perils.

173. Gerald Larner, Ravel (London: Phaidon Press, 1996), 203.

4

Illusions of Form and Void

If Stravinsky’s description of Ravel as “the most perfect of Swiss clockmakers” carries an air of derision, it also recalls the ticking timepieces of L’Heure espagnole, the chronometric precision of Ravel’s working methods, and the automated structural core of many pieces. Another productive analogy could be made between Ravel’s music and Robert-Houdin’s mystery clocks, whose hands seemed to float on transparent dials, without mechanical assistance (figure 4.1). Observers might guess that the works were hidden in the clock’s ornamented base, its golden grotesques seeming to cry out, “Hey! Look down here!” The real mystery involved the transparent tube connecting the clock face to the base, which should have revealed any mechanical links between them. Ornamental supports beneath the dial concealed the transmission of movement from the works to the hands. The clock’s functionality thus depended upon the skillful application of ornament, its camouflage as essential as the works themselves. In Ravel’s music, the shifting, transpositional relationship between ornament and structure produces trompe l’oreilles, often achieved by collapsing the distinction between foreground and background. Gurminder Bhogal explains how such music may be rendered depthless by pointing to the rhythms and contours of the visual arabesque, suggesting a conception of melody “structurally and expressively complete in and of itself,”1 independent of harmonic underpinnings. An example occurs in the first movement of Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello, in which parsimonious counterpoint and the clever manipulation of timbre compress our sense of musical 1. Bhogal, Details of Consequence, 102. This quotation applies specifically to the opening arabesque of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune.

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fig. 4.1 . Robert-Houdin, Napoleon III mystery clock, ormolu and glass, c. 1850. Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images.

depth. In the first few measures, we cannot tell whether the solo violin is playing either an accompanimental figure or a repetitive, motoric melody drawn from A Dorian, a mode reminiscent of the first movement of Ravel’s Trio. The violin’s commingling of major and minor arpeggiated triads provides little harmonic grounding to guide us (example 4.1). The cello enters with a melody in measure six, clarifying the textural ambiguity by turning the violin into an accompanimental ostinato, though one molded with the sort of care usually given to themes. Yet the cello melody also proves unaccommodating, twisting and bending in shape, repeatedly

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ex. 4.1 . Ravel, Sonata for Violin and Cello, first movement, mm. 1–12. Allegro q = 120

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revisiting the opening pitch (E5), and functioning much like an ostinato. The instruments’ similar timbres further confuse foreground and background relationships. To practiced ears, violin and cello are usually easy to distinguish, but much of the opening cello passage is played on the D and A strings’ upper register, sonic doppelgängers of the violin’s A string, where most of the ostinato lies. This interweaving of melody and ostinato, aided by manipulations of range and timbre, produces a composite sound that seems to emerge from a single instrument.2 When violin and cello invert their roles at rehearsal 1—violin takes melody, cello ostinato—meaningful distinctions between foreground and background have disappeared, producing a mostly linear sound with only the faintest shadow of depth. The Duo Sonata may seem idiosyncratic in style and structure, especially for listeners more familiar with Ravel’s delicate textural embroideries. But like Boléro, it expresses his compositional interests with little camouflage, trompe l’oreilles transparently displayed. The piece reflects the style dépouillé typical of the 1920s, when music’s fleshy exterior, thought to be extravagant or superfluous, was peeled away. And yet, the sonata’s tinkering with foreground and background structures echoes Ravel’s earlier, stylistically florid music, in which ornamental surfaces functioned like intricate arterial networks, supplying color and propulsion. As Bhogal notes, in Ravel’s music “everything has been made external, because the surface has been endowed with structural and expressive significance.”3 2. Zank, Irony and Sound, 106, notes that Ravel “created the effects of, on the one hand, a single meta-instrument and, on the other, those of multiple instruments (i.e., an entire string quartet).” 3. Bhogal, Details of Consequence, 305.

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The novelty and stylistic heterogeneity of the Duo Sonata—dissolving hierarchical relationships using timbre and register—illustrate the diverse methods with which Ravel expresses his singular, unwavering interests. This chapter explores three illusions of form and void whose methods are less immediately apparent. One is the pantomime scene in Daphnis et Chloé, a play within a play where the title characters enact the tale of Pan and Syrinx in their obligatory pas de deux. Disjunctions inevitably arise when the intentions and desires of four characters must be expressed through one musical score, but instead of suppressing these divisions, Ravel heightens them, ensuring that we never lose sight of the enactment itself. Each pair alternately occupies the dramatic foreground and background, the music encouraging us to toggle between the pairings, as if to draw them in and out of focus. As a concluding example, consider one of Ravel’s most perplexing works, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, where profusions of ornament surround a void and lend it materiality, like the adornments camouflaging the gears of the mystery clock. This phenomenon is most evident in the third song, “Surgi de la croupe et du bond,” where a sense of mobility and disequilibrium in the outer sections of the piece frame a center section replete with stark, sustained octaves. If Ravel’s Mallarméan void lacks kinetic activity, as we might expect, it also features ornamental framing that highlights the void’s creative potential. But let us begin with Le Gibet, the middle movement of Gaspard de la nuit, where the tension between apparent motion and immobility unfolds in a stylistic context vastly different from the motional stasis of Boléro or the perpetuum mobiles of other composers. While circular phrases and gestures in Le Gibet impede teleological motion, these same qualities also promote a sense of temporal mobility: many of the piece’s phrases can be repositioned, like a sonic mosaic. In malleable spots at the edges of phrases and sections, the music oscillates between linearity and nonlinearity, sequence and simultaneity, belying its apparent stasis. Its formal invention, while anticipating certain developments in twentiethcentury music, plays out a hand dealt by nineteenth-century composers like Chopin and Ravel’s esteemed Russians, who wagered that repetition could both hasten and arrest our perception of time. The Illusion of Stasis in Le Gibet After the premiere of Gaspard de la nuit in 1909, critics declared Le Gibet “doleful” and “monotonous,” evoking an air of “acerbic disquiet.”4 The music, with its stagnant tempo and maddeningly insistent BH ostinato, provided plenty of justification for these assessments, but it did not inspire them unaided. Ravel had based the piece on a macabre prose poem by Aloysius Bertrand (1807–41), an obscure poète 4. Jean Chantavoine, “Chronique musicale,” La Revue hebdomadaire, March 13, 1909, 261; Louis Laloy, “La Musique,” La Grande Revue 53 (January 25, 1909): 396.

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maudit who acquired posthumous fame thanks to the attention of Charles Baudelaire. Three Bertrand poems, each linked to a movement of Gaspard, were printed in the program at the work’s premiere, suggesting gruesome imagery to listeners who lacked the imagination for such things. In Bertrand’s “Le Gibet,” a narrator tries to identify a sound he hears by posing a series of queries, starting with, “Could it be the night wind shrieking, or the hanged man sighing on the gibbet?” The phrases that follow begin with anaphoric questioning (serait-ce . . . ?), each suggesting a different insect or arachnid source for the sound (cricket, fly, scarab beetle, spider). In the poem’s final line, the narrator answers the queries by naming its source: a bell, tolling for a man hanged from a scaffold in a city beyond the horizon. But once we learn the answer, questions multiply. How, Siglind Bruhn asks, could screeching wind or the buzzing of a fly be confused with a tolling bell? And how could a beetle’s flight or a spider’s embroidery be heard at all?5 In the poem’s crepuscular setting, where visual clarity is compromised, sounds evoke what cannot be seen—yet hearing is no better than diminished sight if a fly and a tolling bell sound alike. Perhaps the narrator appeals to supersensible perception, bypassing the vibrations of the ear drum for sounds that might be perceived by supernatural means. (This would be the kind of hearing prized less by the illusionist than by the spiritualist.) The narrator’s vigilant attention to sound contrasts with the epigraph atop the poem, which inspires the reader to look: “What do I see stirring on that gibbet?” Peter Kaminsky finds this sensory substitution a repressive act: the narrator knows very well what lies in the distance but only acknowledges it in the last stanza, finally replacing “serait-ce” (conditional) with “c’est” (declarative).6 The poem’s pictorial qualities align with French literary aesthetics espoused by Victor Cousin and Théodore Jouffroy, who sought to infuse poetry with musical and visual effects.7 For poets like Bertrand, juxtaposing adjectives as if they were adjacent pigments on a canvas creates an unconventional literary syntax, “not a logical order of relationships but the order of sensations.”8 The inner stanzas of “Le Gibet” could thus be rearranged without disrupting poetic teleology, the reader experiencing each sound and image—beetle plucking a bloody hair, cricket singing in the ivy—in the way a roving eye absorbs the details of a painting. Just as viewers might assemble a narrative from pictorial clues, Bertrand’s reader might infer a chronological sequence of events 5. Siglind Bruhn, Images and Ideas in Modern French Piano Music: The Extra-Musical Subtext in Works by Ravel, Debussy, and Messiaen (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1997), 194. 6. Peter Kaminsky, “Ravel’s Approach to Formal Process: Comparisons and Contexts,” in Unmasking Ravel, ed. Kaminsky, 98–99. 7. David Scott, “Writing the Arts: Aesthetics, Art Criticism, and Literary Practice,” in Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. Peter Collier and Robert Lethbridge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 71. 8. Ibid., 71.

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from details organized spatially. Charles Baudelaire extended Bertrand’s pictorial approach in his Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en prose, a work inspired by Gaspard, noting in a letter to his publisher, Arsène Houssaye, how he avoided tying the reader’s “restive will to the interminable thread of a superfluous plot.”9 Instead, he describes how his collection of poems may be organized in countless permutations by invoking the ouroboros, the snake that devours its own tail: “Remove a vertebra and the two parts of this tortuous fantasy easily rejoin. Chop it into several fragments, and you’ll see that each can exist separately.”10 It is easier to read Baudelaire’s advice than to heed it. As Cheryl Krueger points out, many of the prose poems are first-person narratives (with plots), and Baudelaire offers little guidance about how to read them, whether in a linear mode or through a spatially determined, nonchronological strategy.11 If poems inspire in their readers a “forgetting of time,” as Jacques Rivière puts it, then prose poems inhabit an awkward interstitial space, their ephemeral qualities co-existing with temporally linear incidents and anecdotes.12 Baudelaire’s narratives in Spleen de Paris are awash in digression, delay, and descriptive inventories, unspooling the very superfluous plots he had cautioned against. And yet, instead of simulating or evoking temporal passage, these digressive plots seem static,13 undermining both the teleological function of narrative itself and the mobile discontinuities Baudelaire proposes for his poetic collection as a whole. The same sort of contradictory impulses emerge in Bertrand’s “Le Gibet,” its structure inviting the “discontinuous mode of reading” one might bring to Baudelaire’s prose poems.14 The pattern of questioning established in its opening line implies a rhetorical plan that grows clear by the second stanza, creating the expectation that questions posed will ultimately be answered. By the final stanza, the rhythmic anaphora supporting a nonlinear reading of the poem is interrupted with a conclusive statement (“C’est la cloche”), providing a temporal and structural end point. Bertrand’s meticulous descriptions have a way of arresting temporal passage—or at least neutralizing its sting—but the poem still conscripts the irreversible arrow of time, pointing toward the discovery or acknowledgement of a horrifying truth, much like Schoenberg’s Erwartung.

9. Charles Baudelaire, Petits Poèmes en prose (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1869), 1. 10. Ibid. 11. Cheryl Krueger, The Art of Procrastination: Baudelaire’s Poetry in Prose (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 37–38. 12. Jacques Rivière, Le Roman d’aventure (Paris: Éd. des Syrtes, 2000), 73. Rivière originally published this in three issues of La Nouvelle Revue française in 1913. 13. Ibid., 51. 14. Richard Sieburth, “Gaspard de la nuit: Prefacing Genre,” Studies in Romanticism 24 (Spring 1985): 243.

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Ravel’s Le Gibet exhibits similar tensions between stasis and apparent motion, anesthetizing listeners who find its plodding tempo dull but rewarding those who relish its prismatic harmonies. A BH ostinato opens the piece and remains virtually unaltered until the final measure, when it is the last sound heard—a constant companion to the piece’s motivic parallelisms and formal circularities, which experience little development or growth. These motive- and phrase-level structures often center on the registral unfolding of DH, beginning in the third measure, where DH4 is the second pitch in a recurring harmonic sequence; DH5 (measure 6) and DH6 (measure 17) both initiate melodic ideas, before DH4 returns as part of a two-note motive (measure 48) that prepares the final appearance of the opening material. At the conclusion, melodic and harmonic themes appear in reverse order, starting with the opening DH melody (measures 41–42, compare 6–7), a recurring harmonic gesture (measures 48–49, compare 3–4), and finally the solo ostinato (measures 51–52, compare 1–2), completing an arch form. Motives and harmonic progressions echo Le Gibet’s background arch. The first harmonic gesture, called “the gallows” here (example 4.2) contains quintal sonorities in Phyrgian-tinged E-flat minor, beginning and ending on the same chord and evading voice leading conventions through their parallelism. In measure six, an archshaped melodic idea begins on DH, winds through neighbor notes, and returns to its starting pitch (example 4.3); this same idea, harmonized in thirds, recurs in measure ten. Circular phrases, especially when accompanied by parallel harmonic movement, smother teleological motion—an effect that might seem tiresome in unskilled hands. But Ravel combines his musical ouroboros with a structural design that leaves us wondering where the music will go next, or whether it will go anywhere at all. The first melodic idea at measure six could have been followed immediately by its harmonization in thirds; instead, Ravel interpolates the gallows, curtailing melodic succession and linearity by revisiting a gesture that lacks directional focus. This interjection reinforces the sense that both the arch-shaped DH melody and the gallows function as self-contained units, independent of preceding and subsequent phrases. Furthermore, it introduces a sense of formal modularity corresponding to the poem’s, wherein temporal progression is attenuated to the point of virtual disappearance. The interpolated gallows gesture functions as an invariant point of departure, its mercurial relationship to surrounding phrases difficult to define. Even when Ravel chooses not to use the gesture, it lingers as a theoretical alternative to what we hear, producing an experience of simultaneity: as we form projections about what might come next, the gallows remains a looming possibility. In the first half of the piece, phrases in measures 6–7, 10–11, 12–14, 15–16, 17–19, and 29–31 could all be routed to the gallows gesture.15 Given the pattern established in the opening 15. For a graph of these pathways, see Fillerup, “Eternity in Each Moment: Temporal Strategies in Ravel’s ‘Le Gibet,’ ” Music Theory Online 19, no. 1 (March 2013), example 5.

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around an axis, producing an effect of “swaying, static circularity,” reiterated before new material enters. When modal/chordal openings combine with another type— introductory sequences/elaborations—an initial phrase is followed first by a palpable silence, then by a variation implying the growth and flowering of the original idea. In all three types of openings, Debussy rejects conventional syntax, preferring “circularity and return” achieved with “evocative silences, gentle, repetitive gestures, and metaphors of growth and expansion.”17 Hepokoski classifies dozens of Debussy pieces Ravel knew intimately, including some he greatly admired. If Le Gibet’s opening recalls the sequences/elaborations category, certain deviations from type prevent it from flowering. The gallows gesture—four chords revolving around an axis—features circular motivic contours and harmonic parallelism consistent with the modal/chordal formula. The elaboration that would typically follow leads instead to the arch-shaped melody, self-contained and clearly demarcated—perhaps a rival to the gallows, we might think, the bud that will eventually blossom. When the gallows returns, it seems the bud has withered on the vine. Yet the succeeding passage indeed elaborates the arch-shaped melody, as does its extended variation (measures 12–14). Perhaps these phrases, then, will pry the piece open, replacing stasis with efflorescence. As Le Gibet unfolds, such feints are multiplied. Near the midway point (measure 28) the first phrase of an impassive theme exhibits the same potential for circularity as the arch-shaped DH melody, beginning and ending with a sigh motive from F5 to E5. But in the second phrase (measures 29–30), the motive escapes this ambitus, extending from E4 to D4, and two measures later, connective material (F to G) prevents the A–G sigh motive in measure 33 from initiating another circular pattern (example 4.4). The linearity of these phrases echoes earlier passages featuring sequential processes of growth, like the melodic and harmonic variant on AH beginning in measure twelve. But such moments are fleeting: when the reprise of the opening appears in measure 41, discontinuity again becomes the norm, along with the sense that the gallows gesture could return at any moment—even though it is kept at bay until five measures from the end (measure 48). For Jean Marnold, the poems that had served as Ravel’s model—“pseudomedieval verbal illumination[s]”—had inspired him to create a work of “the most audacious modernity.”18 Ravel might have been drawn to Bertrand’s lurid imagery for the same reasons he enjoyed reading Poe,19 but he may also have appreciated 17. Ibid., 54. 18. Jean Marnold, “Musique,” Mercure de France, February 1, 1909, 548. 19. The year of Gaspard‘s premiere was the centenary of Poe’s birth, as Calvocoressi pointed out, extolling Poe’s contributions to literature in an essay dedicated to Ricardo Viñes, Gaspard’s first interpreter. He complained that the centenary was passing unnoticed, even in France, but eleven months remained in the year to celebrate Poe’s legacy. See M.-D. Calvocoressi, “Edgar Poe: ses biographes, ses éditeurs, ses critiques,” Mercure de France, February 1, 1909, 385–403.

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the poet’s use of structural idiosyncrasies, which are mirrored in his musical rendering. If Le Gibet’s opening cites and distorts Debussy’s ex nihilo beginnings, its temporal strategies recall Jeux (1913)—a monument of early modernism for Darmstadt composers like Pierre Boulez, who paid special attention to the piece’s shifting juxtaposition of gestures underpinned by structural homogeneity. Jann Pasler describes how discontinuities in Jeux, created by abrupt changes in meter and tempo, are linked by motivic similarity and constancy of pulse.20 To explain these relationships, she draws on Henri Bergson’s comparison between temporality and melody, whereby our consciousness forms “both the past and the present states into an organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another.”21 Sectional discontinuities in Jeux may thus be ameliorated by rhythmic, motivic, or harmonic continuities because the past permeates the present to such an extent that neither can be easily distinguished. Applying a Bergsonian model of musical listening to Le Gibet helps explain the piece’s temporal fluidity, in which the static gallows gesture also exhibits latent structural mobility. For Bergson, our fundamental error in understanding the nature of time can be illuminated metaphorically by thinking of a clock face. The movement of the hands corresponds to the oscillations of a pendulum, and there is but one position of the hand (or pendulum) in space. We preserve the memory of past oscillations and order them: from the single movement of the pendulum juxtaposed spatially (we imagine) with itself, we generate a chain of succession. In so doing, we create the illusion that time is homogeneous, divisible into moments represented by (and sometimes equivalent to) the oscillating pendulum or the moving hands of the clock. To counter this uniform vision of time mapped onto space, Bergson offers the concept of duration (durée)—the integration of heterogeneous states of mind independent of juxtaposition, replacing quantitative with qualitative multiplicity.22 Bergson’s theories of temporality pose significant challenges to musical analysis, where it is virtually impossible to discuss structure and process without evoking the metaphorical “distance” between past, present, and future. Yet we might nevertheless correlate the role of projected simultaneities in temporal experience to the gallows gesture, whose potential recurrence invites us to juxtapose theoretical and actual realizations, producing Bergson’s “plurality of moments,” which we

20. Jann Pasler, Writing through Music: Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 91–95. 21. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 100. 22. Ibid., 107–10. On qualitative multiplicity, see Leonard Lawlor and Valentine Moulard Leonard, “Henri Bergson,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Summer 2016), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/bergson.

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experience as simultaneity instead of succession.23 The ostinato, whose immutability corresponds to musical stasis, likewise supplies the connective tissue that binds linear phrases to discontinuous gestures, enabling past and present moments to coalesce. Static circularity thus generates mobility and dynamic linearity—a process reflecting the way we generate an illusion of musical motion from temporally proximate, static events. Stasis, Future and Past Le Gibet’s influence on other composers might initially be traced to Debussy, whose first book of piano preludes (1910) included a B-flat ostinato in Voiles, along with other rhythmic and motivic similarities.24 Ondine, from his second book of preludes (1913), used harmonic stasis, pedal points, circular themes and melodies, and the “potential mobility” redolent of moment form25—qualities consistent with Debussy’s style, but also reminiscent of formal processes in Le Gibet. Neither Ondine nor Le Gibet receives a mention in debates over the origins of mid-century moment form, which is usually traced to Debussy’s Jeux and Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Jonathan Kramer, who places particular emphasis on Stravinsky’s contributions, describes moment form as a collection of static ideas or discrete processes that pertain to the whole but otherwise lack succession.26 While such discontinuities allow moments to be rearranged, as if in a collage, structural mobility need only be a possibility, not a prerequisite. Pieces in moment form give “the impression of starting in the midst of previously unheard music . . . [and] break[ing] off without reaching any structural cadence, as if the music goes on, inaudibly, in some other space or time after the close of the performance.”27 Le Gibet’s ostinato functions in this way, starting midway through beat two of the first measure and concluding with eighth notes tied across the final bar. The piece’s structural plasticity, held together by the ostinato, helps neutralize formal and harmonic implications, its embryonic moment form 23. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen; New York: Macmillan, 1950), 292. 24. Howat, Art of French Piano Music, 29. 25. Marianne Wheeldon, “Interpreting Discontinuity in the Late Works of Debussy,” Current Musicology 77, no. 1 (2004): 108–9. 26. Many scholars have produced formal and temporal analyses of Symphonies, and Alexander Rehding has described the piece as a “paradigm of discontinuity.” See, e.g., Edward T. Cone, “Stravinsky: The Progress of a Method,” in Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, ed. Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone (New York: Norton, 1968), 156–64; Christopher Hasty, “On the Problem of Succession and Continuity in Twentieth-Century Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 8 (Spring 1986): 58–74; and Rehding, “Towards a ‘Logic of Discontinuity’ in Stravinsky’s ‘Symphonies of Wind Instruments’: Hasty, Kramer, and Straus Reconsidered,” Music Analysis 17, no. 1 (March 1998): 39–65. 27. Jonathan Kramer, “Moment Form in Twentieth-Century Music,” Musical Quarterly 64, no. 2 (1978): 180.

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reflecting the structure of Bertrand’s poem, organized as a series of images that might be apprehended spatially until the final stanza. Le Gibet merits greater attention for the way it opposes durational and spatial models of time, and its chronological priority should only enhance its standing. But the piece does not confuse formal and temporal circularity with atemporality, the theoretical eternity posited by Stockhausen (and, later, Jonathan Kramer), in which “vertical slices” cut across a “horizontal” experience of time.28 This graphical rendering is not only a spatial metaphor for duration but an attempt to describe timelessness—a virtually unknown (and perhaps unknowable) phenomenon. If Le Gibet proposed the view that stasis need not unfold as an extratemporal, spatialized abstraction, many mid-century composers were disinclined to heed it, preferring temporal models subordinating duration and succession to simultaneity. George Rochberg described a poetics of music that articulated “actions of place” over “actions of time,” suggesting that Varèse was the first twentieth-century composer to “realize through music spatial images in sound.”29 Stockhausen sought to experience an eternity in each moment through “the overcoming of the concept of duration.”30 Perhaps acknowledging the impossibility of abolishing musical succession altogether, György Ligeti lauded Webern’s music for fusing “the successive and the simultaneous in a unifying structure,” which seemed “if not to move forward in one direction, at least to circle continuously in [its] illusory space.”31 He might as well have been describing Le Gibet. If Le Gibet’s Bergsonian tensions challenge the spatialized temporalities of midtwentieth-century music, the piece’s static mobility has clear nineteenth-century antecedents. In Mily Balakirev’s music, Benedict Taylor points out, we find a “kaleidoscopic play of stasis and motion,” produced by “a curious sense of continual reiteration, the music constantly looping back motivically at small- and medium-scale levels as if treading water.”32 Taylor notes this quality in the music of other nineteenth-century Russians, offering as an example the first movement of RimskyKorsakov’s Scheherazade, though it is perhaps most familiar in Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Petrushka, among others pieces, which feature repetitive

28. Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Momentform: Neue Zusammenhänge zwischen Aufführungsdauer, Werkdauer und Moment,” in Texte zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik, vol. 1 (Cologne: DuMont, 1963), 199. 29. George Rochberg, “The Concepts of Musical Time and Space” (1963), in The Aesthetics of Survival (1984; rev ed., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 116, 122. 30. Stockhausen, “Momentform,” 199. 31. György Ligeti, “Metamorphoses of Musical Form,” in Form-Space, trans. Cornelius Cardew, Die Reihe [English edition] 7: 16 (Bryn Mawr, PA: Theodore Presser, 1965). 32. Benedict Taylor, “Temporality in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music and the Notion of Development,” Music & Letters 94 (February 2013): 97.

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superimposed strata—the style Gretchen Horlacher calls “running in place.”33 (Richard Taruskin describes a similar phenomenon in Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet, in which out-of-phase ostinatos evoke both immobility and disjunction, or nepodvizhnost’ and drobnost’.)34 Certainly Ravel’s long-fermenting fascination with Russian music bubbles to the surface in Le Gibet. Indeed, he had experimented with ostinatos and circular gestures several years earlier in another static, somnolent piece—Oiseaux tristes, composed in 1904, the second of five piano pieces in the suite Miroirs. Like Le Gibet, the piece opens in EH minor with a right-hand ostinato that starts on BH and moves to EH, alternating with an arabesque figure evoking birdsong. When the texture fills out in measure four, the ostinato persists in the right hand while oscillating figures fill in the middle register; a descending third motive, interjected between statements of the ostinato, completes the thematic jigsaw puzzle (example 4.5). For the first three phrases, Oiseaux tristes unfolds much like Le Gibet, its operational logic favoring repetition and sequence over development. But a modulation in measure ten provides the catalyst Le Gibet lacks, leading to a volatile flurry of thirty-second notes, as if the titular birds, rousted from their slumber, have abruptly taken flight. Though the motivic torpor of Oiseaux tristes’s opening returns, it generates another irruption— a gentle yet florid cadenza, humorously marked presque ad libitum. These kinetic passages of flight produce a sense of latent or suppressed motion, as if its static passages possess a hidden vitality—a model for Le Gibet’s motional stasis. In addition to precursors within Ravel’s own oeuvre, a specific historical model—Chopin’s “Raindrop” prelude in DH major, op. 28, no. 15—may have functioned like an urtext for Le Gibet. Note Chopin’s long-standing interest in musical repetition in many contexts, including the two-note melodic oscillations in the Prelude in E minor (op. 28, no. 4) and the rhythmic and harmonic ostinato in the left hand of Berceuse, op. 57. The E minor prelude explores the effect of harmonic changes on a melody constrained in its rhythm and range, much of the piece teetering on the verge of monotony, while Berceuse’s treble variations gradually accumulate figural complexity, acting as zealous rejoinders to the relentless accompaniment. This sort of push and pull is less a concern in the DH prelude, its AH ostinato more implacable than the E minor prelude’s melodic oscillations and more salient than the accompaniment of Berceuse. Indeed, the AH ostinato functions much like an artifact displayed at various angles and under different qualities of light, sounded as a single pitch and in octaves, in rich and sparse textures, alternating between right and left hands. 33. Gretchen Horlacher, “Running in Place: Sketches and Superimposition in Stravinsky’s Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 23 (Fall 2001): 196–98. 34. Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 383, 422–23.

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If the opening ostinato of Le Gibet sounds isolated and exposed, Chopin’s AH ostinato embeds itself in the accompanimental texture, making its unyielding character a secret to be discovered. The ostinato grows more conspicuous with the enharmonic modulation to CG minor, where it is played for the first time by the right hand; here, it accompanies figures that bring to mind organum duplum, offering hints of melody but little else to sweeten the texture. Doubled at the octave after two phrases, the ostinato becomes progressively more insistent, amplifying in volume and culminating with accented fortissimo chords and left-hand octaves redolent of clanging bells. When the belfry quiets, the whole passage repeats; then, in a sequence abounding with mournful suspensions, a passage emerges that contains a germ of Le Gibet. (Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.) Functionally, the passage (measures 64–67) is an extension of an earlier half-cadence (iv–V), alternating dominant and tonic harmonies in CG minor, the ostinato sounding throughout (example 4.6).35 Its melodic and harmonic dormancy has a meandering quality: the melody, relegated to an inner voice, circulates through a three-note pattern before returning to its starting point (DG4), anchored by a I-iv vamp in a tonicized GG major with no apparent destination of its own. If the prelude’s harmonic implications sharpen its teleological arc, the momentary slackening of apparent motion 35. In mm. 64–67, the formatting of the example is not practical from a performer’s standpoint, but it renders the ostinato more visually apparent.

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ex. 4.6 . Chopin, Prelude in DH major, op. 28, no. 15, mm. 60–67.

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is all the more evident in measures 64–67, where impassive fragments furnish a potential model for Le Gibet’s static circularities. Ravel could have found even more in the piece than an organizing scheme. Chopin’s “Raindrop” prelude acquired its nickname from George Sand’s Histoire de ma vie, in which she reported the well-known but potentially spurious circumstances of its composition. Chopin wrote the piece, Sand says, as she and her son, Maurice, struggled through a deluge to their temporary domicile, a Carthusian monastery in Majorca. Upon their safe return, Chopin described how his distress at their absence had induced a dream in which he felt icy raindrops falling rhythmically on his chest, mirroring the ostinato in the prelude. When Sand drew his attention to the steady sound of rain on the roof, he denied hearing it and even became angry at her suggestion that the prelude exhibited imitative qualities (in her words, a harmonie imitative).36 Sand understood his objection perfectly, Peter Dayan asserts, inasmuch as Chopin’s “genius was full of the mysterious harmonies of nature, translated in his musical thought by sublime equivalents, and not by a servile repetition of external sounds.”37

36. George Sand, Œuvres complètes de George Sand, vol. 4, Histoire de ma vie (Paris: CalmannLévy, 1902), 440. 37. Ibid., 440; Peter Dayan, Music Writing Literature, from Sand via Debussy to Derrida (New York: Routledge, 2016), 5–6

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While we might debate whether such isomorphism is merely servile, the key point is that if raindrops are evoked in the prelude, their sound is transformed through simulation or representation. The question is, by how much? The water drops of Chopin’s ostinato are too solitary, too regular, to suggest rain showers or torrents, resembling instead drips from a faucet—or, put in more majestic terms, the echoic weeping of stalactites. Perhaps the sound is without acoustical parallel: it could only come from a dream, where raindrops might indeed fall with nearchronometric precision. Understood thus, it foreshadows Bertrand’s treatment of sound in Le Gibet, where a tolling bell might be confused with cricket song or a beetle’s flight, the link between them depending upon supersensible hearing or an altered state of consciousness. Ravel, it seems, would have known the nickname of Chopin’s prelude, given its French literary provenance, and perhaps found within the piece a mode of representation well suited to Bertrand’s acousmatic sounds, where the illusion of sonic equivalences prevails. The manner in which simultaneity and succession restlessly comingle in Le Gibet also recalls the temporality of dreams—where, according to Bergson, the “abolition of the sense of time” stems from a loss of human contact, and with it, the regulatory mechanisms of social behavior. In Le Gibet, the hanged man, severed from human connection, experiences the eternity of all times, or the void of none. Using methods drawn from the nineteenth century, Ravel conjures an experience of time and motion that blends Bergson’s plurality of moments with Bertrand’s hallucinatory temporality. His illusion of stasis calls attention to the temporal multiplicities that often pass unnoticed—eddies of movement swirling in the frozen current of time. T H E PA R A D OX O F AC T I N G

Gurminder Bhogal’s study of musical ornament in French music has placed renewed emphasis on the dimensional metaphor—a pervasive but typically unacknowledged foundation of music criticism. The decorative artworks of Les Nabis, a circle of artists active in the 1890s, dismantled conventional distinctions between foreground and background, reflecting similar trends in contemporaneous French music, as Bhogal notes. But she also asserts the importance of maintaining surfacedepth polarities, which help us understand why artists sought to collapse such distinctions in the first place. The spatial implications of dimensional metaphors include not only surface and depth but interior and exterior, particularly with respect to painting. Édouard Vuillard, a member of Les Nabis, painted interior scenes in which every surface—wall coverings, furnishings, and textiles, including clothing—was saturated with ornament, compressing illusionistic depth into a single plane. Vuillard’s Foliage—Oak Tree and Fruit Seller, a large canvas completed in 1918, diverges in some respects from his earlier style, its flat decorative surface

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fig. 4.2 . Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940), Foliage—Oak Tree and Fruit Seller, 1918. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Distemper on canvas, 76 × 111 ½ in. (193 × 283.2 cm). A Millennium Gift of Sara Lee Corporation (1999.373). The Art Institute of Chicago.

counterbalanced by hints of depth. Its sense of interiority within an exterior scene introduces a way of thinking about ornament and depth that can be applied to the pantomime in Daphnis et Chloé. Foliage (figure 4.2) divides symmetrically, bisected vertically by the tree trunk and trisected horizontally by the leaves dominating the foreground. Between the bushes and leafy boughs, we glimpse the background—presumably a market scene, though visual evidence is scant. The fact that there is a discernible ground seems to invite us into the painting, but other clues reveal that Vuillard only gestures toward illusionism. Had he wanted to create a sense of receding space, he would have needed to render the child in the foreground on a much larger scale than the figure standing near the tree trunk in the background. Moreover, the surface texture—an impasto built up from layers of quick-drying distemper—is exhaustively intricate: shades of variegated green and polymorphous leaves sprout in every possible direction. This thickly encrusted surface repels our attempts to see beyond it. Vuillard’s illusionism is deliberately fragile, alluding to zero-point perspective without employing it in a methodical way. The tree boughs jutting out above the midpoint of the canvas are nearly at eye level, suggesting that the foliage below extends beneath us, enveloping us—yet the textured surface in the leafy

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foreground impedes our progress into the image. Joseph Koerner’s observation that a painting by Caspar David Friedrich (a very different artist) “confounds any ordered progression of vision into depth,” a tree “ris[ing] up before you abruptly, as pure foreground,” applies equally well to Vuillard’s Foliage.38 We find ourselves both inside and outside the painting, neither position a stable vantage point. Vuillard’s gestures toward illusionistic depth can be translated to a dramatic context in the pantomime in Daphnis et Chloé, where the lovers, reunited after Chloé’s capture by pirates, reenact the myth of Pan and Syrinx because Daphnis assumes that Pan has helped with Chloé’s rescue, having dreamed or envisioned that the Nymphs petitioned the god on his behalf. Lammon, an elderly shepherd, tells the couple that if Pan has indeed delivered Chloé, he did so in homage to Syrinx, inspiring the couple to perform their pas de deux as actors playing roles. Thus their task, in its most conventional sense, is to conceal or suppress their own identities in order to portray their characters. In the myth told by Ovid in Metamorphoses and recounted in slightly different form by Longus, Syrinx “disdained and derided” Pan’s advances. He pursued her relentlessly and with violent intent, until at last she ran into a marsh, where she transformed into water reeds. Pan slashed through the vegetation, searching for her, but instead discovered how the unequal lengths of the reeds seemed to signify his unrequited desire for Syrinx. Though he could not possess her body, he could fashion an instrument that would memorialize her; when he played upon it, he could exercise dominion of a different kind.39 The tale’s combination of desire, etiology, and sexual threat is not unusual in ancient Greek literature: in a similar narrative by Ovid, Daphne, chased by Apollo, is transformed into a laurel bush. But the violent portent in Pan and Syrinx’s story makes it an odd parallel to a lovers’ pantomime. Their pas de deux also figures the paradox of absence typical of dramatic performance, whereby actors efface their own identities to confer material presence on characters who would be otherwise disembodied.40 It may seem that Pan and Syrinx thus occupy the dramatic foreground, like characters in a play: enacted by proxy, they are exteriorized, made transparently present. But this description assumes too much. Our loyalties probably lie more with Daphnis and Chloé than with their theatrical doppelgängers, who appear for only a brief scene without an 38. Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 6. My thanks to Elena Calvillo, my colleague in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Richmond, for referring me to Koerner’s work and discussing Foliage with me. 39. For Longus’s account, see Daphnis and Chloe, trans. George Thornley, rev. and aug. J. M. Edmonds (London: William Heinemann; New York: Putnam, 1916), 115–17. 40. Some theorists, like Herbert Blau and Alice Rayner, think of theatrical performance in spectral terms: the actor becomes “a ghost who wears a living, human mask.” See Blau, Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 282; Rayner, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theater (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xvi–xx.

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intervening costume change or curtain drop to signal their arrival. If we indeed continue to experience Daphnis and Chloé as foreground characters, our perspective might be reinforced by the fact that Pan’s distinctive physical characteristics— the legs and haunches of a goat—are implied instead of simulated: Daphnis’s grace, not Pan’s awkwardness, is on display.41 At times, the pantomime’s dramatic layers function like the planes of sound in Ravel’s Duo Sonata, the paired couples seeming to fuse into a single stratum. But in some instances, Ravel adopts an approach more like Vuillard’s illusionism, the dramatic background beckoning as the flattened, decorative surface deflects our gaze. The pantomime music, stretched taut by competing dramatic expectations, strains our attentive capacities; foreground and background oscillate, competing for salience. Daphnis and Chloé are at once characters played by dancers and dancers playing characters, the simultaneity of these roles unveiling the founding illusion of enactment. In the opening measures, Chloé performs the role of Syrinx, who roams alone through a meadow. Hushed strings function like a sonic scrim, providing a tranquil backdrop for the oboe and English horn playing parallel fifths (R172, example 4.7). Chloé and Syrinx, both relics of a nonspecific antiquity, seem equally well matched by the woodwinds’ stark archaism, but the music’s impassivity seems out of joint with Chloé’s emotional odyssey: she has just survived kidnapping and an attempted rape. The music’s pastoral tranquility thus foregrounds mythic past over dramatic present, Chloé subduing her own desires and emotions to portray those of her character. When Daphnis, playing Pan, declares his love for Syrinx, he experiences none of Chloé’s emotional disjunction, finding in the god’s desire a reflection of his own. As Chloé-Syrinx pushes him away, a sinking expressif oboe melody at once captures Syrinx’s rejection of Pan and Chloé’s inner emotional conflict. (She makes her eagerness for physical contact with Daphnis clear at a later point, but must conceal that desire at present.) Daphnis, still in character, responds to Chloé-as-Syrinx’s refusal by growing more insistent; his ascending flourish, associated with desire and display in the “Danse légère,” suggests the “fused identity” of Daphnis and Pan.42 These exchanges establish patterns of interaction for the four characters, whose desires are alternately affirmed or suppressed by the music. A symmetrical, congruent relationship between actor, character, and music reflects the parallel intentions of Daphnis and Pan, while an asymmetrical, dissonant relationship characterizes Chloé’s stance toward Syrinx and her music, represented in figure 4.3. 41. In Longus’s novel, Daphnis runs “on his tiptoes, imitat[ing] the hooves of Pan.” But in ballet, dancing en pointe suggests extension and linearity, not grotesque movement. See Daphnis and Chloe, 119. Comic and grotesque representations had their place in ballet, but they were performed by specially designated characters; Dorcon, the goatherd, was one such character in Daphnis. 42. Gurminder Kaur Bhogal, “Arabesque and Metric Dissonance in the Music of Maurice Ravel (1905–1914),” PhD diss. (University of Chicago, 2004), 226.

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ex. 4.7 . Ravel, Daphnis et Chloé, R172/1–4, Chloé performing Syrinx.

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fig. 4.3 . Music and character relationships for Daphnis (left) and Chloé (right).

Alliances shift when Daphnis-Pan grows more forceful in his second entreaty. At first Chloé responds as she did before, refusing his advances (as Syrinx would do) to the tune of a doleful clarinet, but immediately thereafter, a pair of oboes sweeps through a rising arabesque as Chloé-Syrinx flees into the reeds—a mimetic gesture with a clear dramatic purpose. If the gesture’s ascending contour and rapid thirtysecond note rhythms echo the impetuous, ascending flourish of Daphnis-Pan’s desire, they also recall the arabesque melody of Lyceion, Daphnis’s temptress in the first part of the ballet.43 Chloé-Syrinx’s arabesque thus realigns Chloé’s bifurcated music, expressing her desire for Daphnis while also conveying Syrinx’s refusal and flight. The arabesque’s link to exoticism, entangled with orientalism and notions of the femme fatale, at once redirects Lycieon’s eroticism for Chloé’s own expressive purposes and highlights Syrinx’s temporal and cultural estrangement, marking her as exotic in Daphnis and Chloé’s world.44 Yet the music seems unwilling to accommodate both actors playing their true selves at once: as music enriches Chloé’s expressive range, it restricts Daphnis’s 43. Bhogal, Details of Consequence, 203. 44. On exoticism and various forms of estrangement, see Ralph P. Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 65.

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self-expression. After Chloé-Syrinx disappears, Daphnis-Pan rips a few reeds from the ground to make a panpipe, accompanied by an anguished string variation of Syrinx’s pastoral woodwind motive that exchanges parallel thirds and fifths for seventh chords. This musical evocation of Syrinx, transformed by Pan’s misery, places the mythic pair in the dramatic foreground, obliging Daphnis to indulge the god’s sense of loss and despair—an impulse clearly at odds with his elation over Chloé’s safe return. The extended flute solo representing Pan’s performance might be said to animate his memories, Pan recognizing that “to breathe life into a pipe is to breathe life into one’s desires, in this case, to create the soul of Syrinx.”45 In this interpretation, Pan’s plight mirrors that of the artist, suspended between reciprocal but irreconcilable interests: as he creates music to satisfy his unfulfilled desire, music fails to satisfy him, thus stirring another wish to create. Michael Puri views Pan’s creative impulse as an act of sublimation, bringing “music into the world as a means of expression and consolation.”46 When Chloé reappears as Syrinx and “figures the accents of the flute through her dance” (according to the livret), Puri describes her as “no longer an autonomous character” but an embodiment of sexual fantasy.47 Indeed, it may seem that Chloé-as-Syrinx serves a purely representative function during Pan’s solo, stripped of materiality and intention, merely a projection of Pan’s memory. But Chloé hasn’t lost subjectivity simply by playing a character who has lost hers. The disjunctions created by compressing two dramatic scenarios into one musical score still obtain—in fact, they magnify once Syrinx becomes an animated fantasy of Pan’s. Whereas Pan and Syrinx’s relationship involves striking imbalances of power, from unrequited desire and threats of violence to the subjugation of Syrinx’s will to Pan’s, Daphnis and Chloé enjoy a bond fueled by mutual attraction and the prospect of physical consummation (which indeed occurs at the very end of Longus’s book). The theme associated with their union, appearing throughout the ballet and again just after the pantomime, inverts symmetrically around the axis of its starting pitch—descending by fifth with a triplet decoration, then rising by fifth with another triplet ornament (see example 4.8). Pan and Syrinx never share a theme, and the musical styles associated with each character—sober woodwind chorale for Syrinx, elaborate arabesques for Pan—only magnify their dramatic discord.

45. Dorothy Zayatz Baker, Mythic Masks in Self-Reflexive Poetry: A Study of Pan and Orpheus (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 62. Baker’s discussion centers on a version of the myth in Jules Laforgue’s “Pan et la Syrinx,” from the poetry collection Moralités légendaires. 46. Puri, “Dandy, Interrupted,” 363. 47. Puri, Ravel the Decadent, 196.

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ex. 4.8 . Ravel, Daphnis et Chloé, the couple’s theme in its first appearance, R1/6–R2. Hn. solo

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Grotesque Figures This disjunction between the couples is reinforced if we think of Pan and Syrinx as grotesque—an aesthetic phenomenon with a complex cultural history whose characteristic features include temporal estrangement and unity amid disjunction. We can see a conceptually straightforward example of the grotesque in the work of the Renaissance artist Giusuppe Arcimboldo, whose portraits of human faces comprised other stand-alone objects: fruits and vegetables, animals, fish, even embryonic human figures. His painting The Cook depicts a pair of hands pulling the cover off a serving platter of roasted meats, including pig and chicken (figure 4.4). Since the painting is invertible, it can be turned upside-down to reveal a human head (presumably the cook’s) emerging from between two platters, the top one like a helmet from which the garnish juts, plume-like (figure 4.5). Voilà— dinner is served! Once we have seen the painting turned in both directions, we recognize how its constituent objects belong to multiple domains at once: platter/ helmet, pig/brow, chicken/nose, curly tail/curly hair, garnish/plume. But the interpretive challenge—to bring harmony to an incongruous hodgepodge of objects that is neither wholly dinner nor a human face—ultimately defeats us. The grotesque thus emerges through our physiological, psychological, or emotional response when we express, as Mikhail Bakhtin claims, “deep ambivalence” toward a perceptual gap.48 Bridging that gap has a temporal aspect: as we seek categories or limits for phenomena that transgress boundaries, the grotesque “impales us on the present moment.”49 When combined with allegory, it also produces a temporal effacement of meaning, much like the process described by Baudelaire through which the cultural significance of ancient symbols is transformed:

48. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 304. 49. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 16.

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fig. 4.4 (Left). Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Cook. Oil on wood, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Photo: Anna Danielsson. fig. 4.5 (Right). Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Cook, inverted. As for the grotesque figures left to us by antiquity, the masks, the bronze figurines, the muscle-bound Herculeses, the little Priapuses with their tongues curled in the air and their pointy ears, all cerebellum and phallus . . . I think that all those things are full of seriousness. Venus, Pan, Hercules, were not laughable characters. We laughed at them after the coming of Jesus, with Plato and Seneca helping.50

Venus and Hercules, once invested with supernatural power, thus become abstractions in a modern belief system that links them, like caricatures, to reductive notions of beauty and strength. The name of Venus no longer conjures up a “revered god, but an allegorical figure.”51 Baudelaire’s grotesque involves a temporally displaced interpretive act, creating its characteristic duality of meaning. Ravel wrote grotesque music throughout his career in many genres: in addition to Dorcon’s “Danse grotesque” in Daphnis et Chloé, there is Sérénade grotesque (1895) for piano and the “Danse grotesque et compassée” between the Armchair 50. Baudelaire, “De l’essence du rire,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 2: 533–34. Translated by Virginia E. Swain in Grotesque Figures: Baudelaire, Rousseau, and the Aesthetics of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 15. 51. Swain, Grotesque Figures, 16.

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and the Louis XV Bergère (wingback chair) in the opera L’Enfant et les Sortilèges (1925).52 In 1911, he petitioned the librettist Franc-Nohain to add some “grotesque automatons” to the operatic staging of L’Heure espagnole (1911).53 If Ravel stops short of describing Pan as grotesque in the livret, the god’s physical appearance— torso of a man, hindquarters and horns of a goat—suggest the grotesque’s unity amid disjunction.54 In Longus’s novel, Syrinx rejects Pan because he is “neither perfect man nor perfect goat.”55 A goatherd like Dorcon, Pan was associated with the grottos that sheltered his flocks, as well as with the goat itself, an intermediate figure dwelling “between plain and mountain, forest and field . . . neither wild nor truly domestic.”56 Syrinx’s hybridity, a product of her metamorphosis, is most strikingly evident in one of Peter Paul Rubens’s paintings of the mythic pursuit, where she sprouts tendrils on the fingers and thumb of her left hand.57 But the closest painterly relative of Ravel’s pantomime seems to be François Boucher’s Pan et Syrinx (1759), which offers no hint of impending transformation nor evidence of peril (figure 4.6). For the grotesque, Boucher substitutes the erotic: pleasure-seeking nymphs occupy the painting’s foreground, frankly displayed beneath a luminous artificial light source, as Pan plunges into the middle-ground reeds. His hybridity is scarcely visible, concealed by shadows and vegetation, spotlight tilted upward to illuminate his muscular shoulders and back. By depicting the moment after Syrinx’s transformation, Boucher avoids portraying female disfigurement, even of the mild sort in Rubens’s version. Ravel claimed his vision of Daphnis emerged not from travel or historical study but from his fantasies of Greece as it was “imagined and depicted by French artists at the end of the eighteenth century.”58 Just as Boucher’s pageant of flesh averts visible signs of the grotesque, the pantomime’s flirtatious display of lithe, graceful bodies conceals Pan’s hybridity and sexual threat. Syrinx’s metamorphosis is doubly obscured, enacted off-stage by Chloé to mitigate its alienating and dehumanizing 52. Ravel added “grotesque” to the title in the autobiographical sketch he communicated to Roland-Manuel, published posthumously in La Revue musicale. 53. See Charles Tenroc, “Les Avant-Premières: ‘Thérèse’ et ‘L’Heure espagnole’ à l’Opéra-Comique,” Comœdia, May 11, 1911, 1. 54. Philippe Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece, trans. Kathleen Atlass and James Redfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 42–43. 55. Longus, Daphnis and Chloe, 115. 56. Stephen Epstein, “The Education of Daphnis: Goats, Gods, and the Birds and the Bees,” Phoenix 56 (Spring/Summer 2002): 27. 57. Other works that depict Syrinx in the midst of her metamorphosis may be seen in the exhibition catalogue Pan & Syrinx: eine erotische Jagd: Peter Paul Rubens, Jan Brueghel und ihre Zeitgenossen, ed. Justus Lange et al. (Kassel, Germany: Staatliche Museen Kassel, 2004), 120, 123, and 172. 58. Ravel, “Autobiographical Sketch,” in Ravel Reader, 31; “Esquisse autobiographique,” in Lettres, écrits, entretiens, 45–46.

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fig. 4.6 . François Boucher, Pan et Syrinx, 1759. The National Gallery, London. Presented by Mrs. Robert Hollond, 1880.

aspects.59 But Syrinx can never remain wholly disguised. Her temporal displacement opens up the impassable chasm separating ourselves from the past, revealing her to be a displaced cultural artifact, the subject of an irreconcilable duality of meaning. Pan likewise becomes a caricature of lust and yearning, which Baudelaire links to other antique figures—Venus, Hercules—who have lost their power to command reverence.60 For Baudelaire, to grasp what these figures once meant, and to reconcile that meaning with our own understanding, requires a “backward effort of the mind, the result of which is called ‘pastiche’ ”—the borrowing and blending of things past and present to create new meanings.61 Such a process involves recursive attempts to bring foreground and background, mythic past and dramatic 59. Metamorphosis is more likely to be perceived as grotesque or alienating outside of an etiological “cosmology of migrating forms,” as Mary Barnard notes in The Myth of Apollo and Daphne: Love, Agon, and the Grotesque (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 136. 60. Pan’s supernatural powers may not be fully operable in Daphnis et Chloé, as suggested in chapter 2. 61. Baudelaire, “De l’essence du rire,” in Œuvres complètes, 2: 533.

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present, into perfect alignment, reflecting the infinite regression of the mise-enabyme captured by the pantomime’s doubled enactment. Despite this slippage, the glimmering romantic fantasy of Daphnis seems within our grasp. We are drawn into the frame, past the tree boughs, behind where the eye can see. But glimpsing what is hidden, we find that our vantage point has shifted again, to the foreground once more, or, better—to a place we’ve never seen. T H E M AG IC C I R C L E

When Ravel declared that he wanted to set three of Mallarmé’s poems to music, Roland-Manuel passed a key test of friendship by guessing that one of them would be “Soupir,” which became the first of the Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé. The second song in the group, “Placet futile,” evoked the sensual playfulness of a Boucher painting, also a characteristic Ravelian subject. But for the third song, the composer chose an interpretive cipher, “Surgi de la croupe et du bond”—not, needless to say, one of Roland-Manuel’s guesses. If the pantomime in Daphnis et Chloé reflects illusory experience in a dramatic enactment, the third Mallarmé song metaphorically suggests how negative space—conventionally understood to function as background or frame—might be inverted and centered, revealing its latent capacity to generate meaning. This interpretation is reinforced by a conceptual linkage between “Surgi de la croupe” and “Soupir,” the first song. Before turning to Ravel’s music, let’s analyze the poem “Soupir” (1864) as a way to ease into Mallarmé’s poetic ecosystem, whose entrance policies can be notoriously restrictive. In ten lines of rhyming couplets, Mallarmé compares the beloved to an autumn landscape—a familiar metaphorical strategy that echoes Shakespearean sonnets (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) and Baudelaire’s poetry (“O pale Marguerite! Are you not an autumnal sun like me?”). The first half of “Soupir” culminates with an image of the beloved’s eyes, suggesting a white fountain in a garden casting sprays of water “vers l’Azur.” In Mallarmé’s poetry, azur is both an exotic modifier cognate with lapis-lazuli (derived from the Persian lāzhuward) and a reference to the unattainable Ideal, glimpsed obliquely through the sounds and allusions of language.62 However we might construe the Ideal (there are, of course, many ways), the first half of the poem suggests rising

62. See Barbara Kelly, Music and Ultra-modernism in France: A Fragile Consensus, 1913–1939 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: Boydell Press, 2013), 101. Streaks of azure infuse Mallarmé’s poems, including (most obviously) the sonnet “L’Azur,” which concludes with the poem’s title exclaimed four times—a rare instance of melodrama for the circumspect alchimiste du verbe. “L’Azur” was written three months before “Soupir,” and both were published in Le Parnasse contemporain (1866).

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movement toward it, or perhaps a reaching out implied by vers, which occurs four times in the first six lines.63 In the second half, Mallarmé’s poetic gaze turns from the expansive, vaporous sky overhead to desiccated leaves and stagnant waters underfoot. Movement becomes stasis: pools of water reflect the “infinite languor” of the sky, the fallen leaves carving furrows in the “dead water.” If the poem’s first half reflects an inhalation of breath, replete with infinite possibility, the second half suggests contracting lungs squeezing out air in a gradually slackening stream. Mallarmé’s syntactical fragmentation favors fleeting imagery over sequential narrative; his symbolic language is famously precarious. Elizabeth McCombie points out that “as the trustworthy categories of the physical and the real break down, so do the conventional poetic categories of voice and nature,” both becoming “forces in a mystical and symbolic network.”64 Through this process, Mallarmé creates a poetic illusion with a double function, using metaphor and allegory to suggest familiar images, but eroding their representational capacity by encircling them with an insuperable boundary. As he closes off the magic circle, he opens up a “self-generating verbal universe” that needs no external referents.65 Collapsing the conceptual distinction between object and sign diminishes the symbolic power of language while retaining its polysemous qualities, aligning it closely with music. In the foreword to René Ghil’s Traité du verbe, Mallarmé claims that the word—and more specifically, the act of speech—conjures up, not a signified object, but a concept existing only in the imagination: “I say: a flower! and . . . musically there arises the subtle idea itself, the flower that is absent from all bouquets.”66 The arbitrary sound of the sign brings to mind both the emblematic flower and the void created when we try to fill the imagination with something that does not, and cannot, exist in the real world. Mallarmé’s musical language is not simply the “euphonious juxtaposition of words,” a condition he describes as “self-evident”; words are also “a means of material communication with the reader, like the notes of a piano.”67 63. Peter Kaminsky has also noted the sense of movement in the first half of the poem, while Arthur Wenk suggests that the first half “contains all the forward movement—the subject and the verb.” See Kaminsky, “Vocal Music and the Lures of Exoticism and Irony,” in Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Mawer, 173, and Arthur B. Wenk, Claude Debussy and the Poets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 248. 64. Elizabeth McCombie, Mallarmé and Debussy: Unheard Music, Unseen Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 165. 65. Malcolm Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 62. Bowie’s phrase refers specifically to the poem “Prose (pour des Esseintes),” but it seems applicable to much of Mallarmé’s poetic work. 66. Stéphane Mallarmé, foreword to Traité du verbe, by René Ghil (Paris: Giraud, 1886), 6. The passage also appears in Mallarmé’s Crise de vers, published in Divagations (1897). 67. Mallarmé, letter to Edmond Gosse, January 10, 1893, in Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé, trans. and ed. Rosemary Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 190.

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But what might this communication entail if words truly functioned like music, their significative power dependent upon specific codes (martial rhythms, pastoral orchestration) and accommodating plentiful interpretive ambiguity? The link between music and literature, for Mallarmé, is founded not on representation but relationships. As he described in an interview with the journalist Jules Huret, “Things exist; we do not need to create them. We have only to seize the relations among them; it is the thread of these relations that form verses and orchestras.”68 Once seized, these relationships should generate an art distinct from reality, allowing us, as readers or spectators, to maintain our self-awareness. In theatrical contexts, and specifically in Wagnerian opera, the very presence of music can imperil this capacity, inducing an enthralling simulation of reality: “You have to undergo a spell, the accomplishment of which no means of enchantment involving musical magic is too much, violating your reason as it grapples with a simulacrum, and you proclaim straightaway, ‘Suppose this actually happened and that you are there!’ ”69 Mallarmé claimed for poetry a superior form of communication achieved silently, “between the lines and above the glance,” without the “intervention of catgut strings and the pistons of an orchestra.”70 If noise proved suspect, the nineteenth-century Wagnerian orchestra was a primary offender, its volume and variety of effects no longer a mere “orchestral addition” to theatrical drama but a “vivifying effluvium,” without which the spectacle itself would not exist.71 Though Mallarmé acknowledged instances when music constructively shattered the totalizing illusions of naturalist theater—in melodrama, for example72—he cautioned against marrying music to text: art might no longer create its own world, but rather flow through and from the vicissitudes of human experience, absorbing the semantic meanings of language and sound. Even without the presence of music, a poem that simulates reality, its meaning contingent on the order imposed by concepts and things external to it, diminishes our awareness of the poetic illusion qua illusion. Mallarmé would want the opposite: the “supreme satisfaction” of “being aware of the magic,” the relations that form verses and orchestras suggesting a method for ordering the world.73 68. Mallarmé, “Réponse à des enquêtes,” in Œuvres complètes de Stéphane Mallarmé, ed. Henri Mondor and Georges Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 871. 69. Mallarmé, “Richard Wagner: Réverie d’un poëte français,” in Œuvres complètes (1945), 542. Whether Mallarmé was criticizing Wagner here remains a debate among literary scholars: Martin Puchner, for example, finds a critique of Wagner, while Heath Lees, who reads Mallarmé’s writings more holistically, sees an integration of Wagner’s views. See Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, AntiTheatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 72; Lees, Mallarmé and Wagner: Music and Poetic Language (New York: Routledge, 2016), 211–21. 70. Mallarmé to Edmond Gosse, in Selected Letters, 190. 71. Mallarmé, “Richard Wagner: Rêverie d’un poëte français,” in Œuvres complètes (1945), 542. 72. Mallarmé, “Crayonné au théâtre,” in Œuvres complètes (1945), 296–97. 73. Mallarmé to André Gide, June 1893, in Selected Letters, 192. Also Landy, How to Do Things with Fictions, 86.

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In “Magie,” a cryptic vignette published in 1893, Mallarmé described how the opening and closing rhymes of a poem demarcated a magic circle. Words producing closing rhymes, as Joshua Landy notes, make their opening counterparts seem retrospectively inevitable.74 In the poem “Se purs ongles” (also “Sonnet en yx”), Mallarmé coined the word ptyx to rhyme with other -ix endings, as if it were “created by the magic of rhyme”—a misdirectional claim that belies his intellectual exertions, avowedly drawn from Poe’s “strict ideas” on poetic composition.75 Creating a new word mirrors the process of writing, existing words and sounds put together as if ex nihilo, each poem a world unto itself. But for Mallarmé, music may not have functioned in the same way. By the 1880s, he found in orchestral music an imperfect rendering of the relational network sustaining our existence, advising poets to “take back what is ours”: it is not, he claimed, “through the elementary sounds of brasses, strings, or wood[wind]s, but undeniably through the intellectual word at its height that there should result . . . the system otherwise known as Music.”76 Ravel’s challenge in setting Mallarmé’s poems involved not only the obscurities of the poet’s language, but also his sense of the optimal relationship between music and poetry. As Vladimir Jankélévitch has noted, Ravel considered music a “walled garden, a second nature, a magical enclosure . . . which becomes the fictitious world of art.”77 But Ravel’s view—a suitable complement to Mallarmé’s—had to accommodate the utilitarian function of preparing a threshold to Mallarmé’s poetic world through music. Framing devices, like those sometimes used in programmatic and dramatic music, offered a possible strategy. Take, for example, Dukas’s L’Apprenti sorcier, in which Carolyn Abbate and Carlo Caballero have identified the implied presence of a narrative voice. For Abbate, the musical epilogue suggests the equivalent of third-person musical narration (“he said”), while for Caballero, the two-measure tag following the epilogue exclaims, “That’s the end!”78 In both interpretations, a musical fragment or section sounding external to the main body comments upon it, distinguishing the realm of the sorcerer’s apprentice from the world of orchestral story-telling. In “Soupir,” Ravel adopts a similar approach, translating Mallarmé’s poetic ecology of rhetorical figures to a musical setting that preserves their singularity and integrity. 74. Landy, How to Do Things with Fictions, 85. 75. Mallarmé claimed that he believed the word ptyx existed in no other language. See his letter to Eugène Léfebure, May 3, 1868, in Œuvres complètes (1945), 1488; letter to Henri Cazalis, January 1864, in Selected Letters, 26. 76. Mallarmé, “Crisis of verse,” in Divagations, 210; “Crise de vers,” in Œuvres complètes (1945), 367–68. 77. Jankélévitch, Ravel, 89. 78. See Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 60; Caballero, “Silence, Echo,” 164. In Caballero’s interpretation, the narrative voice simultaneously exclaims, “That’s the beginning!” This replication creates an uncanny effect.

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“Soupir” is scored for an expanded Pierrot ensemble of two flutes, two clarinets, first and second violin, viola, cello, piano, and voice. The piece opens with the diaphanous texture of natural string harmonics, played as glissandos on the G string in the second violin and as arpeggiations across four strings in the first violin, viola, and cello. These crystalline string harmonics, combined with the motional effects of the glissando, produce a shifting, glassy timbre, like flutes playing en plein air, their sound slightly distorted by the breeze. The opening harmony, an extended E minor chord that flows through the first half of the piece, sounds more like roving flashes of the minor pentatonic. There is little sense of meter, though a gentle pulsation emerges from flecks and daubs of sound gleaming through the vaporous harmonics, substituting for more pronounced metrical articulation. Robert Gronquist’s observation that “Ravel begins ‘Soupir’ as if without time, or with time halted” rings true in one sense: the prevailing experience of the opening is of stasis, free from teleological impulses.79 But the sub-metrical pulsations also have a chronometric quality that counteracts the impression of temporal freedom, suggesting a substructure which simultaneously expresses qualities of stasis and motion—much like Le Gibet and Boléro, despite their stark stylistic differences. The piece’s special effects have the transportive character of the glissando and the sense of enchantment typical of the French féerique. Even without the presence of Queen Mab, “Soupir” seems to introduce a realm adjacent to but separate from our own—an impression aided by the hushed silence preceding any concert performance, when we anticipate the singer’s inhalation, the pianist’s lean, the violinist’s stroke of the bow. In such a staged environment, the mere presence of music— any sort of music—is enough to demarcate the boundaries of the performance. For Ravel to suggest that a musical realm stands apart, not just from reality and its simulacra but from other performative representations of aesthetic experience, the music must have a distinctive quality to it. “Soupir” answers this concern with special effects—specifically, string glissandos and harmonics. But if these distinctive timbres initiate Mallarmé’s poetic illusion, we may wonder why the singer enters only after two lengthy measures of instrumental music. This instrumental introduction, functioning conventionally to establish the piece’s key and affect, also uses sound to represent the poem’s unacknowledged beginning, unseen on the page— silence, and an inhalation of breath. (This paradoxical substitution of sound for silence recurs in “Surgi de la croupe et du bond,” as we shall see.) The phrase “vers l’Azur” concludes the first half of the poem and initiates the second half, but this textual repetition has no direct parallel in Ravel’s musical setting. As the string harmonics dissipate (one measure before R3), the gossamer texture gathers into densely woven threads, strings playing descending chromatic motives that strike a note of 79. Robert Gronquist, “Ravel’s ‘Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé,’ ” Musical Quarterly 64 (October 1978): 513.

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disillusion before the singer’s second declaration of “vers l’Azur.” By R4, the harmony turns acerbic, unwinding an octatonic passage that would sound at home in Le Gibet. Only in the last two measures of the poem (shortly after R5) do the enchanted harmonics return, this time joined by piano arpeggiations. If the rising movement of the poem’s first half implies a sense of striving— perhaps for the Ideal, or for the world of metaphor, where a face might be translated into an autumn landscape—then the second half attests to the impossibility of such a place, which can be grasped only through glimpses and allusions. Changes in musical style at the midpoint of the piece reflect images of slackening and contracting in the poem’s second half, along with the poet’s discovery that what he desires is impossible to attain. But if we recall that poetic metaphor is an illusion we “could sustain even in the face of the knowledge that it is one,”80 then the transient disappearance of Ravel’s emblems of enchantment need not signal poetic disenchantment. Perhaps these magical effects fade because they have done their work, marking the illusion’s threshold and drawing us inside. Once we have gained entrance to the magic circle, we have no more need for signposts and signal flares: recall the Nymphs in Daphnis et Chloé, conjured by orchestral effects that gradually faded as we assimilated their mysterious charms. At the end of “Soupir,” the sortilèges return to show us the door, resealing the circle and ensuring we don’t overstay our welcome. This tactic of framing “Soupir” with glittering sonic baubles speaks directly to Mallarmé’s interest in creating self-sustaining poetic worlds legible to readers as illusory creations. Nearly a decade after completing Trois poèmes, Ravel noted his predilection for the work, claiming that in it he had “transposed the literary procedures of Mallarmé”81—including, we might add, the poet’s skepticism of panoptic illusions. The opening of “Soupir,” like the interlude preceding Laideronnette in Ma mère l’Oye, exhibits the sort of qualities Ravel’s detractors would have called recherché: exceedingly novel, and overtly so. We savor its sonic ambrosia but are never allowed to forget where and how it was manufactured. The enchanting surface of “Soupir” is an ironic enticement like Vuillard’s fragile illusionism: as it beckons, it reminds us that Mallarmé’s illusion cannot be pierced with interpretive resolve. It withstands all attempts to transform it into a haven for our desires. Listening to Silence When Debussy set three Mallarmé poems in 1913, two of them were “Soupir” and “Placet futile.” (He described this coincidental choice as a “phenomenon of autosuggestion worthy of communication to the Academy of Medicine.”)82 But despite 80. Landy, How to Do Things with Fictions, 87. 81. Ravel, interview with André Révész (1924), in Ravel Reader, 433. 82. Nichols, Ravel, 159, recounts the dustup between Debussy and Mallarmé’s son-in-law, Dr. Edmund Bonniot, over permission to set the songs, Ravel intervening on Debussy’s behalf.

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his penchant for expressive ambiguity, Debussy passed over “Surgi de la croupe et du bond,” which Ravel chose for his third Mallarmé song. Ravel acknowledged that this poem was “the strangest, if not the most hermetic of [Mallarmé’s] sonnets” but never explained his attraction to it.83 Scholarship on Ravel’s setting has been similarly taciturn, focusing on the song’s tonal structures (or lack thereof) while avoiding Mallarmé’s admittedly baffling text.84 Harmonic relationships are indeed important in a piece that explores the outskirts of tonality in ways uncharacteristic for Ravel (though Chansons madécasses occupies similarly unconventional harmonic turf). But given the composer’s professed desire to “transpose” Mallarmé’s poetic processes into music, it seems imperative to situate musical analysis within, or alongside, poetic interpretation. Using John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” as a companion text lightens the critical burden of “Surgi de la croupe et du bond.” This choice is prompted by a striking thematic similarity between Keats’s ode and Mallarmé’s sonnet, both of which confront the problems of absence and impossibility while alluding to a broader network of shared images and aesthetic preoccupations.85 If these correspondences are accidental, Mallarmé’s knowledge of Keats’s work was not: “in the unfinished work of Keats there is many a poem, pure, ardent, musical, where the most splendid imagination of the present at the same time dons the solemnity and grace of antiquity,” he writes.86 Perhaps the second stanza of Keats’s ode resonates most tellingly with “Surgi de la croupe”: Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

83. Ravel, “Autobiographical Sketch,” in Ravel Reader, 32; “Esquisse autobiographique,” in Lettres, écrits, entretiens, 46. 84. Harmonic analyses of “Surgi de la croupe” may be found in Barbara Kelly, Music and Ultramodernism in France, 108–9; Peter Kaminsky, “Ravel’s Late Music and the Problem of Polytonality,” Music Theory Spectrum 26 (Fall 2004): 246–47; and Gronquist, “Ravel’s ‘Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé,’ ” 521–22. 85. Robert Greer Cohn discusses these affinities in “Keats and Mallarmé,” Comparative Literature Studies 7 (June 1970): 195–203. 86. Mallarmé, “Beautés de l’anglais,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Marchal, 2: 1415.

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Here, the poet asks us to imagine the imperceptible song, whose vibrations exceed the range of human hearing—or produce none at all, sounding on a metaphysical plane beyond acoustical reverberation. It brings to mind the song of Orpheus that Monteverdi had excluded from L’Orfeo: as Abbate notes, “no opera can discover the song that brings back the dead,” just as no ear can perceive the “spirit ditties of no tone.”87 These songs are the absent counterparts of the “heard melodies,” which are themselves unrealized, described in language but unsung. The lovers depicted on the vase are likewise suspended in the expectant moment before a kiss, their passion poignantly idealized but forever unfulfilled. (Despite this, the male lover is told to take heart: never will he have to countenance the wrinkled face or sagging flesh of his beloved.) Keats’s urn, like the lovers’ suspended ardor, can be preserved indefinitely: “When old age this generation waste / Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours.” But what might this bearer of mysteries, which has survived but has not lived, say to us? An object of contemplation, it seems to transcend history and temporality; an emblem of times past, it exists in a state of temporal and cultural estrangement. Indeed, its continued existence as a work of art depends upon its detachment from the culture that had produced it. As with Keats’s ode, “Surgi de la croupe” presents the image of a decorative object—this time a vase—to suggest themes of absence, incompletion, and timelessness. The poem and Katherine Bergeron’s translation of it appear below, along with a reproduction of Rubin’s vase, an ambiguous image (similar to Arcimboldo’s invertible painting, “The Cook”) that Rae Beth Gordon uses to interpret the poem (figure 4.7).88 Surgi de la croupe et du bond D’une verrerie éphémère Sans fleurir la veillée amère Le col ignoré s’interrompt. Je crois bien que deux bouches n’ont Bu, ni son amant ni ma mère, Jamais à la même Chimère, Moi, sylphe de ce froid plafond! Le pur vase d’aucun breuvage Que l’inexhasutible veuvage Agonise mais ne consent, Naïf baiser des plus funèbres! À rien expirer annonçant Une rose dans les ténèbres. 87. Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 19. 88. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AFace_or_vase_7741_(purple_and_grey).svg. License at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode.

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Sprung from the croup and from the bounce Of an ephemeral glassware Yielding no flower for the bitter watch The ignored neck is interrupted. I do believe that two mouths have not Drunk, neither its lover nor my mother, Not ever, from the same Chimera, I, sylph of this cold ceiling! The pure vase without any drink But its endless widowhood Is dying but allows Nothing to expire announcing— The most mournful of naïve kisses!— A rose into its darkness.89

For Mallarmé’s poet, the vase is a vessel of emptiness, containing neither flowers nor drink (“breuvage”), its immobility symbolizing the arrested movement of the lovers framing the vase, whose lips never meet. A sense of what could be, or what might have been, pervades the poem, evident in the potentiality (or seeming nonexistence) of the “sylph of this cold ceiling,” who sees in the vase a reflection of his mother’s unconsummated desire.90 The neck of the vase is “interrupted,” the rose—named only in the last line of the poem—never seeming to furnish a line of visual continuity from the vase’s foot to the crown of its bloom. Keats’s lovers were ecstatically frozen on the urn, enacting the timeless display of beauty that typifies the decorative object. But for Mallarmé’s lovers, unconsummated desire inhibits creative (and procreative) activity: a poetic void takes the place of the temporally estranged objet d’art. The lovers create neither poet nor poem, as Roger Pearson suggests, the sylph being a kind of metaphorical offspring inhabiting the “cold ceiling of failed poetic flight.”91 And yet, the rose’s absence—bringing to mind the flower “absent from all bouquets”—bears within it the possibility of aesthetic 89. Mallarmé, “Surgi de la croupe et du bond,” trans. Katherine Bergeron in Voice Lessons: French Mélodie in the Belle Epoque (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 299–300. 90. Robert Greer Cohn suggests that the creation of the sylph is an “event that does not occur.” See Cohn, Toward the Poems of Mallarmé, expanded edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 202. Graham Robb points out that sylph is one of around a hundred words in French with no rhymed counterpart, enhancing its sense of isolation. See Robb, Unlocking Mallarmé (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 90. 91. Roger Pearson, Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 204.

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fig. 4.7 . Rubin’s vase, created by Nevit Dilmen.

creation. The unheard melody endures beyond human perception; the poem exists outside of the literary container given to it. For Gordon, the active language of the first stanza, particularly evident in the opening word, “surgi,” belies the vase’s fixedness in time and space. Once we perceive the vase as a symbol, the decorative object seems to disappear, leaving both a void and a linguistic “proliferation of decorative effects” that produce a “shimmering vacillation of form.”92 As Pearson notes, the sonnet “will not ‘breathe’ [expirer] the name of the rose, and yet speaks it all the same.”93 In Ravel’s setting of the poem, shifting textural planes suggest Mallarmé’s fluctuating fields of presence and absence, emerging through ornament, void, motion, and immobility. The rising ornamental figure opening the piece translates the first word of the sonnet, “surgi,” into a gestural impulse that passes from flute to piccolo, finally resting on A6 (example 4.9). But torpor soon settles over the piece, a winding, circular melody in the piccolo unfolding over fingered tremolos in the 92. Rae Beth Gordon, Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 156. 93. Pearson, Unfolding Mallarmé, 204.

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violins, creating an impression of delicate, fluttering movement with little sense of harmonic grounding. The melody repeats three times unchanged—or five times, if we count the two transposed repetitions beginning on AG5 in measures five and six. The theme’s circularity, repetition, and enervated rhythms suggest a stagnant environment, like brackish pond water pooling around a rock. At the end of the opening sequence, in measure six, Mallarmé’s text finally appears, describing the immobility of the decorative object in a musical environment defined by melodic circularity and stasis. But as the opening passage unfolds, fingered tremolos in the violins create a very different impression. If their fluttering movements seem contained (or suppressed) in the second and third measures, they grow more expansive by measure four, joined first by an octatonic flute gesture, then by the viola, string tremolos persisting in the background throughout. These gestures seem to impel the music forward despite the melody’s best efforts to arrest it. The sense of stability generated by melodic repetition slips away as decorative flourishes and precipitous chromatic lines skim by. By measure six the texture grows murkier, piano and bass clarinet playing staggered entrances of ornamental gestures until, at the measure’s end, flute and clarinets affix themselves to the melody, their parallel chromatic descents matching the melodic rhythm. Ornament infiltrates the texture, unmooring it from conspicuous harmonic referents and reflecting the precarious presence of Mallarmé’s objects, which flicker and oscillate beneath our gaze. At the change of meter to 128 , the rippling surfaces subdue as the piano strikes ringing AG octaves. This abrupt change of texture occurs just before the singer describes the vase as flowerless, its neck ignored and interrupted. Wringing the musical fabric of its “sonorous fluid” just as the text reveals an empty vase may seem less translational than mimetic: the “empty” texture, combining sustained chords in the strings and winds with stark octaves in the piano, reflects its poetic counterpart.94 Simple enough. Yet this pairing of a hollow musical texture with an empty vase also adjoins two of Mallarmé’s themes in “Surgi de la croupe”: first, the empty vase is filled (with possibility), and second, the poetic language of nothingness consists of somethingness. We might imagine this passage unfolding quite differently had it been written by Debussy, for whom the musical equivalent of silence is more silence, interpolated frequently enough between passages that it develops its own sense of presence, like a character always talked about but never seen.95 Julian Johnson, drawing on Jankélévitch, notes how “the pianissimo of 94. The quoted phrase “sonorous fluid” is purportedly Ravel’s, used in conversation with Jean Cocteau. See Nichols, Ravel, 189. 95. The aesthetics of silence in Debussy’s music has been widely discussed, but Louis-Marc Suter describes several different approaches to silence in “Pelléas et Mélisande in Performance,” in Debussy in Performance, ed. James R. Briscoe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 48–55.

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Debussy’s music is amplified by the silence that surrounds it.”96 For Ravel, the musical evocation of a void cannot be drained of sound, just as Mallarmé’s vase cannot be imagined without language. Ravel approaches the void in the same way painters create an impression of white space: not by leaving part of the canvas exposed, but by applying white paint and other subtle shades to it—a choice that echoes the aesthetics of Mallarmé’s poetry just as effectively as Debussy’s carefully programmed silences. The section of “Surgi” describing emptiness and incompletion thus emerges from a stark musical texture that glows dimly like the embers of a fire, capturing the quality of absence through muted acoustical presence. It is also significant that throughout this section, the piano rings out octaves alternating between AG/BH and F, which resonate intertextually with the BH ostinato in Le Gibet. Bertrand’s titular poem called attention to a particular kind of extra-sensory hearing in which a buzzing fly and a tolling bell might sound alike. If we were able to hear both in Le Gibet, perhaps we can hear more in “Surgi de la croupe” than we might think. At R1, the tempo—already paced at a languorous stroll—slows to a crawl; the voice drops out of the texture, leaving only strings (playing harmonics) and bare octaves in the piano, sustained by the left hand and intermittently struck by the right. If the roving, arpeggiated string harmonics in “Soupir” suggest the sound of pastoral wind instruments, the static harmonics in “Surgi de la croupe” evoke a sealed, crepuscular space, perhaps the dark interior of the vase itself. The characteristic timbre of string harmonics—crystalline, glassy, flute-like—buzzes with astringent dissonances, pitting FG against G and D against EH. The Ravelian shimmer of “Soupir” seems worlds apart from the middle of “Surgi” despite its use of similar special effects. The singer enters two measures after R1 with Mallarmé’s descriptions of incompletion, interruption, and absence—themes to which Ravel has already alluded, shifting from a rippling, active texture to a comparatively “empty” musical space. If Ravel has musically telegraphed the themes of Mallarmé’s text with textural and harmonic changes, then what function do the string harmonics serve? Their purpose becomes clear when we compare them with their counterparts in “Soupir,” which had transported us from the world of sensory experience to an overlapping but separate realm of poetic illusion. The harmonics in “Surgi de la croupe” serve a similarly transportive function, though they convey us to a claustrophobic space that seems like a shadowy, underwater echo of the piece’s opening measures, where sounds blur and pulsing rhythms dissipate. These harmonics sound hoarse because figuratively, they exist outside the range of natural perception; as Bergeron notes, “Ravel has scored the string harmonics to read, almost literally, like the partials of a hypothetical sound—stacked up over the piano’s bass note as if on some imaginary 96. Julian Johnson, “Present Absence: Debussy, Song, and the Art of (Dis)appearing,” 19th-Century Music 40 (Spring 2017): 239.

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spectrogram.”97 Instead of gazing upon a vase, as we are invited to do in the poem, we are drawn inside of it, where emptiness gives way to artistic possibility. We are listening through the harmonics to the noise of unrealized creation, a kind of unheard harmony—the sound of the shimmering “Soupir” as it is being imagined, before it has become structure. Both the languid tempo and harmonic rhythm of the piano and strings give an impression of stasis, but changes of meter, alternating between 23, 44, and 45, create a fluid sense of temporal passage, as if this embryonic music were pre-metrical. Yet even within the apparently motionless chords, the buzzing quality of the harmonics reflects the vibratory process of creation. We leave this still-unformed place not long after entering it. The string harmonics fade one measure before R2, and the winding piccolo melody from the opening of the piece soon returns. Once more, we experience the vase from the outside, as a decorative object, its form fluctuating before our gaze. By the time Mallarmé’s rose rises in the darkness, the piece is nearly over. But the rose’s appearance is not the sort of culminating event another poet might have made of it—not a miraculous emergence from the void. Indeed, the rose is present throughout the poem as an expression of potentiality, the hidden-yet-perceptible counterpart completing the vase’s “interrupted” neck. Like the face of the lovers, carved from the negative space wreathing the vase, the literary manifestation of a rose can seem as real as a solid object. Indeed, Mallarmé’s vase is also a manifestation, its fixedness and solidity a mirage wrought by his (and our) poetic imagination. Often Ravel’s emblems of enchantment have the contradictory effect of absorbing and diverting our attention at once. Rarely do they bring us so close to the act of creation. In “Surgi de la croupe,” we realize why. The middle section, which Bergeron describes as “utterly disenchanted,” is by turns full of noise, instability, and stillness—an apparent reflection of the artist’s mind at work.98 Perhaps it is disenchanted; maybe not. Either way, it is a construction and a representation of artistic process. However credible it may seem, it is not, we must remember, the chose en soi. Mallarmé’s poetry seems to have sprung from his grimoire fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. And yet, a secret lurks behind his brash command of language: the counterpart of a word is another word, not an object or an idea. He invests each word, line, and space with “an aura of indispensability, almost inevitability,” making other choices inconceivable.99 If Mallarmé’s incantatory rhymes conjure up a poetic illusion that seems to have always existed just so, it is because the poet has encouraged a false attribution of method. It may seem that his poetry has the power to create ex nihilo, but embedded within his radical ordering of language is a sense of what is out of reach: the annihilation of 97. Bergeron, Voice Lessons, 304. 98. Ibid., 303. 99. Landy, How to Do Things with Fictions, 84.

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content through poetic expression. “Surgi de la croupe,” a poem of incompletion and absence, reflects in its very existence the somethingness required to produce nothingness. The challenge for Ravel in “Surgi de la croupe” was to capture, in sound, both the poetic illusion of nothingness and the creative potentiality of the void. These paradoxical aesthetic positions, reflected by the vase and the spaces around it, become textural planes in Ravel’s music. Repetitions of circular melodies suggest stasis, but fluttering string harmonics imbue the sound with subtle surface movement, functioning like the musical equivalent of an insect’s beating wings—a scarcely perceptible motion that might be glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eyes. Like Mallarmé’s incantations, Ravel’s piece seems to invite us behind the veil, within the magic circle of creation. But once inside, we find that the poet and the composer are no longer there. They have constructed this circle just for us—a simulacrum of a process containing within it another circle, another simulacrum, an ouroboros of creation and expression. The silence we encounter there has also been constructed, from language and from sound: the impossible, unheard melody of the void.

5

Motion, Illusion, and Phantasmagoria in La Valse

In the 1920s, hardly anyone thought La Valse was just about a waltz. Hearing a duo-piano version, Diaghilev pronounced it a portrait of a ballet, bringing to mind the frozen bodies of tableaux vivants—a judgment that delayed the piece’s choreographic début for years.1 When Ida Rubinstein and Bronislava Nijinska mounted a ballet production at the Paris Opéra in 1929, it looked like something Busby Berkeley might have hatched years later for the film star Esther Williams. Henry Malherbe aptly summed up the absurd yet popular staging: “On the bank of the Danube, we are in a marble swimming pool surrounded by high, massive columns. . . . Mme. Ida Rubinstein, in a silver corset and a cap with flaxen plumes, plays a sort of aquatic goddess of the waltz.”2 But long before Rubinstein donned her plumed cap, audiences had already rendered a verdict on La Valse, after first hearing it at the Concerts-Lamoureux in December 1920. Its orchestrational and affective contrasts evoked historical and symbolic associations, reflecting for many critics the nostalgia, disruption, and loss felt so keenly in the years following the Great War. Théodore Lindenlaub’s review captures this perspective by grafting musical historicism and contemporary angst onto a work whose title suggests neither of those things: 1. Francis Poulenc, Moi et mes amis, confidences recueillies par Stéphane Audel (Paris: La Palatine, 1963), 179. The ballet version of La Valse premiered in October 1926 at the Royal Flemish Opera Ballet in Antwerp. For details of the production, see Mawer, Ballets of Maurice Ravel, 157. 2. “Nous sommes, au bord du Danube, dans un piscine de marbre entourée de hautes colonnes massives. . . . Mme. Ida Rubinstein, en corset d’argent et en toque aux aigrettes blondes, figure une sorte de divinité aquatique de la Valse.” Henry Malherbe, “Chronique musicale,” Le Temps, May 29, 1929, 3.

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There [Ravel] found, among the ruins, amid the void and misery of the present, the relentless waltzes of the past. . . . The artist’s sharp perception . . . [chronicles] . . . the contrast of these insouciant, lively waltzes of long ago with those unfortunate ones in distress [ces malheureux en détresse], who keep turning, whether by habit or else to deaden their sadness and hunger with those bygone rejoicings. And this rising, lugubrious frenzy, the battle between all this Johann Strauss that doesn’t want to die and this race toward ruin takes on the aspect of a danse macabre.3

Other reviewers offered inventive scenarios that transported La Valse from the sometimes antiseptic concert environment to the realms of memory, magic, or natural disaster. For Raymond Schwab, Ravel’s bacchanalian waltz contained in its joyful frenzy something menacing, bringing to mind a saying of the poet Sully Prudhomme’s: “We are dancing on a volcano.”4 Maurice Brillant, who maintained that La Valse was “not at all, as you might think, a dance pure and simple,” described how flickers of sound emerge from a murmuring dissonance; Ravel, “with the skill of a magician,” makes them whirl under a sunbeam. Rhythms in triple meter gradually take shape, and “the memory of an old phrase of Johann Strauss imposes itself ”—not as it might be performed in a dance hall, but a shadow of that music, rustled from the corner of one’s mind.5 Wit and humor play their part in the work’s reception, too: Antoine Banès found La Valse “an amusing pleasantry” and a “parodic apotheosis,” its Straussian motives at times “aggravated by a polytonal dernier cri.”6 But perhaps the view most closely resembling Ravel’s own came from Jean Poueigh, who described the piece as a “sort of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz” and a “sensitive, admiring homage directed toward the genre itself.”7 Years later in his autobiographical sketch, Ravel would echo Poueigh by describing La Valse in almost identical terms, as “une espèce d’apothéose de la valse viennoise.”8 Opinions like Poueigh’s, while compatible with Ravel’s pronouncements, gained little traction with listeners, perhaps because they seemed out of touch with contemporary preoccupations. Before La Valse ever made its way to the stage, Ravel found himself repeatedly defending his view of the work while fending off symbolic and programmatic interpretations, as he did in a 1922 interview: 3. “Il y a retrouvé, au milieu des ruines, du vide de temps present, de la misère, les valses obstinés d’autrefois. . . . La fine perception de l’artiste . . . [enregistre] . . . le contraste de ces valses allègres, insouciantes de naguère avec ces malheureux en détresse, qui tournent par habitude ou pour étourdir leur tristesse et leur faim sur ces joyeusetés défuntes. Et cette frénésie montante et lugubre, la lutte entre tout ce Johann Strauss qui ne veut pas mourir et cette course à la ruine, prend une allure de danse macabre.” T. Lindenlaub, “À travers les concerts,” Le Temps, December 28, 1920, 3. 4. Raymond Schwab, “Concerts-Lamoureux,” Le Ménestrel, December 17, 1920, 496. 5. Maurice Brillant, “Les Œuvres et les Hommes,” Le Correspondant, March 25, 1921, 1126–27. 6. Antoine Banès, “Les Concerts,” Le Figaro, December 13, 1920, 3. 7. Jean Poueigh, “Les Grand Concerts,” Comœdia, December 13, 1920, 2. 8. Ravel, “Esquisse autobiographique,” in Lettres, écrits, entretiens, ed. Orenstein, 46.

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Chapter 5 [La Valse] doesn’t have anything to do with the present situation in Vienna, and it also doesn’t have any symbolic meaning in that regard. In the course of La Valse, I did not envision a dance of death or a struggle between life and death. (The year of the choreographic argument, 1855, precludes such an assumption.) I changed the [original] title, Wien, to La Valse, which is more in keeping with the aesthetic nature of the composition. It is a dancing, whirling, almost hallucinatory ecstasy, an increasingly passionate and exhausting whirlwind of dancers, who are overcome and exhilarated by nothing but the waltz.9

In other interviews and correspondence, he continued to deny that the piece reflected either postwar Vienna or the decline of the Second Empire, complaining to Ernest Ansermet in 1921 that “some set this dance in Paris, on a volcano around 1870, and others in Vienna, before a buffet in 1918.”10 The discordant critical response to La Valse emerged, in part, from apparent discord within the piece itself. Did Ravel’s conjuring tricks fail to sway critical opinion? Or is it possible that critics were duped by the piece? These questions muddle the roles played by volition and interpretation in musical illusions. In previous chapters, the citing of reviews shed light on Ravel’s illusions by examining the impressions they left on critics, focusing on specific effects like perpetual ascent, emblems of enchantment, and illusions of motion or stasis. But if La Valse somehow misled critics and scholars, then the whole piece might function as an illusion—and to claim that a piece “appears other than it really is” raises the obvious question of what the piece “really is.”11 It’s straightforward enough to point out the illusory harp effect in L’Enfant et les Sortilèges described in chapter 1, which presents the auditory appearance of a harp glissando (the illusion) created by woodwind arpeggios (what it really is). The same goes for the illusion of rotational motion in La Valse discussed below: if the music seems to swirl around us, it does

9. “Elle n’a rien à voir avec la situation présente à Vienne, non plus qu’aucune signification symbolique à cet regard. En composant La Valse je ne songeais pas à une danse de mort ni à une lutte entre la vie et la mort. (L’argument de ballet se situe en 1855, ce qui interdit pareille supposition.) J’ai changé le titre, Wien, en La Valse, qui correspond mieux à la nature esthétique de la composition. C’est une extase dansante, tournoyante, presque hallucinante, un tourbillon de plus en plus passionné et épuisant de danseuses, qui se laissent déborder et emporter uniquement par la valse.” C.v.W., “The French Music Festival,” De Telegraaf, September 30, 1922, in Ravel Reader, ed. Orenstein, 423; “Le Festival de musique française,” in Lettres, écrits, entretiens, 345. 10. Ravel to Maurice Emmanuel, Montfort l’Amaury, October 14, 1922, in Ravel Reader, 230; interview with Ravel by André Révész, ABC Madrid, May 1, 1924, reprinted and translated in Ravel Reader, 434. This interview does not appear in Lettres, écrits, entretiens. See also Ravel to Ernest Ansermet, October 20, 1921, in Ravel au miroirs de ses lettres, ed. René Chalupt and Marcelle Gerar (Paris: R. Laffont, 1956). 184. 11. Smith, “Problem of Perception,” 23. I approach the question of what the piece “really is” from an interpretive point of view and am not entertaining ontological concerns about the nature of music.

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not and cannot. The working definition I have applied to illusions thus far would suggest that a piece of music may be a representation of something else. But music might also be said to function as a type of virtual reality—an extension of our actual experience, set off by conceptual boundaries not clearly marked or perceived. Music evoking a theatrical or narrative context—whether ballet, opera, or programmatic instrumental music—may set up additional parameters, of which some may be spatial (a stage, a curtain) and others textual (framing devices like “once upon a time”). If music creates an enchanted space, recalling Mallarmé’s “incantatory stroke” of verse, then its enchantments may be a cognitive illusion wrought not (or not only) on the processing of sensory data, but on expectation and attentional focus. There is apt historical precedent for spotlighting the role of attention in particular. Empirical scientists in the fin de siècle were captivated by the question of whether attention was “an automatic or voluntary act.” Many concluded, according to Jonathan Crary, that “perception was an activity of exclusion, of rendering parts of a perceptual field unperceived”—a view that, while common today, was once considered novel.12 If critics in Ravel’s time were concerned about the unreliability of sensory data, as Alexandra Kieffer argues, their unease stemmed from the distortions and omissions typical of perception;13 indeed, substantial divergences in critical opinion might be traced to normative variations in perceptual experience. Differences between Ravel’s views and those of music critics might also have emerged because La Valse leads us to focus on certain thematic and structural features over others, much the way a magician influences which card we choose from a deck (a technique known as “forcing”). Most modern commentators have found the driving force behind La Valse to be conflict, be it musical, historical, or choreographic. Sevin Yaraman detects the shadowy presence of Johann Strauss and offers the image of Ravel laboring under a Bloomian anxiety of influence, at once paying homage while trying to free himself from his model.14 Deborah Mawer’s musical and choreographic study uncovers dualities on multiple structural levels, from surface rhythms and gestures to the architectural framing of the whole—all of which, she suggests, convey the yearning and dispossession felt by survivors of the Great War.15 Mawer and George Benjamin associate diatonicism and chromaticism with formal sections competing for prominence until the waltzes, infiltrated by dissonance and rhythmic disruption, start to 12. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 24–25. 13. Alexandra Kieffer, “The Debussyist Ear: Listening, Representation, and French Musical Modernism,” 19th-Century Music 39 (Summer 2015): 56–79, esp. 69. 14. Sevin Yaraman, Revolving Embrace: The Waltz as Sex, Steps, and Sound (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2002), 108. 15. Deborah Mawer, “Ballet and the Apotheosis of the Dance,” in Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Mawer, 151, 154.

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decay (Benjamin) or to reconstruct themselves in a decidedly postwar style (Mawer).16 Musical disjunctions and affective transformations drive these interpretations, underpinned by the notion that a generative impulse governs the music, progressing from creation and growth to destruction. Integrative approaches to the piece are far less typical, though Puri has managed the task, seeing La Valse as a bacchanalian frenzy transcending the narrative of conflict through Dionysian synthesis, ecstasy emerging from chaos and destruction.17 These contrasting interpretations bring to mind the well-known duck-rabbit image, a type of cognitive illusion of the same genus as Rubin’s vase, discussed in chapter 4 (figure 5.1).18 The duck-rabbit toys with our perceptual faculties, dangling before us the possibility that we might be able to see both animals at once; instead, we are left to toggle between the two, never achieving a stable image. Our perceptual oscillations induce a sense of temporal paralysis, absorbing the attention we might devote to other stimuli, like the exhortations of a ticking timepiece. For the duck-rabbit, as for La Valse, there is no “way it really is.”19 Disjunctive interpretations of La Valse stem in part from the piece’s oppositional qualities, highlighted by Ravel in ways that parallel the structure of a conjuring trick or detective story. They also arise from differing approaches to musical temporality and structural process: listeners who hear disjunction and transformation tend to focus on linear, diachronic events in the piece, while those who perceive integration seem to hear or think synchronically. Favoring one temporal approach doesn’t foreclose others: indeed, at key moments, contrasting musical temporalities converge, producing an oscillation between diachronic and conceptually synchronic hearings. The presence of two musical illusions in La Valse—perceptual ascent and rotational motion—combine with these structural and temporal processes to create a vivid programmatic odyssey that has been contested since the piece’s earliest performances. This chapter comprises a number of interlocking parts that will eventually link. It begins with a motivic analysis of La Valse before moving on to the piece’s illusions of rotational and ascending motion and their corresponding relationship to the vertige 16. Mawer, “Ballet and the Apotheosis of the Dance,” 154; George Benjamin, “Last Dance,” Musical Times 135 (July 1994), 432–34. 17. Puri, Ravel the Decadent, 171–72. 18. Some psychologists and neuroscientists dispute whether figures like the duck-rabbit should be called illusions, preferring to described them as ambiguous images. But I’m thinking of cognitive illusions as images that challenge us to see something we cannot, not as illusory images that differ from their veridical appearance. 19. Though E. H. Gombrich believes we cannot watch ourselves experience an illusion, I think we can indeed maintain an awareness of our position as spectators while perceiving an illusion at the same time. See Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5–6.

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fig. 5.1 . Duck-rabbit featured in the magazine Fliegende Blätter, October 23, 1892.

(vertigo) evoked in Baudelaire’s poetry and criticism, echoing the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. Vertige, as we shall see, is a key attribute of the grotesque, whose unity amid disjunction (as described in chapter 4) provides a theoretical framework for understanding the apparently oppositional qualities of La Valse’s structure and affect. Critical discourse on the piece evokes two forms of theatrical spectacle popular in the nineteenth century: phantasmagoria and magic lantern shows. To consider the different ways in which La Valse’s assemblage of effects appeal to attentional focus, we will compare its motivic relationships to the magic lantern’s dissolving views, polychromatic displays, and simulations of whirling movement.20 La Valse’s motivic structure, when linked to illusions of motion, provides a conceptual basis for determining if the piece’s transformational ascent conforms to the type witnessed in Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête and the second movement of the G major piano concerto. Whether its conclusion satisfies or defies expectations largely depends upon the degree to which we understand La Valse as phantasmagoria—that is, as an evocation, not only of phantom dancers, but of musical revenants that help define its apparent motivic and thematic conflict. T H E M AG IC L A N T E R N A N D M O T I V E X

The magic lantern, invented in the seventeenth century, projected images painted on glass slides to create a wide range of effects, including kaleidoscopic color, light and shadow, movement, and dissolving views. It was among the first media technologies to rival the influence of print culture, providing scientific, religious, and 20. Anthony Newcomb has examined the potential influence of phantasmagoria on the staging of the Wolf ’s Glen Scene in Weber’s Der Freischütz, and Deidre Loughridge has explored the relationship between the magic lantern, phantasmagoria, and developing audiovisual culture as an interpretive context for the music of Haydn and Beethoven. See Newcomb, “New Light(s) on Weber’s Wolf ’s Glen Scene,” in Opera and the Enlightenment, ed. Thomas Bauman and Marita Petzoldt McClymonds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 61–88; Loughridge, Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow, 163–231.

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political instruction to spectators of all social classes and educational levels. As a diversionary spectacle, its popularity crested in the 1800s, spurred in part by the invention of phantasmagoria, a theatrical genre introduced to Paris and London in the late eighteenth century by Paul Phylidor and Étienne-Gaspard Robert (known as Robertson). By the mid-nineteenth century, these ghost shows featured increasingly vivid and lifelike apparitions, like the three-dimensional Pepper’s Ghost. Around the same time, toy-sized magic lanterns and instructional booklets started to be marketed to families, turning phantasmagoria into quotidian domestic entertainment.21 Phylidor and Robertson typically lectured before their shows, providing scientific explanations for ghostly projections and disavowing any association with stage magic. Their rhetoric prefigured Ravel’s interpretive imprint on La Valse. “I am neither magician nor priest,” Phylidor asserted—and, in a remark befitting Ravel, “Is it necessary to say that these prodigies are nothing more than effects of optics? They are the playthings of an artist skilled in benefitting from the contrast of light and shadow; the rays of a torch directed and concentrated onto a single object; the image, shape and movement of that object.”22 Phylidor conceded more than he intended: optical effects are indeed real, even if the sort of ghosts he displayed are not. Ravel offered a similarly revealing disclaimer when he suggested that La Valse simply expresses “an ascending progression of sonority”—in other words, an illusion of rising musical motion. By Ravel’s time, the magic lantern had completed its metamorphosis into a plaything, operated by children and nostalgic parents born too late to have seen the theatrical shows in their heyday. In Swann’s Way—the first installment of Proust’s multivolume novel, In Search of Lost Time, the narrator, Marcel, describes how a lantern propped on top of a lamp projected images of figures from medieval legend: Golo and Geneviève de Brabant, animated on the walls of his childhood bedroom. For Marcel, this vivid prismatic display, narrated by his great aunt, inspired more dread than delight: In the manner of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colors, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window. But my sorrows were only increased, because this change of lighting destroyed, as nothing else could have done, the customary impression I had formed of my room, 21. Pepper’s Ghost first appeared in a stage adaptation of a Dickens story at London’s Royal Polytechnic in 1862; the magician Henri Robin created “Paganini’s Dream,” featuring an apparitional demon, for Paris audiences in 1863. On the mid-century marketing of phantasmagoria, see Castle, “Phantasmagoria,” 42. 22. Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. and ed. Richard Crangle (Exeter, England: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 143, 151.

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thanks to which the room itself, but for the torture of having to go to bed in it, had become quite endurable. For now I no longer recognized it, and I became uneasy.23

If the lantern had become a domestic novelty, it retained its link to the supernatural for the child Marcel, rendering the familiar strange through its prismatic display—a theme to which we shall return. A few critics described La Valse as if it were a phantasmagoria, imagining Ravel’s courtly evocations of Strauss as spectral effects with magical overtones, as we shall see below. But for the moment, let us focus on the technical and aesthetic dimensions of magic lantern shows, considering how three types of display— dissolving views, superimposed images, and simulated motion—offer visual analogues for La Valse’s motivic structure. To produce transformational effects like day into night, two lanterns projected onto the same space, the shutter of one gradually opening as the other closed, creating a dissolve, or the sense that “one slide seems to melt into the other.”24 Superimposed images used multiple glass laminae to suggest gradual accretion or illumination: in a Gothic scene painted on three slides, for example, the moon clouds over, then lights snap on in a castle, and a phantom materializes on the battlements.25 An impression of movement could be created by moving one slide over another on a single lantern, or by coupling a lantern with a rack-and-pinion mechanism, allowing projections of whirling, repetitive patterns.26 In La Valse, our perception of a fundamental rhythmic and melodic motive (call it motive x) might lead us down one of two different metaphorical tracks: the dissolving view or the superimposed image, depending on how we focus our attention. In many instances, Ravel provides ample incentive to ignore the motive’s presence and direct our attentional spotlight elsewhere, making the dissolving view, which masks motive x, more salient. Instead of describing the musical plot of La Valse in detail—there are other comprehensive accounts that highlight aspects of its form, motivic development, and harmony—I shall sketch its basic shape and refer to more specific formal and thematic markers as needed.27 Its tripartite (ABA') structure may or may not contain an introduction; for now, no decision needs to be made about that. The piece begins, like the Concerto for the Left Hand, with ominous rumbling in the contrabasses, 23. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1, Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 10. 24. Henry Simon Gage, Optic Projection: Principles, Installation, and Use of the Magic Lantern, Projection Microscope, Reflecting Lantern, Moving Picture Image (Ithaca, NY: Comstock, 1914), 34–35. 25. Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 154. 26. Gage, Optic Projection, 36; Warner, Phantasmagoria, 155. These were often achieved by pairing stationary and rotating slides, the latter producing a simulation of movement for the static slide. 27. See, e.g., Puri, Ravel the Decadent, 175, and Volker Helbing, “Spiral and Self-Destruction in Ravel’s La Valse,” in Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music, 182–83.

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before shifting to a series of courtly waltzes, finally careening toward mayhem at the end, truncheons wielded by percussion and brass. The first waltz theme, beginning at rehearsal 9 (R9), initiates a chain of waltzes separated by occasional flashes of percussive ebullience (R26 and R36). A reprise, where many commentators identify an affective shift, occurs at R54, marked by fragments of waltz themes cycling by in rapid, iterative succession. By R76, one of the waltz themes achieves ascendancy and unspools for nearly sixty measures, surrounded by rising and falling chromatic scales that yield increasingly dissonant harmonies. These waves reach an apex at R98, where the waltz rhythms virtually disappear, blotted out by chromatic smudges. Ravel’s livret extends only to the first one-fifth of the piece: Through clearing, swirling clouds, waltzing couples may be glimpsed. The clouds disperse gradually: we discern [at letter A] an immense hall populated by a whirling crowd. The scene is illuminated by degrees. At the fortissimo [letter B], light from the chandeliers radiates forth. An imperial court, around 1855.28

Though my focus here is on symphonic over choreographic performance, familiarity with the livret will be useful, since it clings to the music regardless of performance context. From the opening creatio ex nihilo, the bassoons form motive x, comprising a half-diminished seventh chord, an upper-voice tritone pattern pivoting around D, and a distinct rhythmic profile that helps establish the waltz meter. At R5, an upward glissando in the second harp seems to transfigure our surroundings, the low string tremolos—aural tokens of primordium, according to many critics— supplanted by the diffuse warmth of horns and clarinets. As the violas take up a graceful melody inflected with portamento, it seems as if we have entered a ballroom, leaving the swirling mists behind. It’s easy to overlook how motive x has followed us there, adapting to our courtly surroundings by smoothing out its rough edges, tritones becoming fourth and fifths to accommodate diatonic harmonies (example 5.1). Rhythmically, motive x hasn’t changed at all, nor have the articulations that define its rhythmic groupings. By R9, the first waltz theme, borne by viola and bassoon, arrives in a buoyant D major, escorted by divisi contrabasses alternating tonic and dominant. Having already turned itself into a melody at R5, motive x seamlessly adapts to the waltz theme with a few additional tweaks, including a rhythmic augmentation and an exaggerated portamento. Thus the waltz theme reveals itself a lilting, elongated version of the primordial fragment from the opening (example 5.2; cf. example 5.1). 28. “Des nuées tourbillonnantes laissent entrevoir, par éclaircies, des couples de valseurs. Elles se dissipent peu à peu; on distingue une immense sale peuplée d’une foule tournoyante. La scène s’éclaire progressivement. La lumière des lustres éclate au fortissimo. Une Cour impériale, vers 1855.” See “Arguments de ballet de Ravel,” in Lettres, écrits, entretiens, 385. The manuscript that seems to have contained a more thorough description of the scenario is lost.

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ex. 5.1 . Ravel, La Valse, motive x at R1 and its adapted form at R5. R1 Bn.

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Very few commentators have noted the motivic relationship between the swirling mists and the ballroom—an indifference, it should be noted, that may not necessarily reflect what we hear. The metaphorical dissolving view captures how the piece has typically been described, motive x replaced by a diatonic waltz theme when swirling mists transform into a ballroom scene, as if one painted slide gradually transitioned to another. Stylistic and orchestral camouflage encourage this interpretive approach: the waltz theme’s cheerful character invites us to forget its link to motive x, as does the orchestration of the waltz theme at R9, which emphasizes the viola’s velvety timbre over that of the bassoons (the instrumental remnants of the swirling mists). Framing the opening measures as “past” and the waltz melodies as “present” promotes a sense of linearity and succession, evoking familiar oppositional metaphors, such as darkness to light, creation to destruction, prewar to postwar. Perhaps if we are hearing La Valse for the second (or tenth) time, we might spot motive x in disguise and, moreover, recognize its unifying structural role. But before exploring this second possibility, let’s follow the motive through a few more changes of scenery. The D major waltz, closing at R16 with a swaggering, celebratory statement, accumulates dynamic volume, percussion, and brass. Motive x lurks in the woodwinds, horns, and upper strings, rebounding off the downbeat. By rehearsal B (R17) the motive reaches jubilant ascendancy, played fortissimo and accented on the half note. Its two statements coincide with the moment in the livret when “light from the chandeliers radiates forth.” By the reprise at R54, the instability of the opening measures has become a distant memory, crowded out by waltzes orchestrated with

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utmost opulence. When motive x returns in the bassoons at the reprise, it revives the harmonic instability of the opening but fails to recapture periodic phrasing (compare to R55 to R7). The diatonically normalized version of motive x from R5 appears in the violas at R57, followed by another permutation in the flutes and horns. By the time it regains its celebratory state at R62 (compare to R17), the reprise has rehearsed, in brisk succession, virtually every musical context in which motive x has been heard. It continues to appear, in whole and in part, as a foil to the waltz themes, which cycle through the piece with increasing rapidity. At R88, the full orchestra blasts the motive amid proliferating thickets of chromaticism, and by R94 it takes a final bow before embedding itself in the horns and trumpets at R100, undaunted by orchestral splutters and gasps. Much always passes by unnoticed at the first hearing, but La Valse seems intent on leading our attention toward its disjunctive elements while disguising motive x’s unifying role, which transcends musical polarities. In magician’s parlance, motive x functions like the small move hidden by larger gestures and special effects. La Valse bubbles and froths with singable melodies, its novel orchestral timbres—sur la touche bowing, harmonics, glissandos, portamento—weaving an aura of enchantment. These effects urge upon us a conflict-ridden, transformational arc, in which the celebratory statement of motive x at R16 forms an effective boundary, cutting off the enchanted waltzes from all that came before. At the same time, the timbral effects misdirect our attention from motive x even when its presence might have been obvious. Were La Valse a detective story, the motive would be the clues minimized or misinterpreted by the reader, making it possible for listeners to feel, as Poe once said of literary novelty, “excited, but embarrassed, disturbed, in some degree even pained at this own want of perception, at [our] own folly in not having [ourselves] hit upon the idea.”29 Edward Cone once used the detective story metaphor to identify perceptual differences between the first hearing of a piece—a diachronic journey of discovery— and the second hearing, which is abstracted, synchronic, and analytical, “constantly shifting back and forth between the planes of memory and experience.” Cone’s hypothetical third hearing, offered as an ideal, would pursue a “double trajectory,” combining the diachronic, experiential qualities of the first hearing with the analytical appreciation of the second.30 In a third hearing, we partially suppress our foreknowledge of the plot with the same psychological capacities we use when playing games, heightening their stakes by experiencing the game world as a kind of virtual reality. If we apply Cone’s approach to La Valse—without adopting his hier29. Edgar Allan Poe, “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” in The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe (1850–1856), ed. Rufus Wilmot Griswold (New York: Redfield, 1857), 3: 191–92. 30. Edward T. Cone, “Three Ways of Reading a Detective Story—or a Brahms Intermezzo,” in Music: A View from Delft, ed. Robert P. Morgan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 80.

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archical approach to modes of listening—we may interpret motive x differently in a variety of contexts. Take, for example, the triumphant statement at rehearsal B, aligned with the point in the livret when “light radiates forth from the chandeliers.” Listening synchronically, motive x flickers behind the music’s triumphant affect as we recall earlier moments when the motive asserts its presence—perhaps in the ominous rumblings of the opening or the lilting D major waltz.31 The familiar image of light banishing darkness may function ironically once we recognize that the music responsible for exorcising the haze has actually evolved from it. As the presence of motive x grows more conspicuous, other instabilities in the D major waltz emerge, further unsettling disjunctive views of the piece. Accompanying the apparently periodic, symmetrically phrased waltz theme are dissonant appoggiaturas in the clarinets and fluttering tremolos on GG and A in the divisi cellos and violins, glazing an otherwise transparent diatonicism (example 5.3). If these double neighbors have a long Viennese pedigree extending back to Schubert, their pace and frequency perturb a seemingly straightforward accompaniment. Other dissonant incursions appear between phrases, irregularly spaced and with rhythmic deviations that throw the melodic periodicity off-kilter. The first such instance occurs in the introduction to the melody itself, lasting three measures beginning at R9; the second emerges in the fourth bar of the antecedent phrase, where clarinets and string tremolos work their dissonant mischief in the melody’s absence. In the consequent phrase the melody returns, immediately followed by two bars of tremolos and arpeggiations—interruptions drawing attention to the near-constant accompaniment of clarinet figurations, eight eighth notes crammed into each measure of triple meter. These mild rhythmic and harmonic distortions evoke the sounds of an evening carnival, when the boisterous songs of daylight take on a macabre tinge. A slight shift of focus when listening to this passage can alter the way we hear (melodic) foreground and (harmonic) background planes, making the tremolos and dissonant passing tones even more obvious. (Comparing different orchestral performances can have the same effect, since some conductors emphasize these background gestures more than others.) By bringing a similar mode of attention to the waltzes leading to the reprise—just before the apparent affective shift takes place— we can discover further signs of volatility, embedded in chromatic accompanimental figures (R30), syncopation and metric displacement (R34), and pervasive hemiola (R18, R26). At the same time, we find that dissonant, turbulent passages after the reprise unfold in relatively stable rhythmic and metrical frameworks: at R100, when the music snags on a repeated stuttering gesture, the triple meter 31. Given differing tendencies and capacities of listeners, some may identify the presence of motive x partway through a first hearing; others may not recognize it after hearing the piece several times. The key point here is that synchronic hearings are only possible after the listener has heard the whole piece, or at least a significant portion of it.

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ex. 5.3 . Ravel, La Valse, D major waltz (R9) accompanied by dissonant tremolos and appoggiaturas. expressif Va. Bn.

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remains intact, the downbeat registrally distinct from the accented chords on beat two. Attending closely to relationships among rhythm, meter, and harmony reveals La Valse’s tendency toward equilibrium instead of opposition—something that may only become evident after more than one hearing. Choosing to attend through alternately diachronic and synchronic modes of listening may not produce the sort of ideal musical experience Cone imagines, but it does suggest the extent to which interpretive agency responds to misdirectional cues. Put another way, we may choose to hear La Valse as a rabbit while aware that it is a duck, or vice versa. Such a choice resonates with the views of nineteenth-century thinkers like Goethe and Hegel, who saw perception as a generative process rather than an “orderly contiguity of discrete stable sensations.”32 It also recalls the metaphor 32. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 100.

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of superimposed versus dissolving magic lantern slides: the first lamina depicting motive x materializes from the swirling mists and perhaps remains in the background instead of dissolving to reveal a ballroom. A second lamina, the D major waltz, overlaps it, and a third—the celebratory music at Rehearsal B—illuminates the ballroom and the mists together, motive x expressed in multiple concurrent contexts. If the dissolving view represents temporal experience as a succession of events, superimposition offers a panoramic, synchronous temporality of more fickle flexibility. We need not commit to either scheme while listening to La Valse: indeed, we more likely oscillate between modes of listening throughout. Past and present events vertiginously converge, leaving no temporal moment stable, nor arrival secure. This feeling of disorientation was noticed by critics in Ravel’s time, and it arises, in part, from the motional effects of the piece, which produce the impression of a spiraling ascent. V E RT I G E I N T H E WA LT Z

Two essays about La Valse, perched like bookends enclosing the 1920s, link its motional and spectral effects to vertige: Théodore Lindenlaub’s 1920 review in Le Temps and Pierre Capdevielle’s study of Ravel’s “two choreographic poems” (La Valse and Boléro), appearing in Le Monde musical in 1930. Both stand out for their unusual length, exegetical insight, and distinctive rhetoric, including descriptive images reminiscent of phantasmagoria. Phylidor and Robertson, the best-known exhibitors of phantasmagoric theater in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, created spectral effects by using rear projection, shining the lantern behind a canvas facing the spectators to produce a play of light and shadow suggestive of flickering apparitions. Robertson added wheels to the projector, generating images that seemed to advance and retreat from the audience—an effect that, as Deidre Loughridge has noted, became synonymous with the genre.33 Whereas lantern shows sometimes featured repetitive rotational movements (think of turning windmills), phantasmagorias created effects of rapid transformation, such as “The Three Graces, turn into skeletons.”34 Phantasmic movement seemed volatile and precipitous, as “animated figures crossed the screen in all directions, loomed up from the base of the screen, came towards the viewer at an astonishing speed, and then disappeared suddenly.”35 Unlike virtually every other form of theatrical entertainment in the early nineteenth century, phantasmagoria required a darkened space, which was “primary and overwhelming.”36 33. Loughridge, Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow, 211. 34. Castle, “Phantasmagoria,” 36. 35. Mannoni, Great Art of Light and Shadow, 141. 36. Tom Gunning, “The Long and the Short of It: Centuries of Projecting Shadows, from Natural Magic to the Avant-Garde,” in Art of Projection, ed. Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 23.

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Lindenlaub’s view of La Valse focuses on the melancholic image of waltzes swirling in the ruins of the past, leaving a “spectral impression.”37 He ascribes anthropomorphic qualities (sadness, hunger) to these waltzes, and suggests that Ravel has done similarly: an instrument is a “being,” a note possesses “a sex, a physiognomy, a constitution of its own.” Perhaps, he suggests, Ravel has achieved something new by creating a piece predominantly about movement, inspired by his desire “to breathe the musical air of Vienna.” If so, Ravel’s historical tourism produces a jarring contrast between the “lively, insouciant waltzes” and ces malheureux en détresse, the “unfortunate, distressed ones,” driven by habit and unproductive nostalgia. Lindenlaub’s vision of sound personified takes on the aspect of a danse macabre, music awakened from the past by eerily humanized instruments and sounds that process through space like phantoms across a screen. These choreographic projections have a “filling in” effect for the concert performance Lindenlaub reviewed, La Valse’s title, metrical profile, and programmatic narrative all alluding to bodies conspicuously absent. Pierre Capdevielle’s 1930 study also casts La Valse as a “spectral and visionary” work, but more subjectively as a “reconstruction of a dream, or a nightmare.”38 He recounts its expressive architecture in familiar terms, “harmonic sumptuousness and orchestral splendor” emerging from an “uncertain, smoke-filled haze.” Even without the mediating influence of dancers and sets, a concert performance of La Valse enlists a visual response, generating the “grandeur and mystery of a natural mirage” (emphasis in the original)—the result, in today’s parlance, of musical percepts forming the illusory image of a ballroom. For “receptive sensibilities,” this mirage might be “supernatural,” akin to hallucination, calling to mind Proust’s description of the “supernatural” array of colors adorning Marcel’s walls, like jeweled fragments of a stained-glass window gleaming in a shadowed cloister. In Capdevielle’s illusory ballroom, the “psycho-musical ether” allows us to glimpse the “polychromatic luster of silks, velours, brocades, the colorful adornments, sparkling costumes, the shimmering and gleaming lights of stones, jewelry, and candlesticks.” This opulent setting, unfolding before our “haggard and dazed eyes,” prepares the entrance of the dancers, “abandoned to the cult of Terpsichore.” Once the piece’s enchantments have taken hold, they infuse us with a “sort of exasperated, almost opiated, undoubtedly phantasmagoric neurosis.” Both critics refer explicitly to the experience of vertige. For Lindenlaub, La Valse’s most notable qualities—its refined orchestration, mix of timbres, and “friction” of strange harmonies—reinforce an impression “of secret anguish, of heartbreak, which gasps under all this fever and vertige.” Capdevielle suggests that as we envision the dancers’ movement, the “amorous languor of vertige is mixed up with 37. Lindenlaub, “À travers les concerts,” 3. 38. Capdevielle, “Deux poèmes,” 249–50.

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the wild voluptuousness of the round dance”; he repeats the same imagery in a review of the pianist Madeleine de Valmalète, who performed a solo arrangement of La Valse in 1930.39 Other critics adopt similar language: in one performance, the piece whirls by in a “vertiginous vision”; in another, it unfolds through a “vertiginous execution.”40 In these reviews, vertige expresses a disorienting synesthetic experience: the insinuating murmurs of the opening, the tremulous haze of sound, the phantasmic vision of whirling dancers, the smell of perfumed flowers and sound of rustling silk, the whispering touch of velvet, and finally, the ear-splitting blasts of brass. (“I like the hall to quake when I hear them,” one critic proclaimed.)41 These views accord with Ravel’s own remarks about La Valse, especially the pair of interviews in which he claimed that the piece is a “dancing, whirling, almost hallucinatory ecstasy” and a “fatal spinning around, the expression of vertige and of the voluptuousness of the dance to the point of paroxysm.”42 To understand Ravelian vertige, we might turn to Poe, whose writings supplied a wealth of macabre themes to the French decadent writers who revered him. His pocket-sized tale “The Imp of the Perverse” describes how vertige merges alarming physiological effects, like the sensation of falling, with the pleasing enticements of sensory confusion. The first-person narrator begins in a tone of bemusement, reflecting on the perversity of pursuing courses of action known to be destructive. But two-thirds of the way through the tale, this brooding philosopher of frights turns raconteur, and we learn that he is speaking to us from a jail cell. How did he land there? We discover that after poisoning a man and inheriting his estate, he lived for years without feeling either guilt or concern about being caught. But after a time, he started to experience a “haunting and harassing thought,” which he likens to the persistent memory of a song, and he soon confesses his crime to a stranger, the words tumbling from his mouth without his bidding: “Could I have torn out my tongue, I would have done it.”43 We are put in the awkward position of wondering whether the narrator’s only principled act was, like the murder, merely a wayward impulse. He normalizes his 39. Pierre Capdevielle, “Madeleine de Valmalète,” Le Monde musical, April 30, 1930. 40. Adolphe Piriou, review of La Valse, Le Monde musical, May 31, 1930, 199; Laurence Pechard, “Présence de Ravel dans les concerts parisiens en 1930 d’après Le Ménestrel et Le Monde musical . . . La Valse,” Revue internationale de musique française 24 (November 1987): 84. 41. Marcel Belvianes, “Concerts-Poulet,” Le Ménestrel, October 24, 1930, 447. 42. “C’est une extase dansante, tournoyante, presque hallucinante, un tourbillon de plus en plus passionné et épuisant de danseuses, qui se laissent déborder et emporter uniquement par la valse.” See “The French Music Festival,” in Ravel Reader, 423; “Le Festival de musique française,” in Lettres, écrits, entretiens, 345; “The Great Musician Maurice Ravel Talks about His Art,” interview with André Révész, ABC de Madrid, May 1, 1924, in Ravel Reader, 434. 43. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Imp of the Perverse,” in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Random House, 1965), 284.

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depravity further by claiming that the confession was like any other kind of reckless behavior: he merely acted on what we have all felt. We peer into the abyss—we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnameable feeling . . . and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height . . . .And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we the most impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge.44

Whatever our revulsion or contempt of the narrator, there is a kernel of truth in his ramblings. Something within us longs to take a thousand-foot plunge, to feel the exhilaration of the first nine hundred and ninety-nine feet. French readers in Ravel’s time would have linked Poe’s abyss and its attendant thrills and horrors to distinct meanings of vertige, which entailed a pleasurable sense of disorientation, a disturbing state of mind, or a symptom of disequilibrium.45 The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française defined vertige in 1932 as an “indisposition in which it seems that everything is turning”46—induced, we might imagine, by certain types of physical experiences, like standing on the glass walkway over the yawning mouth of the Grand Canyon. In Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire’s references to vertige are usually coupled with movement, dance, or an ill-defined void, as in, for example, “Harmonie du soir,” “Le flacon,” “Danse macabre,” and “The Abyss.” Yet Baudelaire also connected the physical pathologies of vertige to acts of reading and interpretation. Perusing Poe’s tales would have been enough to kindle it, the opening passages in particular having a “quiet, drawing power, like a whirlpool” that impels the reader onward.47 As he cautions in “Le Cygne,” reading can resemble the abyss of nature when “everything becomes allegory,” signs threatening to overwhelm intellect and senses.48 Vertige is similarly ticklish: its conceptual pliancy might be construed as categorical instability. But Baudelaire’s interlacing of vertige with sensation, motion, and disorientation offers a clear analogue to La Valse’s illusions of rotational motion and perpetual ascent, reinforcing its apparent narrative of creation, growth, and destruction. 44. Ibid., 282. 45. Paul Imbs, Trésor de la langue française: Dictionnaire de la langue du XIXe et du XXe siècle, 1789–1960 (Paris: Éditions du centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1971), s.v. “vertige.” 46. Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 8th ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1932–35), s.v. “vertige.” 47. Charles Baudelaire, “Edgar Allan Poe: sa vie et ses œuvres” (1856), in Œuvres complètes, 2 : 316–17. 48. Baudelaire, “Le Cygne,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 1: 86.

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U P, U P, A N D AWAY

As the examples from Baudelaire illustrate, we need not be exposed to actual movement, or even to an imitation of it, to experience vertige. Had La Valse been titled differently (perhaps Assis sur le quai de la baie), it would still arouse vertiginous sensation. Its simulation of motion combines rotational movement with an impression that the music is constantly rising, producing Capdevielle’s “natural mirage.”49 Due to these effects, the piece seems to push toward an upper limit that, if breached, might crank its machinery to a halt—a trajectory of obsessive propulsion similar to Boléro’s, yet with very different results. The gestural language of La Valse includes arcs, circles, and spirals—or circles opened and extended by a change in register—that sonically trace the waltz’s rotational movement, which resembles planetary motion: couples orbit an imaginary axis when circling the dance floor, like spinning planets revolving around the sun.50 There are many types of circular gesture in La Valse, of which a few allude to the simultaneity and cyclical superposition typical of waltz choreography. At R30, for example, a circling figure in the cello begins on D3, rises chromatically to A3, and returns to D3, establishing a two-measure cycle of chromatic motion that repeats three times (example 5.4). On the fourth repetition, an upward extension of the chromatic ascent in the violas opens the circle into a spiral, registrally transferring the same figure to the clarinets at R31. After the clarinets repeat the twomeasure cycle, a longer chromatic extension further amplifies the spiral, renewing the cycle in the divisi flutes. This pattern of rotation, extension, and instrumental exchange continues for several phrases, until R34. Paired with the spiraling accompaniment is a circular waltz theme in the violins (R30) that dips down a minor seventh before rising to its starting pitch, BH4. Its rotations align with the accompaniment at first, but after two repetitions, the theme spins more rapidly, completing one cycle each measure—half the orbiting rate of the accompanying figure. This change in cyclic proportional alignment reflects the overlapping orbits found in ballroom waltzing and prefigures the rotational acceleration that gradually imposes itself after the reprise. The long-range implications of these superposed rotations emerge most clearly in the waltz theme first heard in the clarinets and cellos at R41. Without any of the typical circular gestures in play, the theme nonetheless implies rotational movement by featuring a motive that unfolds like a coiling spring: the leap between two eighth notes is followed by a half note, which often bends in the direction opposite the leap. When this theme returns at R77, the circular contrabass accompaniment—a 49. Gabriel Trarieux, “Courrier de la Côte d’Azure,” Le Temps, November 28, 1932, 4, noted the piece’s ascending progression contributing to its “irresistible effect.” 50. Helbing, “Spiral and Self-Destruction in Ravel’s La Valse,” 192–93, identifies “pendular” motion as another type of rotation in which a fixed upper note alternates with an ascending chromatic voice.

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ex. 5.4 . Ravel, La Valse, circular movement at R30 in 1:1 and 2:1 cycles. 1:1 cycle

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repeating chromatic descent that cyclically rises—accentuates the looping quality of the coiling spring motive, shaped less by pitch contour than rhythm (example 5.5). Motive and accompaniment both occupy three-beat cycles, but their entrances are misaligned, like adjacent couples whirling out of step with each other. The jostling continues as the reprise sequence unfolds, the chromatic figure ascending over six-

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ex. 5.5 . Ravel, La Valse, looped coiling spring motive and misaligned rotational motion at R77. R77

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and-a-half octaves. Five measures after R83, the orbit in the accompaniment shrinks from six chromatic pitches to four, and the coiling spring motive contracts by onethird, quarter note replacing half note, producing two misaligned hemiolas—an effect somewhat mitigated by synchronized accents (example 5.6). Dizzying iterations of the waltz theme between R76 and R83 spin around an ever-narrowing axis; cosmologically speaking, the waltz’s planetary girth is shrinking, making its elliptical path around the sun increasingly volatile. La Valse’s intermittent chromatic ascents, extended throughout the reprise, reinforce the illusion that the piece is not only rotating but perpetually rising. György Ligeti, another magician of sound, created a similar impression in the piano étude L’Escalier du diable (1993, no. 13 from book 2). Though the étude shares little else with Ravel’s music—apart from the extraordinary demands placed on the performer—it is worth examining for a moment. The piece’s comparatively compact structure makes its method easier to spot (as with the solo and duo arrangements of La Valse), and it shows how musical illusions can transcend differences in style and performance medium.51 51. Ligeti cited Ravel’s influence as a potential source of inspiration in his plans for two compositions: Hungarian Rock (1978) and the Horn Trio (1982). See Richard Steinitz, “À qui un hommage? Genesis of the Piano Concerto and the Horn Trio,” in György Ligeti: Of Foreign Sounds and Strange Lands, ed. Louise Duchesneau and Wolfgang Marx (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2011), 186–87, 195.

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ex. 5.6 . Ravel, La Valse, compressed and misaligned rotational motion, R83/5–R84.

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The first measure of L’Escalier establishes patterns of interaction between right and left hands that govern the piece’s overall structure and ignites its volatile propulsion—a typical strategy for perpetuum mobiles. The left hand’s chromatic ascent, starting on B1, is countered in the right hand by single notes or pairs of pitches, the pairs often rebounding in contrary motion (example 5.7). The right hand takes over the chromatic ascent on AG2, in the last third of measure one, but the left hand, not to be outdone, drops back to B2 and doubles the right hand note for note. In the second measure, the right-hand ascent gradually breaks down, but the second cycle of the chromatic bass line persists; by the middle of the bar, doubled pitches in the ascent (played by the right hand) reverse into a descent, creating a registral convergence on F natural near the end of the measure. The left hand initiates still more ascents on B, doubled at the fifth and then the third (given octave equivalency), but as the piece unfolds, the starting pitch for new cyclic ascents changes, sometimes occurring at the same pitch level or lower than that of the previous cycle. Near the end of the piece the final ascending passages, which rise to aerial heights on the piano, begin on the piano’s lowest D. Rising dual chromatic lines define the global trajectory of the piece, smoothing out the twists of inversional and contrary motion to create an impression of per-

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ex. 5.7 . György Ligeti, L’Escalier du diable, chromatic ascents (marked tenuto) in mm. 1–3. Presto legato, ma leggiero, w ™ = 30 ? ‰ bœ ‰ ‰ bœ bœ bœ ‰ bœ ‰ œ ‰ bœ‰ œbœ ‰ 12 * 8 pp ? ‰ ‰ Œ ‰ ‰ ‰ Œ œ- # œ- œ- œ- #œœ- œ- # -œ

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12 only serves as a guideline. e actual meter consists of thirty-six eighth notes (three "bars"), divided 8 asymmetrically. & œ œ œ #œ œ #œ œ #œ ‰ œ ‰ #œœ ‰ bœœ bœ ‰ œ ‰ œ #œ œ œ ? #œ-#œ -œ œ -œ œ#-œ -œ œ#œ- œ- #-œ œ- #-œ nœ ‰

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petual ascent resembling the effect known as Shepard scales—auditory illusions produced by cycling through a scale while adjusting the amplitude of pitch frequencies as the apex approaches. Upper pitches gradually phase out while lower pitches increase in amplitude, creating a sonic equivalent of Penrose stairs, perhaps best known from their use in M. C. Escher’s drawings. (This effect holds for descending scales.) A few years after Roger Shepard first demonstrated the illusion, Jean-Claude Risset applied it to his electronic piece Little Boy (1968). Spectrograms of Little Boy and L’Escalier reveal striking similarities in texture and contour, despite the fact that Ligeti’s piece features no electronic manipulation of frequencies.52 Yet as compelling 52. These spectrograms can be seen in James S. Walker and Gary W. Don, Mathematics and Music: Composition, Perception, and Performance (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2013), 159.

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as we may find L’Escalier’s illusion of rising motion, we may still recognize that its ascents are neither continuous nor steady and predictable. If its relentless pulsating, homogeneous contour patterns, and breakneck tempo suggest perpetual motion, its sequence of ascents hampers forward progress, sputtering out at irregularly spaced intervals and forcing each motional cycle to begin anew. These wrinkles of discontinuity, while unable to disrupt the piece’s forward propulsion, are enough to deepen our sense of vertige, as the music, like a stunt plane, pitches, yaws, and rolls while curving steadily upward. In La Valse, the chromatic ascent begins in earnest at R76, when the rotational movement gains a sense of acceleration and urgency. But hints of upward propulsion are scattered throughout the first two-thirds of the piece, embedded mostly in the inner and bass voices of the waltz themes (table 5.1), where they are less likely to be noticed.53 About one-fifth of the measures leading to R76 contain chromatic ascents of several notes, the first occurring in the trombones before R17—shortly after the waltz has established itself, just before the moment in the livret when light bursts from the chandeliers. From R76 to the end of the piece, the frequency and amplitude of the ascents multiplies, more than half of the measures featuring extended chromatic climbs in increasingly prominent roles. But La Valse’s illusion of perpetual ascent, like L’Escalier’s, also involves contrary, inversional, and cyclical motion, which impede upward expansion and throw the rotational movement off-kilter, as if by unscrewing a counterweight. At R76, the chromatic descent in the contrabass, suggesting rotational movement, returns to a fixed point on D1 for eight measures before beginning its gradual ascent, each descending cycle beginning on a higher pitch (D–DG–E and G– GG–A). Cellos take over the figure just after R78, starting on D an octave higher than the contrabass and rising chromatically (D–DG–E), followed by clarinets, their ascent by third (A–CG) pitched a fifth higher than that of the cellos (example 5.8). Once the bassoons enter at R80, the chromatic ascent expands in length, from three notes at a time (R76–R80/8) to nine notes (R81–R82/4) to thirteen (R82/5– R83/8). Despite brief interruptions to the ascent, we hear continuous chromatic movement all along, having been primed by the recurring presence of ascents throughout the piece. Gradual upward movement, which at first lurches in fits and starts through lower registers (contrabass, cello, bassoon) to higher ones (English horn and oboe by R81), grows more regular and continuous, the piece’s geometric trajectory resembling a spiral that has been wound more tightly at the top, maintaining steady rotation even as the distance between coils contracts.

53. Many more instances of ascents that mix chromaticism and diatonicism might be noted, too, but because the chromatic ascent plays a key role at the end of the piece, I have left out diatonic and mixed ascents.

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table 5.1 Chromatic ascents in La Valse from the opening to R76 Rehearsal/measure no.

Position in texture and instrumentation

R16/5–8 R19/5–8 R22/1–2, 5–6 and R23/1–2, 5–8 R24/5–8 R25/1–3 and R28/1–3 R29/1–8 R30/1–R33/7 R34/2–R35/8 R44/4–8 R49/2–6, 8–10 R60/1–R61/7 R67/1–5 and R69/3–5, 6–9

Bass: trombone Inner voice: English horn Inner voice: flute, English horn, violin I Melodic inner voice: oboe Melody and inner voices: horn, trombone, trumpet Bass: tuba, cello/bass, bassoon, horn, bass clarinet Figural accompaniment: cello, viola, clarinet, flute Melodic inner voice: oboe, clarinet, flute Inner voices: horn, trombone Bass: cello/bass, harp Inner voice: cello, violin II, trumpet, trombone Inner voices: horn, trumpet, flute, clarinet, viola

A second ascent in the contrabass, cello, and bassoon begins at R82 and at first moves in tandem with the treble. (The treble ascent may be seen in the top staff of example 5.8, starting at R82.) Once the rising treble figure reaches its apex, the cyclic length of its rotational movement correspondingly shortens, suggesting a surge of centripetal force; at the same point, the bass ascent doubles the rate of the ascending treble and continues to climb. The registral distance separating treble and bass is a fifth (maintaining octave equivalency) at R82, but when both rates of ascent increase after R83, bass outstrips treble and closes the registral gap between them, finally converging (as in L’Escalier) with the treble on AG at R84. Here, the treble figure turns back on itself like a frantic whirligig while the bass persists in its rise, gobbling up another octave. The swaggering music from R17 returns at R94 and splinters into motivic fragments and hemiola after R97, driving toward the modulation from D major to BH minor at R98, which marks another notch in the music’s elevation. From R98 to R100, it seems that the perpetual upward movement has ceased: sweeping chromatic ascents, aided by harp glissandos, are counteracted by descents in the trombones. But shrieking fortissimo chords punctuate these gestures, and the treble note atop them proves most salient, rising chromatically from FG6 to AG6 before landing on C7. The perpetual ascent stalls at R101, when a circular figure spins haplessly in the treble register, without phased-in bass ascents to fuel it. A final gesture, played in unison, packs four accented quarter notes into three beats, ending on D in the last measure. Though much of La Valse unfolds in D major, including the first waltz theme, the conclusion gives little sense of return to a musical home, recalling instead Marcel’s unease after the lantern show, when an “intrusion of

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R78

R79

R80

R81

R82

R83

R84

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ex. 5.8 . Chromatic ascents in La Valse from R76 (top and middle staves) and R82 (bottom staff, bass ascent). Registral convergence after R84.

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beauty and mystery” infused familiar objects with a strange aspect: Golo had floated over the walls, window curtains, and door, transforming a mundane item like a doorknob into his own “astral body.”54 In La Valse, illusions of rotation and ascent yield a similarly spectral effect: we return to D in the final gesture but now sense its double identity. If chromatic lines and burgeoning orchestral forces reinforce the illusory ascent, the vertige it induces is more than a product of sensory processing. A fitting parallel can found in Baudelaire’s account of an English pantomime in his essay on the grotesque, “De l’essence du rire.” The English Pierrot, as Baudelaire describes him, seems quite unlike the pale, mysterious character known to French audiences. He bursts on stage like a hurricane and pursues “every gluttonous and rapacious fantasy.”55 Sentenced to death for an unnamed crime, he must face the guillotine. After the blade falls, his head rolls downstage, revealing “the bleeding disk of the neck, the severed vertebrae, and all the details of butchered meat just carved up for the window display.”56 But suddenly Pierrot’s headless trunk, “moved by its irresistible monomania for theft,” retrieves his lopped-off head and drops it in his pocket. The spectacle is intended to be funny, though a prose description is unlikely to do justice to the headless, thieving Pierrot wobbling about, stumbling upon his own head, and deciding to steal it back from the executioners who had deprived him of it. It takes the intoxicating atmosphere of live performance to produce the giddy fusion of comic, strange, and shocking effects Baudelaire associates with vertige. As Pierrot’s animated torso pursues his irrepressible obsessions, he not only cheats death but also inverts the roles of body and brain: the head—the seat of intellect—becomes a piece of butchered meat, while the body expresses volition and (no doubt rudimentary) judgment. The vertige thus induced is a physiological symptom of the grotesque—which, as Wolfgang Kayser suggests, is both a structure and a provocation, eliciting surprise, shock, and disorientation.57 Its disjunctive qualities are not merely a fragmented assemblage but instead present a semblance of unity or wholeness. Poe recognized how the grotesque permeated his tales of horror, sleuthing, and satire, elaborating on its importance while defending such outwardly trashy stories as “Berenice”: The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in nature—to Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does 54. Proust, Swann’s Way, 11. 55. Baudelaire, “De l’essence du rire,” in Œuvres complètes, 2 : 538. 56. Ibid., 539. 57. Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 180–85.

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G. R. Thompson sees in Poe’s syntax and punctuation less a directory of sundry effects than a strategy for deploying the grotesque as a singular impression.59 A tale might contain the colorful and the horrible, or the witty turned burlesque, producing a doubled self that mirrors the beheaded Pierrot, sundered yet contained in the same body, both alive and dead, “capable of the endless generation of extraordinary effects.”60 Ravel—not just a fan of Baudelaire and Poe, but an observant tactician—incorporates linear and disjunctive qualities in La Valse, pierced through with vertiginous effects, from illusions of rotational movement and perpetual ascent to the duplicitous, integrative presence of motive x. If the piece is a portrait of a ballet, as Diaghilev insisted, it is invertible, like Arcimboldo’s The Cook—legible from many vantage points. Louis Laloy, writing about Daphnis et Chloé, noted that Ravel’s music was at once ravishing and disconcerting for the way it captures subtle textures and “assembles them in an unstable equilibrium that doesn’t seem to respond to the laws of our world.”61 That is what made him a magician of sound: the capacity to produce volatile compounds that shimmer in uncanny suspension instead of exploding. In La Valse, the illusion of perpetual ascent, plotted out like a detective story, seems to have a straightforward trajectory—onward and upward!—sprinkled with emblems of enchantment implying that the ascent is transformational. Often in Ravel’s music, such effects are exactly that. But La Valse’s frustrated teleology keeps asking whether the piece is really doing what we think. To answer that question, we must examine how the piece reanimates and juxtaposes musical apparitions of the historicized past, which shade La Valse’s background. Once materialized, these spectral effects are difficult to shake off. Ravel knew just what to do with each of them. SP E C T E R S O F PA R O DY

La Valse’s general affinities for Poe’s blending of suspense, parody, horror, lyric beauty, and cold-blooded ratiocination can be made specific. Richard Buckle and Deborah Mawer have identified compelling similarities between La Valse and Poe’s 58. Poe to Thomas White, Baltimore, April 30, 1835, in The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 1: 57–58. Emphases are Poe’s. 59. G. R. Thompson, Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 43. 60. Swain, Grotesque Figures, 18. 61. Louis Laloy, “La Musique,” La Grande Revue 73 (June 25, 1912): 848.

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“The Masque of the Red Death,” pointing out how in both, dancing couples are oblivious to the threat in their midst, which finally unveils itself in the menacing conclusion.62 Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström,” which Ravel knew and admired, having drawn a charcoal illustration of it when he was in his teens, might be an equally illuminating analogue.63 This tale parallels La Valse’s simultaneous propulsion toward parody and destruction, as well as the way its rotational motion and teleology proposes, and subsequently undermines, a transformational narrative. In “Maelström,” an unnamed framing narrator begins the tale, but soon a Norwegian mariner takes over, relating his harrowing encounter with a vortex. When his schooner is sucked into its lip, the mariner reports, “I became possessed with the keenest curiosity about the whirl itself. I felt positively a wish to explore its depths.”64 The ship begins its sickening descent, clinging to the walls of the vortex, while the mariner, glimpsing the depths below, feels “the sensation of awe, horror, and admiration” at the sight. Descending in “dizzying swings and jerks”—so like the swerves, dips, and changes of velocity in La Valse—he has what seems like a flash of insight. He remembers that among the debris he had seen washed ashore by the vortex, cylindrically shaped objects were still intact, while those of other shapes were smashed to bits. Armed with this knowledge, the mariner lashes himself to a water cask and hurls himself into the watery abyss. He survives the vortex but is physically transformed, his raven-black hair turned white. Structural parallels are clear enough. In La Valse, the rotational movement surges toward destruction, ascending to a seemingly boundless pinnacle—an inversion of the mariner’s experience. Both journeys court the collision of disjunctive impulses in a manner typical of the grotesque: the mariner feels the “sensation” (note the singular) of horror, awe, and admiration, just as listeners of La Valse experience an integrated array of seemingly irreconcilable effects in a compact musical structure. The combined forces of simulated circular motion and affective disorientation triggers vertige for Poe’s readers and Ravel’s listeners alike. But perhaps most compelling is the juxtaposition of the mariner’s professed enlightenment, wrought by his nautical descent, with the darkness-to-light motif in La Valse, which ends, for so many listeners, in destruction. It seems that the mariner’s physical descent induces its metaphysical opposite: an ascent toward intellectual clarity, aesthetic appreciation, or the obliteration of self when faced with the magnitude of nature or the divine. But the tale is strewn with incongruities that undermine the mariner’s apparent enlightenment. The 62. Richard Buckle and John Taras, George Balanchine, Ballet Master: A Biography (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988), 186; Deborah Mawer, “Balanchine’s La Valse: Meanings and Implications for Ravel Studies,” Opera Quarterly 22 (Winter 2006): 106–8. 63. See Viñes, “Le Journal inédit de Ricardo Viñes,” 183. 64. Edgar Allan Poe, “A Descent into the Maelström,” in Complete Tales and Poems, 135.

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notion that cylindrical objects descend more quickly than spherical ones—a principle Poe attributes to Archimedes—could not have passed muster with even a dilettante scientist. Poe, who likely knew this, often placed misinformation and hyperbole into the mouths of characters to undermine their accounts. The mariner’s narrative might itself be fabricated, a tall tale sold to tenderfoots using the same techniques that draw us, as readers, into Poe’s literary illusion. “Maelström” shares with such yarns the use of a framing narrator and quotations from authorities— whether Archimedes or the Encyclopædia Britannica—to establish verisimilitude.65 But if we sense the ironic underpinnings of the mariner’s adventure saga, we are not seeing “behind” the illusion, escaping its reach; rather, our pleasure doubles as we read using dual modes of attention. The ending of La Valse has a similarly duplex relationship with its beginning, which Michael Puri (among others) places in a line of creatio ex nihilo openings spanning Wagner’s Das Rheingold and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.66 (We could extend the line further back to Haydn’s oratorio Die Schöpfung.) The miseen-scène of the livret, combined with the ex nihilo opening, suggests that the piece indeed progresses from obscurity to order, supported by critical interpretations chronicling its transition from one state to another. La Valse’s triumphal arc seems to sharpen as the chromatic ascent intensifies from R97, with a growing sense that if the piece breaches its upper limit, it will either transfigure or shatter. In such interpretations, a sense of struggle propels the movement through various affective states, recalling the symphonic treatments of toil, victory, and redemption of which German composers were so fond. (Besides the Ninth, Beethoven’s Third and Fifth Symphonies come to mind, as do Mahler’s Second and Eighth—not to mention Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung and Also Sprach Zarathustra.) But French symphonic composers concocted their own variations on this Teutonic recipe: Vincent d’Indy claimed in his Cours de composition musicale that musique pure— instrumental music without an explicit, extramusical program—should project a triumphant narrative of light over darkness.67 He offered César Franck’s Symphony in D minor as a model for young composers seeking to emulate the structural and aesthetic principles that might realize this arc, which he found especially compelling in the music of Beethoven. Ascending modulations, most typically by fifth, would draw the music toward light or enlightenment (clarté); descending modula65. See Fred Madden, “ ‘A Descent into the Maelström’: Suggestions of a Tall Tale,” Studies in the Humanities 14 (December 1987): 127–29. 66. Puri, Ravel the Decadent, 68, 230. 67. Vincent d’Indy and August Sérieyx, Cours de composition musicale, deuxième livre (Paris: Durand, 1933), 112. The volume is based on Sérieyx’s notes from d’Indy’s composition classes at the Schola Cantorum in 1901–2. Andrew Deruchie discusses the implications of d’Indy’s theories on Franck’s D minor symphony in The French Symphony at the Fin-de-siècle: Style, Culture, and the Symphonic Tradition (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013), 67–82.

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tions to the subdominant would produce the opposite effect.68 Franck’s symphony, progressing over three movements from D minor to D major, conveyed a “continual ascent towards pure gladness and life-giving light,” d’Indy observes.69 (Note how d’Indy describes the process in terms similar to the perpetual ascent.) If we view the ending of La Valse as destructive, then the piece offers a striking critique of these triumphal narratives, the darkness-to-light motif ultimately thwarted as ominous seeds blossom into full-blown fleurs du mal—blighted emblems of promise unfulfilled. The structural role of La Valse’s opening becomes important at this juncture, its ambiguous function at once reinforcing and subverting the darkness-to-light narrative. Much of what we need to know about La Valse comes from its opening measures, but misdirection soon follows, the diversions of the ballroom seeking to displace the chaotic coach ride that brought us there. Though the illusion of perpetual ascent may differ in its particulars from the ascending symphonic modulations described by d’Indy, it draws on the same discourse. At every turn, there is evidence—from waltz melodies inflected with dissonant appoggiaturas to recurring appearances of the ever-malleable motive x— that La Valse will thwart expectations. But listening to the piece, we tend to favor a top-down conceptual schema over bottom-up sensory evidence. Recall how the patter in Robert-Houdin’s Second Sight effect functioned as code, spoken plainly for spectators to hear, or how the criminal in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” conceals his theft in plain sight. A pilfered letter should be stashed in a vault; a secret code should be too cryptic for everyday speech. Even as La Valse upends the Kampf und Sieg narrative, it flaunts the spoils of a victorious war. We have been invited to overlook the obvious—not because we are dupes, but because we have trusted the illusionist’s sure hand and marveled when it refused to deliver triumph. For those who indeed hear La Valse’s final moments as victorious, perhaps a spirit of parody has overwhelmed its fatalistic impulses. While many critics asserted the piece’s spectral, destructive, and nostalgic qualities, others described it as a “jewel of humor” in which melancholy poetry “mingles intimately with wit and a smile”; the same critic who heard in the piece a “polytonal dernier cri” also called it a “parodic apotheosis.”70 The piece might thus satisfy the darkness-to-light motif in the same way “Maelström” manages to be terrifying and amusing at once: both works make explicit reference to conventional paradigms but subject them to inversions, absurdities, and other quirks of irony. By what process was the mariner saved, if not dumb luck? If La Valse rings a note of triumph, it is surely mock-heroic. The conventions governing both triumphal and parodic narratives may also function as spectral effects. Take as an example Georges Méliès’s 1896 trick film, 68. D’Indy, Cours de composition, 112. 69. Deruchie, French Symphony at the Fin-de-siècle, 67. 70. See, e.g., Banès, “Les Concerts,” 3, and Brillant, “Les Œuvres et les Hommes,” 1127.

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Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin (or The Vanishing Lady), which parodied a popular stage illusion pioneered by the French magician Buatier de Kolta. Méliès, playing the role of magician, bows to the camera and beckons Jehanne d’Alcy, his frequent collaborator, to sit on a chair placed atop a sheet of newspaper (indicating to the viewer that no trap doors will be used). He drapes d’Alcy with a silk cloth and pulls it away to reveal an empty chair, just as expected. Gesticulating in the air, he flings his arms toward the chair—a gesture meant to convey the imminent return of the vanished woman—but instead, a scorched skeleton takes her place. Méliès reacts with shock, waving his hands at the skeleton as if it were a pesky mosquito at a picnic. His failure to conjure d’Alcy from the void, replacing her with a metonymy for death, turns a commonplace narrative of concealment and restoration necrotic.71 Familiarity with popular versions of the “vanishing lady” stage illusion underwrites the nineteenth-century viewer’s surprise at Méliès’s apparent blunder; indeed, these stage versions function almost like unseen companions to the film, inhabiting its shadowy frame. La Valse’s own train of accompanying specters include phantasmagoria, whose intermedial manifestations link the piece’s spectral imagery to its music. In phantasmagoria, the embodied presence of a voice actor and the “mediated presence” of apparitions created for viewers “an uncanny oscillation between the visible and the invisible, materiality and immateriality, presence and absence.”72 For listeners, La Valse may generate not only the spectral images of waltzing couples but musical revenants as well, from memories of the Waltz King’s best-known melodies to the triumphal narratives of Beethoven, Mahler, and Richard Strauss, all filling the brain like static interference. In place of direct quotations from the Kaiser-Walzer or the Blue Danube, Ravel uses “the memory of an old phrase of Johann Strauss,” as one critic put it, as if the original melodies had been smudged by the passage of time.73 Ravel, like the early inventors of phantasmagoria, insisted critics were hearing things in La Valse that might not (or should not) have been real, claiming, “one should only see in [the piece] what the music expresses.”74 Yet La Valse’s musical phantoms inform not only how we listen to the piece, but also alert us to the presence of specters lurking in other musical works. In this sense, the piece foreshadows the third movement of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, whose apparitional bricolage rests upon the murmuring scherzo from Mahler’s second symphony and incorporates musical quotations from Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, 71. On concealment as a technological narrative, see Matthew Solomon, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 34. 72. Nele Wynants, “Spectral Illusions: Ghostly Presence in Phantasmagoria Shows,” in Reframing Immersive Theatre: The Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance, ed. James Frieze (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 207. 73. Brillant, “Les Œuvres et les Hommes,” 1126. 74. Ravel to Maurice Emmanuel, October 14, 1922, in Ravel Reader, 230.

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Stravinsky’s Agon, and La Valse—pieces with nostalgic associations. Sinfonia realizes Svetlana Boym’s claim that nostalgia involves the “repetition of the unrepeatable,” its musical intertexts containing and transporting the ephemeral sounds of past performances without actually reproducing them.75 Nostalgia’s “double exposure”—its apparent superimposition of present circumstance and a desirable other—undergirds La Valse’s irresistible vertige.76 By 1855, the year invoked by the piece’s livret, phantasmagoria’s looming wraiths had been miniaturized and tamed, projected by toy lanterns that plainly revealed optical effects whose methods were once concealed by stage magic.77 If this reduction in scale helped unveil the magic lantern’s secrets, La Valse permitted no such disclosures, unleashing its motional illusions while accruing density, bulk, and gravitational force, as though it might form a new planet. But embedded in its panoramic effects is a method for musical listening. Our oscillation between disjunctive and integrative views of La Valse mirrors the relationship between sounding music and “silent” intertexts—the skipping over, filling in, sorting, and absorbing of acoustic and spectral sounds that makes each replicative hearing, in its way, original. To listen in this manner is to transfigure the unrepeatable sounds of the past into phantasmagoric evocations, recombined like motive x, adaptable to any musical context. The particularities of La Valse’s spectral projections—the images, acoustic revenants, programmatic narratives from critics and scholars—might even displace the piece itself, turning it into a phantasmagoric theater of the mind, where it endures as a ghostly afterimage. There it whirls, as if it has always existed, endlessly remaking itself.

75. On nostalgia in Sinfonia, see Michael Hicks, “Text, Music, and Meaning in the Third Movement of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia,” Perspectives of New Music 20 (Autumn 1981–Summer 1982): 214. See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xvii. The “repetition of the unrepeatable” evokes Kramer, Musical Meaning, 263. 76. The phrase is Boym’s. See Future of Nostalgia, xiv. 77. Lifelike ghosts were still a major theatrical attraction during this time, but the advancing and receding apparitions popular around the turn of the century had lost much of their appeal.

Conclusion Time, Space, Sortilèges

Early in Swann’s Way, Marcel wakes, disoriented, memories cropping up like gusts of wind, tossing him through various times and places. Unable to sleep, he tries exploring his childhood memories of Combray, his hometown, a landscape familiar because he has lived there and remembers what it was like. These recollections, driven by habit and shaped by the importunities of life, focus on a particular recurring event: the ritual of preparing for bedtime, culminating with a kiss from his mother. No other childhood memories seem available to him, as if “all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase, and as though there had been no time there but seven o’clock at night.” Yet one dreary and otherwise ordinary day, long-buried memories of tasting his Aunt Léonie’s madeleines on Sunday mornings are resurrected by crumbs of a madeleine dunked in his tea— and from that memory spring others of Combray, unwinding and spreading like tree roots. Brought to life, but not sustained by it: the revelatory power of the first mouthful gradually dilutes in strength, the potion “losing its magic.”1 The madeleine scene is the first of several episodes to chronicle the experience of involuntary memory, which can indeed feel like a magic trick. It often arises from sensory cues, its phenomenal character differing from memories we retrieve and construct by choice. With it may come a rush of sensation or emotion that interrupts our feeling of present-tense time flow: in an instant, we are swept up by 1. Proust, Swann’s Way, 61. Although Proust’s “la vertu du breuvage semble diminuer” lacks the magical overtone supplied by Moncrieff and Kilmartin’s translation of it, the passage nonetheless conveys a sense of enchantment, the tea functioning as a miraculous agent initiating Marcel’s physical (and later, metaphysical) transformation.

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a powerful current that promises (or threatens) to transport us. Samuel Beckett, struck by the way this type of memory bursts forth, described it as an “unruly magician” that “chooses its own time and place for the performance of its miracle.”2 Puri uses Proust’s evocative portrayal of involuntary memory as the methodological fulcrum in his study of Ravel’s aesthetics, attending to the moment bienheureux of the madeleine scene and a few key episodes that follow it.3 My interest in Proust has a different focus: memory’s power to conjure, transport, and manipulate spatial and temporal relationships. I seek less a method in Proust’s work than a literary reflection of Ravel’s approach to constructing a childhood world that partakes of fantasy, illusions, and verisimilitude at once. In the foregoing chapters, we have examined Ravel’s strategies for creating musical illusions of various types. Perpetual ascent animates the fairy-tale promenade of Le Jardin féerique and the motional rotations of La Valse. Transformational ascent, sometimes paired with the harp glissando, appears in various guises, whether to signal a dream or vision (Daphnis et Chloé), mark inward or outward metamorphosis (Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête), or initiate an illusion of mechanization (the Adagio of the Piano Concerto in G major). Priming serves both types of ascent, creating an expectation of continuous upward motion repeating in similar (if not identical) contexts. By foregrounding various types of movement, Ravel focuses our attention on the illusory qualities of musical motion and stasis, manipulating timbre, melody, harmony, and rhythmic ostinatos (as we have seen in Le Gibet and Boléro) to vary our impressions of both. Harp glissandos— sonic clichés whose blurring of discrete pitches offers an illusion of portamento— have a special place in Ravel’s oeuvre, indicating transformation, transportive effects, and extratemporal experience. Unstable perspectives, illustrated by Rubin’s vase and the duck-rabbit image, motivate the pantomime from Daphnis et Chloé and La Valse—pieces that negotiate interiorized and exteriorized meanings, our oscillations between them generating the vertige characteristic of the French grotesque. Emblems of enchantment—distinctive timbres produced with harmonics, sur la touche string bowing, tremolos, and glissandos—are signs of Ravel’s conjuring, denoting the virtual world of Mallarmé’s poetry, the Nymphs’ invocations in Daphnis et Chloé, and the mechanical simulation of life in Rapsodie espagnole. Illusions of mechanization in the two piano concertos explore the hidden automaticity of human functioning and behavior, revealing the coterminous relationship between mechanical and organic elements, recalling Robert-Houdin’s Pastry Chef. Most of Ravel’s illusions affect our temporal experience, which may seem hastened or arrested, fixed or unstable; at times, multiple synchronous temporalities converge to evoke an impression of timelessness. 2. Samuel Beckett, Proust (1931; New York: Grove Press, 1957), 20. 3. Puri, Ravel the Decadent, 15–21.

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Ravel’s second opera, L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, synthesizes many of the themes and effects described above, including transformational ascent, spoken and musical incantation, priming, various species of misdirection, and yes, harp glissandos. Like Dukas’s L’Apprenti sorcier, the opera is a tale of enchantment gone awry. A boy who refuses to do his homework throws a tantrum, his crimes of petulance including ripping down wallpaper, tearing pages from a book of fairy tales, pulling the cat’s tail, and breaking his china cup. Exhausted, the boy collapses on the floor, only to discover (or imagine) that the objects surrounding him have come to life: sofa and chair, the fire, the shepherds and shepherdesses on the wallpaper, the fairy-tale Princess, a maniac teacher sprung from a math textbook. Some of them taunt the boy; others remind him ruefully of their watchful care and affection. Night falls, and two cats sing a pre-coital meowing duet that climaxes with a change of scenery to the garden, lit by a full moon, where insects cavort to the accompaniment of chirping birds and croaking frogs. More recriminations come, this time from a wounded tree and a squirrel that the boy had locked in a cage. As the boy observes the animals’ expressions of joy and affection, he feels alone and forgotten, crying out, “Maman!” The animals attack him, wounding a squirrel in the skirmish. The boy binds up the squirrel’s paw but collapses to the ground, and the animals call for help using the only word they can speak, known to them by the boy’s plaintive repetition of it: “Maman.” After the boy opens his eyes, a light turns on in the house, and the animal chorus sings, “Il est bon, l’enfant, il est sage” in four-part choral polyphony, its sober tranquility made the more poignant by its scarcity in Ravel’s style. The opera ends with the boy spreading his arms and asking once more, gently, for his mother. L’Enfant et les Sortilèges appeals to an experience of childhood deeply rooted in social class and economic status, its setting reflecting both Ravel’s fairly comfortable upbringing and Colette’s poignant evocations of her own childhood, where the whimsical inhabitants of nature awaited just outside the doorstep of her country home. Childhood, as Maria Gutman notes, was once seen as “a period in life to get through, not to prolong.”4 Only in the nineteenth century did European and American middle- and upper-class parents come to view their children as innocents needing insulation from the adult world, creating nurseries and playrooms filled with child-sized furniture, specialized clothing, and objects with no functional purpose besides entertainment.5 Not many such luxuries were to be had in working-class homes, where children had little leisure, instead filling the hours before and after school with odd jobs like selling newspapers, delivering milk, run-

4. Marta Gutman, “The Physical Spaces of Childhood,” in The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, ed. Paula S. Fass (New York: Routledge, 2013), 251. 5. Ibid., 251.

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ning errands, and babysitting.6 But Ravel’s Child lives in a comfortable home, attends school, and has the time to work on his homework afterward—even if he feels disinclined to do it. Ravel was neither the first nor second choice to compose the music for L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, which premiered at the Théâtre de Monte-Carlo in 1925. The project originated in collaboration with Jacques Rouché, director of the Opéra, and Colette, the novelist and actor, whom Rouché had approached during the war years about writing a libretto. When Colette delivered a ballet livret in 1916, it fell to Rouché to find a composer for it. Dukas declined the commission, citing his refusal to play nicely with others. (“You know my views on collaborations. They have not changed.”)7 Rouché and Colette invited Stravinsky next—a tantalizing prospect given his experience with animated puppetry in Petrushka and his fairytale evocations of birdsong in Le Rossignol. But he either refused the opportunity or never received Colette’s letter, obliging Rouché to find someone else to do it. He wrote to Ravel, then stationed in Verdun, and eventually piqued the composer’s interest. Direct evidence of Ravel’s collaboration with Colette finally appears in 1919, when the composer sent her a well-known letter, inquiring, “What would you think of the cup and the teapot, in old Wedgwood—black—singing a ragtime?”8 If L’Enfant et les Sortilèges is tinged with the nostalgia many adults feel for their childhood, it also evokes specific experiences of maternal loss. Between the time Ravel first heard of the commission and the time he completed it, the Great War had ended, and his mother, Marie, had died, at the age of seventy-six. It was a loss that came suddenly and too soon for Ravel, who was close to her. Colette’s mother had died in 1912, and the following year she gave birth to her only child, Colette de Jouvenal, three years before submitting the draft of L’Enfant to Rouché. For the next few years, she worked on the livret with a toddler in tow, discovering her own “still-unfamiliar motherhood.”9 That the protagonist of L’Enfant is a child is significant given the suffering of children in the war: as Emily Kilpatrick observes, “hungry children, homeless children, fatherless children and, most potently of all, murdered and mutilated children . . . loomed large in the public imagination.”10

6. Colin Heywood, “Children’s Work in Countryside and City,” in Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, ed. Fass, 132; also Heywood, Childhood in Nineteenth-Century France: Work, Health, and Education among the “Classes Populaires” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4. Heywood discusses how, even in twentieth-century France, “the school system and the notion of a cloistered childhood have still not gained a total ascendancy.” 7. Quoted in Emily Kilpatrick, The Operas of Maurice Ravel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 36. 8. Ravel to Colette, February 27, 1919, in Ravel Reader, 188; in Lettres, écrits, entretiens, 172. 9. Kilpatrick, Operas of Maurice Ravel, 228. 10. Ibid., 219.

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Colette also plants an allusion to the missing fathers of war in the frantic, aimless chiming of the damaged Grandfather Clock, who recalls how he used to track domestic events with placid consistency: time to sleep, time to wake, time for a loved one to return home. Had the Child not pulled out his pendulum (“S’il ne m’eût mutilée”—a phrase recalling the war’s mutilés de guerre), he sings, “maybe nothing would have changed in this house; maybe no one would have died.” If only he could have kept the time, each hour the same as the last, there might never have been an hour that stood out from all the others, marked conspicuously by sorrow. Though the figure of Maman looms large in L’Enfant, physically and thematically, there is little hint of a father—just flawed representations like the Chat Noir, whose erotic antics will no doubt lead to a litter of abandoned kittens. Colette’s libretto, written during the war, describes the Child as six or seven years old, making him about the right age to be the son of a veteran, perhaps one who died after the war as a result of infirmity or illness. But this potential loss is mentioned only as one of the clock’s many laments, and it is not recounted in any contemporaneous criticism I have seen. When its reverberations are felt at later points in the opera, they are muffled by more conspicuous themes—most often, that of temporal passage through a nostalgic lens, as we shall see. C O N J U R I N G T H E VO I D

It is easy to overlook the fact that the room subjected to the Child’s rampage is not his own.11 There may have been a playroom in the old Norman house of Colette’s imagination, filled with toys and small furniture, but it doesn’t appear in this opera. Instead, the room is occupied by stylish grownup-sized furniture, a stately clock, a tea set, a crackling fire, and the family cat. The wallpaper that the Child shreds isn’t a pastoral nursery print but a delicate, colorful toile that might adorn a sitting room. The only conventionally childish possessions in the room include the math textbook (treated as a symbol of oppression, not amusement), the captive squirrel (treated likewise), and the storybook. Ravel, that lifelong connoisseur of toys and automata, wrote an opera about childhood without any manufactured playthings in it. He could have introduced a few into Colette’s libretto, as he did with his other opera, L’Heure espagnole, which included marionettes, a soldier, and a mechanical bird (all things, incidentally, that would have appealed to the Child). But given an even stronger dramatic inducement to create toy characters for L’Enfant, he passed.

11. I know because I’ve done it. When first writing about this opera, in “Ravel and Robert-Houdin, Magicians,” I described the setting of the first act as the child’s bedroom, and a number of other scholars have used the same phrase or a similar descriptor, like “nursery.”

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Thus the Child isn’t in a playroom filled with toys, and if his fondness for certain adult possessions might be explained (children given to holding tea parties might indeed possess a beloved china cup), he is otherwise surrounded by things chosen and cherished by adults. An engraving of the stage design for the Monte Carlo premiere gives a clear sense of how Colette and Ravel imagined the Child’s environment—a clue, I think, to how his perspective relates to ours as spectators (see figure 6.1). Are we meant to enter the Child’s world, to see as he sees, but only that much? It certainly seems so. In the libretto, the mise-en-scène is portrayed as seen through the Child’s eyes, from the exaggerated dimensions of the room to his view of Maman, whom he sees as an oversized apron, a hand, and scissors dangling from a chain. (Colette’s clever portrayal of Maman as a hand with accessories surely reflects the activities a child of the 1920s would associate with Mother— cooking, mending, nurturing, and discipline.) Carolyn Abbate evokes Walter Benjamin to explain how we, like children entering a storybook world, might cross the proscenium, aided by the presence of music, the “audible trace of the gazing Child’s passage into the fictional world.”12 If the Child seems surprised that the furniture has started to dance, he remains, as Kilpatrick notes, “grounded in the potent and magical reality of childhood,” never questioning why inanimate objects have come to life.13 As spectators, we tend to approach opera similarly: why not witches, a rainbow bridge, a singing statue from hell? Critics largely judged the work a success, but even its supporters noted the difficulty of rendering Colette’s mise-en-scène, particularly due to its odd proportions. After seeing the French première at the Opéra-Comique, Robert Dezarnaux put the problem succinctly: “The scenic realization of L’Enfant et les Sortilèges is, perhaps, impossible. The Opéra-Comique has done its best.”14 The composer Jean Poueigh, who claimed that the only good thing about the opera was that it lasted no longer than forty-five minutes, found it ridiculous to portray, enlarged to scale, “objects jostled and animals martyred by the cruel and turbulent little despot.” He felt, however, that the role of the Child, played by a woman, was appropriately cast, since “the sentiments he expresses—laziness, gluttony, malice—are those of a feminine nature, mutinous and impulsive,” easier for a female singer to portray “without great effort or artifice.”15 The 1929 Viennese première dealt with one aspect of 12. Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera, 230. 13. Kilpatrick, Operas of Maurice Ravel, 226. 14. Robert Dezarnaux, “La Musique,” La Liberté, February 3, 1926. Other favorable reviews include Raymond Balliman, “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges,” Lyrica, February 1926, 693; Raymond Charpentier, “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges,” Comœdia, February 2, 1926, 1–2; Jane Catulle-Mendes, “Les Premières,” La Presse, February 3, 1926, 2; and Henry Malherbe, “Chronique musicale,” Le Temps, February 3, 1926, 3. A famously self-serving review by Georges Auric appears in “La Musique,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, artistiques, et scientifiques, April 11, 1925, 7. 15. Jean Poueigh, “Chronique musicale,” La Rampe, February 15, 1926, 12.

fig. 6.1 . Illustration of the stage design for the first tableau, Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique, published by Durand in 1926. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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the problematic staging by turning Maman into a disembodied figure, first glimpsed in profile behind a glass door; Eugen Steinhof, who directed the production, noted that, in order to preserve the illusion, the shadow was all spectators would see of her.16 Reviewing the Italian première in 1939, Luigi Dallapiccola described the “immense difficulty of the stage realization,” adding that the opera was fifteen years before its time: had it been written in 1935 instead of 1920, it surely would have been an animated Disney feature, not an opera.17 Only in such a medium, he believed, would L’Enfant “find its definitive expression, free from compromises, open and clear.”18 By using people instead of pixels, Ravel and Colette seem to have outstripped the capacity of stage illusions in a paradoxical manner: if some critics found the mise-en-scène lacking the requisite verisimilitude, others believed it foundered in portraying the outer limits of a child’s fantastical imagination. Even critics who wished for a greater measure of theatrical enchantment in the staging were nonetheless captivated by the illusion of childhood wrought with music and words, which draw us deliciously close to the Child’s vision of his theatrical reality. But there are two episodes in L’Enfant that complicate our relationship to the Child, muddling his “picturing gaze”19 and questioning the extent to which his vision coincides with our own. The first episode of these occurs in the opening tableau, when twilight falls—one of the few moments in the theatrical staging that might rival the enthralling aura of the Child’s enchantment. Steinhof painted it in evocative terms: “A large round moon appears on the horizon and, behind the wall of the garden it gilds, begins its ascent; we perceive its reflection in the little pond where waves, created by a special apparatus, ride the luminous surface of iridescence.”20 Before the moon appears, Fire’s coloratura warning to the Child assumes a menacing character, forcing him to hide behind the furniture. As Cinder rises up to play with the flames, a series of ascending triads emerges from muted divisi viola and cello, contrabass holding a D pedal while the piano unfolds triplet arpeggiations. Staggered entrances in the divisi upper strings splinter, second violins dividing into four parts and first violins into three as Fire and Cinder pantomime their play, Fire exhaling bursts of laughter in staccato arpeggiations. The 16. Eugène Steinhof, “ ‘L’Enfant et les Sortilèges’ à l’Opéra de Vienne,” L’Art vivant, May 1, 1929, 354. 17. Luigi Dallapiccola, “Per un’esecuzione de ‘L’enfant et les sortilèges,’ ” in Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, ed. Fiamma Nicolodi (Milan: il Saggiatore, 1980), 279. Originally published in Letteratura 3, no. 3 (July 1939). Édouard Ravel reportedly expressed a similar sentiment after seeing Disney’s Snow White, released in France in May 1938, about six months after his brother’s death. See Madeleine Goss, Bolero: The Life of Maurice Ravel (New York: Henry Holt, 1940), 195. 18. Dallapiccola, “L’Enfant,” 279. 19. The phrase is Benjamin’s, quoted by Abbate, In Search of Opera, 229. 20. Steinhof, “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges,” 354.

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234

Conclusion

ascent reaches its pinnacle at E8, played as a harmonic in the first violin (R49, Example 6.1a–b). When Fire’s flames extinguish, twilight shadows fill the room, and the orchestra becomes a strange amalgam of string harmonics, trills, and glissandos in the violas and cellos. The Child cowers, fearful, hearing titters of laughter from the shreds of wallpaper, which rise up—Shepherds and Shepherdesses, sheep and goats—to begin a solemn procession, singing a farewell: “We’ll no longer graze our green sheep on the purple grass!” As the Child buries his face in his arms and sobs, a hand emerges from the torn page of his storybook, followed by a halo of golden hair, and at last the fairy-tale Princess herself. The music accompanying Fire and Cinder, just before twilight falls, has all the hallmarks of a transformational ascent: muted strings, harmonics, string glissandos, and a patient, gradual rise that begins in the depths and reaches an ethereal pitch. Some of the string parts double back, dropping a step or a third before resuming the climb, suggesting perpetual ascent, though the scene isn’t quite long enough to sustain it. Eerie and enchanted effects swirl together as if in a potion: one draught, like a sip of Proust’s tea, transports us to another place. But where has the ascent taken us? What has changed? Though an earlier sequence at R38 had shifted the action from daylight to sunset, the move to twilight is more distinctive, musically and dramatically. Paired with the rising music, it mirrors the dream or vision sequence in Daphnis et Chloé, whose transformational ascent was performed by a cappella choir during a similar transition to nightfall. In Daphnis, there are other signs suggesting an oneiric or prophetic turn. Statues of the Nymphs come to life to perform their mysterious dance, and Pan manifests his presence to the pirates by electrifying the air, igniting little flames, and sending satyrs to torment them, phenomena all pointing to dreams, divination, or magic. During the scenic transition from grotto to pirate camp, a cappella voices ring out from the dark, helping to bridge the geographical gap, their disembodied presence, combined with the abrupt change of scenery, heightening the jarring sense of dislocation typical of dreams or altered consciousness. The parallel passage in L’Enfant has none of these signs. When coupled with the sort of striking visual effect Steinhof envisioned, the ascent underscores the symbolic value of the temporal shift to twilight, emblematic of the Child’s growing maturity. But I think it has more significant implications for the Child’s unfolding sense of self. It prepares the second episode in the opera that clouds his “picturing gaze,” inviting us to contemplate how his past— foreshortened in dramatic representation to the point that it scarcely exists—might interpolate itself in his bewitched fantasia, creating a poignant moment of reconciliation. This episode, which retrospectively clarifies the purpose of the ascent, occurs just after the ballet of the Shepherds and Shepherdesses, when the fairy tale Princess—the Child’s première bien-aimée, a proxy for Maman—appears to remind him of why he loved her.

Conclusion

235

Harp glissandos accompany her rise from the torn page, the Child remarking with awe, “Ah! c’est Elle! c’est Elle!” The Princess sings of the mischievous Child’s love for her, then asks mournfully what will happen to her now that the pages of her story have been destroyed, recounting her history with him in two-part counterpoint with the flute (example 6.2). As she asks if he regrets not knowing the end of her story, an alien sound materializes: another harp, perhaps? But no—this time we hear clarinets, a bassoon, and flutes alternately playing arpeggios (example 6.3). Vladimir Jankélévitch, Ravel’s most poetic and florid interpreter, describes this case of mistaken identity as a kind of “instrumental mystification”; Roland-Manuel points out a similar moment of illusory transposition in the orchestrated Ma mère l’Oye, where the sound of a trumpet turns out to be “the shadow of a trumpet evoked by the flute.”21 Abbate, building on Jankélévitch, considers this musical illusion emblematic of the barrier separating us from the tomb-like space inhabited by the princess. The illusory harp may also represent the sound of a music imagined but never made: less the remembrance of a “dead sound”22 than the music lost through the void of vanished narrative. Parallels between this moment and “Surgi de la croupe et du bond,” the third of the Mallarmé songs, are legion, despite obvious differences in musical style. Mallarmé’s poem evokes both the void (poems that might have been) and the possibilities lying within it (poems that still might be). In Ravel’s setting, contrapuntal flutterings in the opening drop out in favor of a stark (not silent) texture, at once reflecting the flowerless vase described in the text and the Mallarméan quandary that the language of nothingness consists of somethingness. Later in the piece, the strange buzzing of dissonant string harmonics suggests the sound of unrealized creation from inside the vase—a potential sound, but also a lost one, customarily inaccessible to us. In L’Enfant, the harp illusion is another way of sounding the void, making its reverberations audible; the somethingness of the fairy tale narrative becomes nothingness, lost to the Child’s crise de colère. From this shattered narrative frame comes a remarkable inversion of perspective. Now the Princess sees as the Child sees. The questions she puts to him are the same ones readers might ask of her story: will the evil sorcerer put her to sleep or make her disappear in a puff of smoke? The Child has no doubt asked these very questions himself, but he is powerless to answer them, unable to generate artistic meaning alone, while the Princess seeks meaning instead of acting as a stimulus or subject. Though aware of her status as a character—unreal in a world of objects, real in the Child’s imagination—she thinks and anticipates like a reader, focusing on the narrative account of future events. The enchanted harp music had first introduced the 21. See Jankélévitch, Ravel, 140; Roland-Manuel, “Maurice Ravel ou l’esthétique de l’imposture,” 21. 22. Abbate, In Search of Opera, 239.

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Conclusion

237

ex. 6.3 . Ravel, L’Enfant, woodwind arpeggios simulate the harp at R65.

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238

Conclusion

The Princess’s conversation with the Child ends with a cry for help before an invisible force sucks her underground. Her disappearance reminds us that her narrative—not the book’s words and pictures, but the tale unfolding through time, night after night, Scheherazade-style—is always unformed, waiting to be realized. It may seem that her story’s disappearance simulates the experience of reading, voids in the narrative emerging whenever the reader puts the book down for a more pressing task. But reading doesn’t always work that way. The Child may not know it, but Mallarmé does, and Ravel imbues the closing moments of the Princess episode with this knowledge—the somethingness of the void. Near the end of the Child’s dialogue with the Princess, the harp glissandos return, this time joined by the clarinet and flute arpeggios that had mimed the harp glissé, as if to fill in the metaphysical gap between interlocutors. In the Mallarméan view, the harp and its illusory double express the nothingness of vanished narrative and its opposite— the possibility that the Princess lives on, sustained by the Child’s imagination, as real (or as fake) as the pictures in her storybook. Ravel’s harp illusion in the Princess episode owes part of its success to bottomup sensory processing, which renders larger moves more salient. Stephen Macknik and his co-authors note, for example, that a pickpocket may squeeze the victim’s wrist before stealing a watch, creating both a “high-contrast somatosensory impression” affecting the skin’s touch receptors, which makes the person less likely to respond when the watch is removed, and a “somatosensory afterimage,” suggesting to the victim that the watch is still attached.23 Magicians exploit this same principle when secretly returning objects to spectators, requiring a deftness of touch that must be rehearsed like a violin étude. Ravel’s harp glissando at the Princess’s entrance creates a type of aural impression, rendering us less sensitive to subsequent appearances; put another way, we have been primed by the harp to hear harpiness. When the woodwind arpeggiations take the harp’s place, they evoke the aural parallel of a somatosensory afterimage, suggesting to listeners that the harp, like a stolen wristwatch, is still present even after it is gone. The Princess’s poignant episode reveals much about the purpose of the transformational ascent preceding it. When the Child unleashes his reign of terror at the beginning of the opera, any pang of conscience he suffers would feel uncomfortable, but not unfamiliar: all children lucky enough to have belongings know what it feels like to break them. After the ascent, his experiences center not on breakage but on loss—which remains, for him, an intractable mystery. He feels the first twinges of heartache upon hearing the Shepherds and Shepherdesses’s farewell song, which functions differently from previous numbers: the Armchair and the Louis Quinze Sofa pondered whether to deprive the Child of comfortable rest, the Grandfather Clock complained and flailed, the Teapot and China Cup shat23. Macknik et al., “Attention and Awareness,” 875.

Conclusion

239

tered but came back to life, dancing spiritedly off stage. By contrast, the pastoral figures—the first characters to sing after the transformational ascent—proclaim and then enact their departure, and the Princess simply disappears, swept away by that force invisible. We might assume that these incidents represent the Child’s first contact with loss and abandonment, but what if he has experienced them before? If so, his encounter with the Princess might mark a different kind of milestone: the first time he has truly felt that loss. Perhaps, recapitulating the deaths of Ravel and Colette’s own mothers, the Princess’s function as a mother figure occludes our vision of the void behind her, signifying the absent father alluded to by the Grandfather Clock. The Child might have been too young to make sense of his father’s death, especially if it had occurred years before the scenario in L’Enfant; that loss would indeed have felt to him like the mysterious, invisible force that seizes the Princess, who vanishes exclaiming, “Sleep and night want to reclaim me!” This metaphorical language of a battle against mortality seems like something the Child has heard before, in another form. His lament, “Toi, le cœur de la rose,” is unmistakably a song about the Princess, whom he describes using language reserved for the glorified beloved: blue eyes, golden hair, delicate as the fragrance of the white lily. Yet perhaps within this song of love forfeited are echoes of an irrevocable loss he has already suffered years ago—long enough that, in the chronology of the Child’s memory, he cannot describe his father’s face, even in generic or idealized terms. When seen in this light, the transformational ascent is a transportive, unruly Proustian device. It prefigures the Child’s emotional realization of loss, experienced during a new phase in the day representing both temporal passage and developmental maturity. But it also hearkens back, achingly, to a time when loss has already visited the Child’s home. Memory and understanding envelop him, infusing his melancholy over the Princess with a plaintiveness drawn from experience. This incident unfolds differently from Proust’s moment bienheureux, and I do not offer it as a dramatic parallel: there are no sensory cues to fetishize here, and no “dispirited state of mind” from which memory lifts the Child, who is already in the midst of a vivid fantastical reality.24 Nor does the Child ever articulate what he may have remembered, focusing only on what he feels about the Princess. And yet, the confluence of memory and experience is transformative in an almost supernatural sense, recalling the “twin eyepiece” of the moment bienheureux, as Roger Shattuck puts it: Marcel’s reminiscences are forward- and backward-looking, for “at the close of the madeleine sequence, ‘the whole of Combray’ takes shape out of Marcel’s teacup—not just the memory of the place but the yet to be composed

24. Roger Shattuck describes the archetypal pattern of the moment bienheureux in Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to “In Search of Lost Time” (New York: Norton, 2000), 57–58.

240

Conclusion

narrative that completes the recollection.”25 The Princess episode produces a similar effect on the Child—if not quite a glimpse at “Time itself,” which is what Marcel claims to experience after years of puzzling over his memories, then a temporal convergence that smudges chronolinear distinctions. We sense, not only the Child’s anguish in response to his past, but also how these experiences will come to change him by the end of the opera. This convergence affects our understanding of the relationship between time, space, and the self in L’Enfant, recalling questions Georges Poulet poses about Marcel at the beginning of Swann’s Way: “He no longer knows who he is because he no longer remembers when he is. Is he a child? Is he an adult?”26 Throughout the novel, he is both and neither. The child Marcel is unknowable, glimpsed only through the scrim of memory, but is nevertheless a part of the adult Marcel—if not an occupant, then a bundle of warp or weft threads helping to hold him together. In L’Enfant, oversized furniture dwarfs the Child and draws us nearer to his perspective, but the mise-en-scène is full of things associated with adult life, not nursery room detritus. Watching the opera, we might well ask: are we children? Are we adults? How can we be both at once without being neither? Ravel resolves this paradox at L’Enfant’s conclusion through a moment of disenchantment that functions as a companion, structurally and thematically, to the Princess episode. If her disappearance in the first tableau rouses the Child’s slumbering memories of loss, producing a brief and unexpected breach in his fantastical reality, his transitory unconsciousness in the second tableau functions similarly, with unexpected results. The Child’s apparent disenchantment upon awakening adjoins the uttering of a magic word—one that echoes in the dim, ever-narrowing tunnel that separates us from our own childhoods. WO N D E R

Near the end of L’Enfant, the Child takes in the sights of the garden—squirrels leaping and playing, dragonflies embracing, a “paradise of tenderness and animal joy,” in Colette’s words. Suddenly he yearns for his mother’s comfort and cries out “Maman,” a descending perfect fourth. The animals, sensing vulnerability, attack him, but to their astonishment and shame, injure one of their own. Then comes another surprise: the pint-sized tyrant binds up the injured squirrel’s paw, then faints. Following a long pause, one of the animals speaks at last—speaks, not sings—in a voice Ravel describes as “plaintive, supple, and almost without timbre.” When deprived of the Child’s enchanted gaze, it seems, the beasts and insects no longer dance, croon love duets, or consort with croaking frogs. 25. Shattuck, Proust’s Way, 258. 26. Georges Poulet, L’Espace proustien (1963; new ed., Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 144.

Conclusion

241

Perhaps this change in expressive mode should surprise us less than it does. Throughout L’Enfant, the animals have expressed themselves in a variety of ways, sometimes without discernable language: the nightingale chatters textless filigree like an avian Queen of the Night, while the frogs (nature’s automatons) prattle in onomatopoeic harmony, their mechanical clicks and hums resembling the percussive purr of the Gare de Lyon. But the garden never sounds more beastly than when the animals start imitating human speech, fumbling their way toward “Maman” (example 6.4a–b). They try hesitantly at first, missing the mark on both sides of the perfect fourth. More voices join, the cacophony of this feral kingdom contrasting pointedly with the lyrical, soulful sounds of the garden that prevail through the second tableau. When the Child regains consciousness, he opens his eyes, a harp glissando prefacing the orchestral invocation of “Maman,” which finally gets the motive’s descending fourth right and subsequently repeats it three times. Instead of signifying the moment of enchantment, the orchestra enacts it: the incantation is encoded in sound. For Abbate, this “transfigured moment” restores the Child’s enchanted gaze, permitting the animals to sing once more. But this re-enchantment requires a closer look. In the first tableau, time seems magnified, as if the Child experiences, in one afternoon, several stages of development that might unfold over months or years. By confronting the consequences of his actions—baby bats left motherless, a dragonfly losing his beloved—the Child acquires greater autonomy and empathy for others; at the end of the opera, as Steven Huebner suggests, the beginning “will be replayed—it is replayed—but infused with a greater sense of independence and compassion, with spirit, soul, and thought.”27 In other words, the Child becomes more like the adults who have been watching him, even as we are asked, in turn, to experience the opera partly through his eyes. The Child’s developmental process culminates with his awakening, which Abbate aligns with re-enchantment: despite his act of mercy, he remains a child, and it is only through his eyes that the fantasy unfolds for us. Abbate suggests that the return of the “auratic gaze music,” abetted by the harp glissando, is timed to the precise moment when the Child opens his eyes, restoring his enchanted vision. The temporal proximity of these incidents makes a link between them natural, almost inevitable, a coup d’oreille too fleeting to question. Yet there is a slight misalignment between the music and Colette’s stage direction—an instance of time misdirection—that proposes a different interpretation of the episode. In theatrical magic, temporal proximity can encourage spectators to make false inferences, described thus in a research collaboration between neuroscientists 27. Steven Huebner, “Ravel’s Child: Magic and Moral Development,” in Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth, ed. Susan Boynton and Roe-Min Kok (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), 88.

ex. 6.4a–b . Ravel, detailed reduction of L’Enfant. The animals cry “Maman,” the Child awakes, and the house is illuminated with light.

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244

Conclusion

and magicians: “In many magic tricks the secret action occurs when the spectators think that the trick has not yet begun, or when they think that the trick is over. . . . The magicians’ term ‘time misdirection’ refers to the deliberate separation of the moment of the method from the moment of the effect.”28 Music is particularly effective at establishing temporal and perceptual frames, implying that something important is about to happen, when in fact the critical action may already have occurred—or it may be happening at that very moment. In the climactic episode of L’Enfant, the Child returns to consciousness as the animals are struggling to produce human speech, not after, and when he awakes, he sees them in the same light as the adult spectators (see example 6.4a–b).29 Only after several measures of raucous animal speech does the music of enchantment return when the orchestra intones, “Maman.” It’s easy to misalign these incidents because of the way Ravel constructs a distinct teleology in the measures leading up to the apparent re-enchantment. Orchestral density increases, along with short bursts of motivic repetition, alternating choral interjections, and a crescendo, all of which suggest a wave about to crest. Sure enough, it does. What follows—a harp glissando, a change of key and tempo, and the animals singing once more—are among the clearest signs Ravel could give that some form of enchantment has been restored. But it is not the enchanted vision of the Child, whose perspective seemed responsible for the dragonflies waltzing and the furnishings dancing a courtly sarabande. It is the enduring enchantment of childhood to which all adults lay claim: memories of fairy tales, talking animals, and motherly comfort that bear within them signs of loss and disenchantment. The harp glissando is Ravel’s most trusted confederate device in this episode, its priming effects resonating locally and intertextually, recalling the inaccessible void of the Princess in L’Enfant, the magical transformation of the Beast in Les Entrétiens de la Belle et de la Bête, and the charms of the Good Fairy in Le Jardin féerique. Though the glissé seems to indicate the return of the Child’s “picturing gaze,” it signifies the blending of childhood enchantment with the rugged experiences of growing up—a reckoning of gains and losses that works its own magic. Perhaps the most astonishing illusion posed at the opera’s conclusion is that the Child’s gaze might never have been needed at all. Enchanted vision thrives unbidden in the fully grown spectator, a remnant of what is lost but not forgotten.

28. Macknik et al., “Attention and Awareness,” 875. 29. The piano-vocal autograph does not direct the Child when to open his eyes; also missing is the indication for the Child to hold out his arms when singing his final word of text, “Maman” (three measures from the end of the piece). Yet both of these directions appear in the earliest print editions, likely reflecting Ravel’s dogged attempts to correct omissions and mistakes in his scores.

Conclusion

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The Child’s awakening promises more than a return to physical consciousness when he stretches out his arms and utters, “Maman,” a cry muddled with the budding fruits of nostalgia for his paradise lost. For some critics, this magic word is potent.30 For Colette, its meaning is ambiguous. In a program note accompanying one of the first performances at the Opéra-Comique in 1926, she writes that a light flickers on in the Child’s house, “announcing the arrival of supreme relief, the appearance of the one called for by the chorus of beasts—the appearance of Maman.”31 But the word used to described Maman’s appearance (“apparition”) might equally apply to a supernatural manifestation, or to the shadowy silhouette of Maman in Steinhof ’s production. In print editions of the orchestral and piano-vocal scores, the stage directions do not imply that Maman appears at all, either in person or by proxy: only the light in the house does, presumably to signify her presence. What is conjured when the Child wakes, if not enchanted animals or Maman herself? In “Asie,” the first song in Ravel’s 1903 cycle Shéhérazade, the narrator thrice repeats the song’s title, as if the mysterious continent he longs to see might materialize if he simply chants its name. In the song, Ravel treats this text as an incantation, setting it syllabically to pairs of intervals rising from a backdrop of muted string tremolos. When the narrator expresses his wish to depart that very evening on a schooner, Ravel summons the boat through the characteristic rhythms and gestures of the barcarolle; music is the magician here, conjuring the desired object into being. In L’Enfant the charm, though dutifully performed, works differently: Maman is the one called for, but the thing summoned by Ravel’s music is the childhood home—a locus of mystery, wonder, and melancholy. Catherine Crimp describes how Proust links memory to place, a process whereby “the parallel between physical and mental spaces for remembering includes places remembered from childhood, and places for remembering those places.”32 Proust’s views of time, which are admittedly varied, include Marcel’s description of temporality as a fourth dimension of space—a notion occurring to him as he recalls walking through the church at Combray. Here, his temporal perspective still seems bound by succession, each architectural landmark in the church’s nave an emblem of linear time stretching back to the Merovingians. In later episodes in the novel, it becomes clear that fourth-dimensional time whittles away imperatives of linearity and sequence, which themselves may be artifacts of 30. See, e.g., Gaston de Pawlowski, “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges,” Le Journal, February 2, 1926; AndreBloch, “La Musique,” Le Radical, February 4, 1926, 2. The German translation of L’Enfant is titled Das Zauberwort—The Magic Word. 31. Program for L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, Théâtre National de l’Opéra-Comique, stamped February 13, 1926, BnF, Articles de presse sur L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, 8-R0–4168 (1–4). 32. Catherine Crimp, Childhood as Memory, Myth, and Metaphor: Proust, Beckett, Bourgeois (London: Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge, 2013), 60.

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temporal perception. Dividing time into discrete moments, each one alike, is how the Grandfather Clock in L’Enfant once expressed time, before loss entered the Child’s home to disfigure that temporal illusion. But in fourth-dimensional time, there is no need for a clock to chime the hours: all times exist simultaneously, whether or not we apprehend them all at once. Proust’s sense of time, as Poulet puts it, is “spatialized, juxtaposed,”33 as if each moment of Marcel’s life is potentially coeval with the others. One serendipitous act might pierce the veil between them, creating the sense of convergence that Marcel describes, in Time Regained, as “extra-temporal.” If we cannot concoct the potion that first transformed Marcel’s perception of time, we can approximate it by viewing Monet’s paintings of haystacks or of Rouen cathedral, where time is both subject and medium. There are more than thirty paintings in each series, which Monet created at various times of day during different seasons of the year, capturing the prismatic colors and shifting effects of light made especially apparent when the images are placed in sequence. The haystacks, when so viewed, create a book of hours with a seasonal chronology: glowing orange and red tones at sunset become woolen, snow-capped, bleached by the sharp morning light, then wreathed with whispers of fog under a spring sunrise. If these paintings are disarranged in their sequence—or if the eye roves without respect to order—a sense of totality emerges: time expressed as a function of space, every little slice standing ready for our inspection, effacing the chronological progression of days, seasons, and years. Each of Monet’s haystacks suggests a fixed position in time and space, but their collective grouping is destabilizing, lacking a focal point or an allusion to time’s arrow. At the end of L’Enfant, light flickers on in the Child’s home just after the orchestral invocation of Maman, harp glissandos shimmering in the background. Here is Ravel’s last act as an operatic conjurer: a trick of time and memory that might be drawn from Robert-Houdin’s playbook, defying everything we think we know about physical and temporal experience. Maurice Brillant notes how, in L’Enfant, Ravel tends to focus on the relationship between sound and time; in focusing on timbres, he “now isolates them successively, and in time more than in space.”34 The Child and his environment are similarly cast in a dynamic relationship with temporality. A glancing return to Poulet’s remarks on Marcel’s temporal dislocation— “He no longer knows who he is because he no longer remembers when he is”— might capture our experience watching the conclusion of L’Enfant. When light illuminates the house, an illusion of temporal convergence twists the ribbons of memory and experience into one perceptual strand. At the same time, the childhood home splits and re-forms like Dukas’s riotous brooms, and soon there are 33. Poulet, L’Espace proustien, 136. 34. Brillant, “Les Œuvres et les Hommes,” 620.

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many homes, arrayed before us like Monet’s haystacks—places we remember and places for remembering those places.35 We see the home as children, things too large, objects out of reach, people coming and going, sickness, play, small comforts of magnified significance; we see it as adults, images shifting in and out of focus, lost smells, holidays, disappointments, embraces, injuries of body and spirit. Indeed, the theater itself becomes a place for remembering, another kind of home, with the magical capacity to bring past and present into alignment. With the Child’s dimensional perspective framed by an adult’s sense of functional and aesthetic space, the opera’s mise-en-scène finally makes sense. Through spatialized juxtapositions of time, the Child stands alongside the adult, connected but independent—yet another consequence of a harp glissando judiciously employed, rending the temporal curtain to animate the past, infused with all the glowing intensity of involuntary memory, but more palpable still. Time becomes unbalanced—the Grandfather Clock sans balancier, unmoored from its chronometric anchors. In a moment of disenchantment, when it seems that the Child is seeing as an adult for the first time, we discover what Ravel and Colette so scrupulously concealed through time misdirection: that temporal perspective in L’Enfant looks forward as well as back. The Child grows up, becoming like us; at the same time, we see as children again through a temporal illusion, where the self can exist in endless chronological iterations. This projection of temporal experience onto space, creating continuities and juxtapositions where none exist, might be construed as a kind of deception, clashing with our veridical experience of time. But illusions reveal what is true about our perception of the world—how, by sensing through mechanisms that winnow and magnify, we are flooded by sensory subterfuge. These illusions are truer, in their way, than anything our senses represent as “real.” The broader perceptual project of L’Enfant involves our experience of temporal passage in music, and whether it constitutes fantasy, illusion, or some measure of both. We know we can gain direct knowledge from the world, even when things are other than they appear to be. Music doesn’t move; time (or our sense of it) doesn’t freeze for our inspection. But they can seem to—and in L’Enfant, time misdirection becomes a source of knowledge or epiphany. Without it, we would never have encountered our past selves. The same might be said of all of Ravel’s music, whose illusions, though methodically constructed, express an emotional and perceptual truth. Ravel excels, Roland-Manuel notes, at “engineering [à machiner] spells that are self-sufficient,” 35. These two modes of perception might invite a comparison between Bergson’s notion of spatialized time, which involves a firm separation between present and past perception, and durée, or the stream of temporal passage that freely entangles memory and perception. But while Bergson differentiates between these modes, claiming that any spatial model of time misrepresents the nature of temporal experience, I suggest that the two are interrelated here, each informing the other. See Bergson, Time and Free Will, 107–10.

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which sounds as if his effects are assembled in the most mundane of enchanted laboratories, labels affixed to explain precisely what each will do (just that, and no more). But these effects are deployed in ingenious combinations that withstand the cold scrutiny of analysis. Often the warmth and wistfulness of his music appeals directly to our senses, bypassing cognition for emotion—a strategic as well as stylistic turn, steering us away from inquiries about wires, smoke and mirrors, hidden mechanical contraptions. Consider what happens after Pan’s apparently supernatural demonstration to the pirates in Daphnis et Chloé. The stage backdrop seems to melt away (semble se fondre), transitioning to a nature scene, and Ravel’s orchestration changes accordingly: string glissandos and sur la touche tremolos yield to woodwind arpeggios and harp glissandos, miming trickles of water circling rocks. Daphnis is still asleep when the bucolic daybreak scene opens, and a melody, appearing first in clarinet and viola, languorously unwinds over the sound of murmuring rivulets, periodically interrupted by shepherd’s pipes. Next played by violins, the melody undulates against shimmering harp glissés and muted backstage voices, building to an extravagant climax that prefigures the scores of 1940s romance films. The music breathes like an organism, lungs swelling, converting the subdued warmth of the opening arpeggios into a magnificent sonic display. Its somatic appeal seems direct and unambiguous. But make no mistake: there is magic in Ravel’s sunrise, if less overt than in the Pan sequence. The scene opens while still under the spell of Daphnis’s dream (or vision) of the pirate camp, as he sleeps in a verdant meadow visible only to us. A motivic rise from B1 to C5, conveyed from low to high strings and underscored with harp arpeggiations, is a transformational ascent, propelling the mise-en-scène from darkness to dawn and reminding us that theatrical enchantment need not involve otherworldly figures or bewitching displays—indeed, that enchantment exists beyond the stage, dawn’s vivid pageantry visible from any vantage on the natural world. The composite sound of undulating melody, harp glissando, and woodwind arpeggiation (R161) culminates in Daphnis’s awakening at the shepherds’ hands (R163), merging his vision with our own. To align these frameworks—dream and waking reality—Ravel might have offered more conspicuous emblems to fix our attention on the unfolding theatrical illusion. Instead, he weaves an enchantment that rouses our sense of aesthetic beauty—a transportive but extra-dramatic appeal. The music permeates our bodies, enhancing Daphnis’s stage illusion by transcending  it. If we happen to notice this strategy, I think Ravel wouldn’t mind. His composition teacher, Gabriel Fauré, used to feel apprehension about having his compositional methods uncovered; as Caballero puts it, “A stranger peers into the workshop, and a finished masterpiece suddenly returns to its humble origins amid sandpaper, glue, and sawdust.”36 But Ravel rarely shared such concerns. His workshop—or 36. Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics, 240.

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laboratory, factory, whatever artisanal euphemism may suffice—has always been a stage. Like Poe and Robert-Houdin, Ravel’s stylistic variety can be traced to a repertoire of methods. Underpinning his explorations of childhood, antiquity, myth, fantasy, and machines is an enduring interest in perception—how we process and interpret musical gestures, formal relationships, combinations of timbre, impressions of motion or stasis, and our sense of temporal and spatial location. Sometimes this interest can be traced to specific effects, whether emblems of enchantment or illusions of mechanization, transformation, motion, or perpetual ascent. In sorting Ravel’s effects, I have passed over a few pieces that evaded clear categorization, like Chanson madécasses, an exotic fantasy in a dissonant style dépouillé. But even these songs, so different from the luminous surfaces of “Soupir,” feature illusory sounds: in “Il est doux,” for example, cello and flute harmonics suggest the piccolo. Many more such examples beyond those explored here might be found.37 But just as a magician’s act cannot be appreciated by cataloguing its deceptions, Ravel’s music is more than a taxonomy of tricks. This is partly because the music, like theatrical magic itself, reveals the deceptive truths of perception—the illusions we depend upon to make sense of the world. Part of Robert-Houdin’s success as a conjurer emerged from his artful blending of method and effect: his illusions astonish, yes, but they are also beautiful to behold. Perhaps the most important quality Ravel shares with Robert-Houdin is the way his musical enchantments use beauty and refinement—of sound, craft, and effect—as a deflecting cloak and a tender invitation. Come closer, now: you can almost hear the gears at work.

37. See Jennifer P. Beavers, “Beyond Mere Novelty: Timbre as Primary Structural Marker in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major,” Music Theory Online 25, no. 6 (December 2019): 4.

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In dex

Abbate, Carolyn: on L’Apprenti sorcier, 180; on entering fictional worlds through music, 229; on illusory transposition, 235; on Ravel as machine, 95, 111; on re-enchantment in L’Enfant, 241; on sonic replication of machine breakdowns, 105; on unrealized songs, 184 absence, paradox of, 169 a cappella voices, 234 Adagio (from Concerto for Piano and Orchestra) (Ravel). See G Major Piano Concerto (Ravel) Adam, Adolphe, 57 Adams, John, 38, 39ex, 40 Agon (Stravinsky), 223 aircraft, 104–105 “airplane in C” (Ravel), 104 À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust), 6, 26, 198. See also Du côté de chez Swann (Proust) Alvars, Elias Parish, 59 Amar, Jules, 99, 100 Amossy, Ruth, 63 amputation, 118. See also prostheses; soldier amputees Amyot, Jacques, 87 animal bridegroom tales, 53 Ansermet, Ernest, 135, 194 Antar (Rimsky-Korsakov), 56, 67 Antony, Louise, 33–34, 42 appliances, household, 99

L’Apprenti sorcier (Dukas), 73–74, 105, 148, 180 Archimedes, 220 Arcimboldo, Giusuppe, 173, 174fig. Armida (Haydn), 68 Armstrong, Tim, 127, 131 art as virtual reality, 19–20 L’Art du jouer du piano (Richert), 115 artifice of Ravel, 25–26 artisanship of Ravel, 13 l’art pour l’art movement, 20 ascending scales: in Daphnis et Chloé, 90ex.; in L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, 232–233ex.; in L’Escalier du diable, 213ex.; in G Major Piano Concerto, 110ex.; in Jardin féerique, 77ex., 78, 79ex.; as metamorphosis, 7; as moving toward enlightenment, 220–221; in String Quartet in F Major, 8–9; as striving for Ideal, 181–182; as transformational, 218; in La Valse, 215tab., 216ex. See also perpetual ascent “Asie” (Ravel), 245 attention, modes of, 203, 220 attentional focus, 30–32, 195, 199. See also misdirection automatons: grotesque, 175; in L’Heure espagnole, 4, 94n5, 97, 175, 228; ideal workers as, 103, 132; piano teaching and, 113; Robert-Houdin and, 13, 27–28, 93; as simulation of the body, 96; the Turk, 13–14, 28

271

272

Index

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 78–79, 108 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 173 Balakirev, Mily, 163 ballet productions: of Boléro, 144; of Ma mère l’Oye, 50; of La Valse, 192 Banès, Antoine, 193 Barnum, P. T., 13 Baudelaire, Charles: Bertrand and, 155; on the dandy, 23, 25; on the grotesque, 173–174; intro to The Raven, 11; on organization of prose poems, 156; on pastiche, 176; vertige and, 208, 217 Beaumont, Jeanne-Marie Leprince de, 50, 52–53, 54 beauty, aesthetic, 248 Beauty and the Beast (1991 film), 52 Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête) (1946 film), 53–54 Beckett, Samuel, 225 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 37, 112, 220 Benjamin, George, 195 Benjamin, Walter, 229 Berceuse, op. 57 (Chopin), 109, 164 “Berenice” (Poe), 217–218 Bergeron, Katherine, 184, 189–190 Bergson, Henri, 124, 146, 161–162, 167 Berio, Luciano, 222 Berlioz, Hector, 56, 59, 69, 70 Bertrand, Aloysius, 154–155, 167, 189 Bewegung (movement), aesthetic history of, 36 Bhogal, Gurminder: on Boléro, 139, 141; on externality of Ravel’s music, 153; on Fauré, 109; on ornamentation, 143, 167; on visual arabesque as depthless, 151 birdsong, simulated, 76 Bizet, Georges, 56 Boccioni, Umberto, 43 body: interdependence of machine and, 130–131; as machine, 96; mechanical motion of, 94–98, 150. See also automatons; mechanomorphs; soldier amputees La Boîte à joujoux (Debussy), 74 Boléro (Ravel), 135–150; ballet productions of, 144; body’s mechanical motion in, 95, 96, 150; conjuring language in critiques of, 3, 144; E major transposition in, 147–150; as “experiment,” 136–137; factories and, 102; form of, 137–143, 141ex., 142ex.; interviews on, 10–11, 136, 137, 138; inversion of method and effect in, 138, 143; as musical machine, 98, 135, 144–145, 146, 147; noise in, 148–149, 149ex.;

“ostinato machine” in, 94; Ravel’s critique of, 135, 138n145; sleight of hand in, 144; stasis and movement in, 140ex. Boschot, Adolphe, 106 Bosco, Bartolomeo, 23 Boucher, François, 175, 176fig. Boulez, Pierre, 161 Boym, Svetlana, 223 Braus, Ira, 78 Brillant, Maurice, 193, 246 Brittan, Francesca, 5, 70 Browning, Tod, 118–119 Bruhn, Siglind, 155 Bruneau, Alfred, 119 Brussel, Robert, 106–107 Buckle, Richard, 218–219 Busser, Henri, 70 Caballero, Carlo, 68–69, 73, 180, 248 Calvocoressi, Michel-Dimitri, 25–26, 27, 111, 137 Cammano, Salvatore, 57 Capdevielle, Pierre, 145, 205, 206, 209 Caplet, André, 74 Capriccio espagnol (Rimsky-Korsakov), 56, 67 Carden-Coyne, Ana, 132 card tricks, 29–30, 31 Carraud, Gaston, 81 Cazalis, Henri, 20 Cello Concerto (Ligeti), 42 Chabris, Christopher, 32 Chalupt, René, 102, 144–145 Chanson madécasses (Ravel), 249. See also “Il est doux” Chausson, Ernest, 65–66 childhood, enchantment of, 226–227, 229, 231, 244 children in war, 227–228 chinoiserie, 124 chiroplasts, 112–113 Chopin, Frédéric, 38, 39, 39ex., 109, 164, 166ex., 167 chordal/modal openings, 158–159 Christmas Eve (Rimsky-Korsakov), 71 circularity: in Boléro, 139–140, 141; mobility and dynamic linearity through, 162; in Oiseaux tristes, 164; of pitch, 78–79; smothering of teleological motion by, 157; as stasis, 191; in “Surgi de la croupe et du bond,” 186–187; in Trois mouvements perpétuels, 44–45; in La Valse, 209, 210ex., 214 Civilisation, 1914–1917 (Duhamel), 100 Claretie, Jules, 72

Index Clark, Andy, 134 Clarke, Eric, 37, 40 cliché, harp glissando as, 59, 63, 65–67 Cocteau, Jean, 53–54 cognitive processing, 31, 92, 196, 221, 238 coiling spring motive in La Valse, 210–211, 211ex. Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle, 10, 226, 227, 228, 240, 245 Colette de Jouvenal, 227 color phi phenomenon, 41 Comala (Gade), 57 comedians, stand-up, 4 Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (Ravel), 106. See also G Major Piano Concerto (Ravel) Concerto for the Left Hand (Ravel): “blue” motive, 121, 124; embodied mechanization in, 95–96; main enchantée in, 7, 127ex.; mechanistic qualities in, 121–127, 125fig.; Parisian premiere of, 106, 117; structural elements of, 120–128, 126fig.; triadic motive in, 121–124, 122ex., 123ex., 129–130 Cone, Edward, 202, 204 Confidences d’un prestidigitateur (Robert-Houdin), 22–23 conflict in La Valse, 195–196, 220 conjurers, unveiling of methods by, 27 conjuring, language of, 1–3, 106–107, 144 conjuring tricks: alliance with supernatural, 18–19; attentional focus and, 30–32; dramatic illusion and, 4–6; Mallarmé and, 12; memory as, 10; modes of execution, 27–30; musical motion as, 44–48; Poe and, 11–12; scientific explanation for, 19, 30–32 La Conquête du paradis (Gautier), 1 continual ascent. See perpetual ascent convergence points, 78–79, 80ex., 196, 212, 215, 216ex. The Cook (Arcimboldo), 173, 174fig. Le Coq d’or (Rimsky-Korsakov), 56 Cortot, Alfred, 112 Cours de composition musicale (d’Indy), 220 Cousin, Victor, 155 Cox, Arnie, 37 Crary, Jonathan, 34, 195 creatio ex nihilo, 120–121, 200, 220 creation, acts of: emblems of enchantment and, 190 crescendos in Boléro, 146 Crimp, Catherine, 245 critics: on Boléro, 135; on L’Heure espagnole, 55, 55n10, 94n5; language of conjuring by, 1–3,

273

106–107, 144; on Rapsodie espagnole, 81–82; on La Valse, 192–194; on Wittgenstein, 117–118 Crosti, Roger, 117 cyborgs. See mechanomorphs “Le Cygne” (Baudelaire), 208 Czerny, Carl, 115 Dadaists, 99 d’Alcy, Jehanne, 222 Dallapiccola, Luigi, 231 “Le Dandy” (Baudelaire), 23 dandyism, 13, 25–26 “Danse grotesque” (Ravel), 174 “Danse grotesque et compassée” (Ravel), 174–175 Daphnis and Chloe (Longus), 50, 81, 175 Daphnis et Chloé (Ravel), 87–92; character relationships in, 171ex., 173ex.; chromatic ascent in, 90ex.; conjuring language in critiques of, 1–2, 3; disjunction in, 172–173; as full of Ravelian effects, 81; grotesque music in, 174; harp glissandos in, 65, 248; illusionistic depth in, 5, 154, 169–170; patterns of interaction in, 170–172, 171ex., 172fig., 173ex.; representation of Greece in, 50; sur la touche bowing in, 88, 248; transformational ascent in, 7, 234, 248; unstable equilibrium in, 218 darkness-to-light motifs, 220–221 d’Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine, 50 d’Aurevilly, Barbey, 23 Daverio, John, 57 Dayan, Peter, 166 Debussy, Claude: climactic end of De l’aube à midi sur la mer, 72; harp glissando and, 60; influence of Le Gibet on, 162; lack of transformational motifs by, 74; on Ravel as fakir, 1; setting of Mallarmé poems, 182–183; treatment of silence by, 187, 188; use of modal/chordal openings, 158–159; use of sur la touche bowing, 69–70; use of tremolo, 69 Dédale 39 (Ravel), 104 de Kolta, Buatier, 222 Delacroix, Eugène, 24 de Lapommeraye, Pierre, 144 De l’aube à midi sur la mer (Debussy), 72 Delibes, Léo, 56 Delius, Frederick, 77 depth, illusionistic, 151–153, 168–170 “A Descent into the Maelström” (Poe), 11, 220, 221 detective story metaphor, modes of listening and, 202–205

274

Index

de Valmalète, Madeleine, 207 development, stages of, 241, 247. See also childhood, enchantment of Dezarnaux, Robert, 229 d’Humières, Robert, 71 Diaghilev, Sergei, 192, 218 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (8th edition), 208 Dilmen, Nevit, 186fig. d’Indy, Vincent, 220, 221 disability: and Concerto for the Left Hand, 121; erasure of, 117–118. See also prostheses; soldier amputees disfigurement, female, 175 disjunction, 172, 175, 196, 203, 217, 218 Dismorr, Jessica, 98 Disney company, 52, 231, 231n16 dissonance, 221 Dolan, Emily, 5 “The Domain of Arnheim, or The Landscape Garden” (Poe), 20 Donizetti, Gaetano, 57 Downes, Olin, 82 dreams, 89–90, 89n79, 167, 248 duck-rabbit image, 196, 196n18, 197fig. Du côté de chez Swann (Proust), 6, 198–199, 215, 217, 224, 240 Du Dandysme et de George Brummell (d’Aurevilly), 23 Duhamel, Georges, 100 Dukas, Paul, 73–74, 105, 148, 180, 227 Dumesnil, René, 107, 119 Duo Sonata (Ravel), 151–153, 153ex. duration, concept of, 161 Durony, Geneviève, 50 effect and method, 8–11, 138, 143 élan vital, 136 Electro-Lux, 99 electronic music, 38 emotion, 27, 248 enactment, illusion of, 170 enchantment: act of creation and, 190; of childhood, 226–227, 229, 231, 244; in Daphnis et Chloé, 88, 90–92; disappearance of in “Soupir,” 182; of féerique, 181; French orchestrational practices of, 69–75; harp glissandos and, 56, 65, 244; harp glissandos as re-enchantment, 241, 244; in Le Jardin féerique, 81; in Ma mère l’Oye, 75–81; in La Valse, 202, 218 “En Dirigeable” (Meurthe), 104

L’Enfant et les Sortilèges (Ravel), 226–247; animal expression in, 240–241, 242ex.; childhood in, 226–227, 229, 231, 244; grotesque music in, 174–175; harp glissandos in, 235, 236ex., 238, 241, 244; harp illusion in, 34–35, 194, 237ex.; inversion of perspective in, 235, 237; lack of automatons in, 228–229; loss in, 227, 228, 238–240; mechanical sounds in, 94; mise-enscène, 229–231, 230fig., 231n16, 244n29, 245; motion and stasis in, 10; Ravel as composer of, 227; temporality in, 245–247; transformational ascent in, 7, 232–233ex. enlightenment, 219–221 Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête (Ravel), 50–55, 52ex., 53ex., 63, 65, 66–67, 244. See also Ma mère l’Oye (Ravel) equilibrium, 204, 218 L’Escalier du diable (Ligeti), 211–214, 213ex. Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin (1896 film), 221–222 Escher, M. C., 213 Ethereal Suspension illusion, 31–34, 149 Études de mécanisme, Op. 849 (Czerny), 115 evocation of sounds, 3, 4–5 factory sounds, Ravel’s attraction to, 103–104 factory tours, 102 “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (Poe), 86 fairground entertainment, 84, 86 fairy tales, Ravel’s interest in, 49 fashion as misdirection, 26–27 fathers as absent, 228, 239 Fauré, Gabriel, 109, 248 féerique effects, 70, 181 Feria (Ravel), 82, 84, 85ex., 86. See also Rapsodie espagnole (Ravel) fictional novels, 19, 91 flashing dot experiment, 41, 42 Les Fleurs du mal (Baudelaire), 208 Fliegende Blätter, 197fig. Foliage—Oak Tree and Fruit Seller (Vuillard), 167–169, 168fig. force invisible, 239 Forsyth, Cecil, 59, 69 framing devices, 180, 182 Franck, César, 220, 221 Franc-Nohain, 175 Freaks (1932 film), 118–119 freaks, virtuosos as, 120, 128 freak shows, 118–119 Fréjaville, Gustave, 84 Friedrich, Caspar David, 169

Index Fuller, Loïe, 71, 72–73 Futurists, 99 Gade, Niels, 56, 57 gallows gesture, 157–159 Gaspard de la nuit (Ravel), 1, 49. See also Le Gibet (Ravel) Gautier, Judith, 1 Gautier, Théophile, 24, 28, 29 George, André, 144 gesture in instrumental music, 19 Gevaert, François-Auguste, 56, 59, 69 Ghil, René, 178 ghost shows. See phantasmagoria “Le Gibet” (Bertrand), 155–156, 159, 161, 162–163, 189 Le Gibet (Ravel), 154–167; arch-shaped melody in, 159; extra-sensory hearing in, 189; gallows gesture in, 157–159, 158ex., 161; influence on other composers, 162–163; motion and stasis in, 10, 154, 157–162, 163; ostinato in, 162–163; sigh motive in, 159, 160ex.; treatment of sound in, 167 Giselle (Adam), 57, 58 Gjerdingen, Robert, 40–41 Glinka, Mikhail, 56 glissandos, 181. See also harp glissandos; piano glissandos G Major Piano Concerto (Ravel), 95–96, 106–116, 108ex., 110ex. Godebski, Cipa, 49 Godebski, Ida, 49 Godowsky, Leopold, 117 Goehr, Lydia, 36 Gordon, Rae Beth, 184–185, 186 the Great War: effect on children, 227–228; postwar experiences of, 118; Ravel’s tour of duty during, 101–102; transformation effects of, 132–133. See also soldier amputees “Le Grillon” (Ravel), 3. Gronquist, Robert, 181 the grotesque, 173–177, 217–218 Guiraud, Ernest, 70 gusli, 56–57, 66 Gutman, Maria, 226 hallucinations, 33, 89, 89n79, 167 hand castings, 128–129 Handel, George Frideric, 68 Hanslick, Eduard, 35, 113 Haraway, Donna, 133

275

harmonics: in Daphnis et Chloé, 88; and féerique effects, 70–71; in Ma mère l’Oye, 75; as movement, 191; potential of the void and, 235; in “Soupir,” 181–182, 189–190; in “Surgi de la croupe et du bond,” 189, 191; transportive function of, 189 harp glissandos, 55–67; as cliché, 59, 63, 65–67; in Daphnis et Chloé, 248; as emblem of transformation, 131; enchantment and, 65; in L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, 235, 236ex., 238, 241; in Les Entretiens, 51, 65, 244; gesture of transformation, 67; as illusory, 60; as inward metamorphosis, 54–55; in Le Jardin féerique, 76, 244; in Ma mère l’Oye, 75; mimetic function of, 63, 65–66, 74; as misdirection, 62–63; as musical illusion, 34–35; placement of, 61; priming effects of, 244; Ravel’s fascination with, 66–67; in Ravel’s music, 7, 60–65; re-enchantment and, 244; Rimsky-Korsakov and, 59–60; synonymous with enchantment, 56; as transformational effect, 51 harp illusions in L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, 34–35, 194, 235, 237–238, 237ex. harps, 56–59. See also harp glissandos Hasty, Christopher, 36, 41 Hatten, Robert, 19–20 Haydn, Joseph, 68, 108, 136 Hayles, N. Katherine, 133 Haystacks series (Monet), 246 hearing, extra-sensory, 189 Heine, Heinrich, 113 Hellé, André, 74 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 97–98, 104 Hepokoski, James, 158–159 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 35–36 L’Heure espagnole (Ravel): automata in, 4, 97, 175, 228; critique of, 55, 55n10; evocation of clocks in, 4–5; harp glissandos in, 65; human and mechanical qualities of, 95; irony in, 4; mechanical sounds in, 94, 94n5; organicmechanical hybridity of, 116; rumination on death in, 84, 86 Histoire de ma vie (Sand), 166 Histoires naturelles (Ravel), 1, 3. See also “Le Grillon” (Ravel); “Le Paon” (Ravel). Holmes, Sherlock, 29 Honegger, Arthur, 104 Horlacher, Gretchen, 45, 164 Houssaye, Arsène, 156 Howe, Blake, 117, 120, 126–127 Huebner, Steven, 11, 26, 241

276

Index

Les Huguenots (Meyerbeer), 56 Huret, Jules, 179 Icare (Ravel), 104 ideal, striving for, 177–178, 182 “Il est doux” (Ravel), 249. illusionism, 168–169 illusions, 4–6, 27–30, 32, 33–35 “The Imp of the Perverse” (Poe), 207–208 The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde), 115 inattentional blindness, 32. See also attentional focus industrial development, 99 In Search of Lost Time (Proust), 6, 26, 198. See also Swann’s Way (Proust) “instrumental mystification,” 235 intervals as musical motion, 36 interviews on Boléro, 10–11, 136, 137, 138 Introduction et Allegro (Ravel), 60–61, 62ex., 64ex. irony, 3–4 Iverson, Jennifer, 134 Jacquet-Droz, Pierre, 13 Jankélévitch, Vladimir: on instrumental mystification, 7, 235; on “magic spell” in Boléro, 105–106, 148, 149; on music as “walled garden,” 180; on Ravel as charlatan, 48 Le Jardin féerique (Ravel), 2, 76–81, 77ex., 79ex., 80ex., 244. See also Ma mère l’Oye (Ravel) Jeanne d’Arc (Ravel), 103 jeu perlé style, 112 Jeux (Debussy), 69, 161, 162 Johnson, Julian, 187 Jouffroy, Théodore, 155 Jourdan-Morhange, Hélène, 103 Kalkbrenner, Friedrich, 112, 113–114, 113n74, 115 Kaminsky, Peter, 93, 155 Kashchey the Deathless (Rimsky-Korsakov), 66 Kayser, Wolfgang, 217 Keats, John, 183–184, 185 Kieffer, Alexandra, 5, 195 Kilpatrick, Emily, 227, 229 Koerner, Joseph, 169 Korevaar, David, 94–95, 109, 111 Kraft (energy), 98 Kramer, Jonathan, 38, 39–40, 162 Krueger, Cheryl, 156 Kuhn, Gustav, 8 Labarre, Théodore, 61 labor, economy of, 98, 104

Lakmé (Delibes), 56 Lalo, Pierre, 81 Laloy, Louis, 1–2, 218 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 96 Lamont, Peter, 13 Landy, Joshua, 180 Lanford, Michael, 137–138, 147 Lang, Fritz, 103 Lang, Paul Henry, 55n10 Larner, Gerald, 149–150 Larrue, Jean-Marc, 4 Larson, Steve, 36, 37 Le Corbusier, 99–100, 133 Left Hand Concerto (Ravel). See Concerto for the Left Hand (Ravel) Leleu, Jeanne, 50 Leong, Daphne, 94–95, 109, 111 Leppert, Richard, 114, 115, 130 Les Nabis, 167 Levy, Janet, 135 Levy, René, 145–146 Lewin, David, 141–142 Ligeti, György, 42, 163, 211–214, 213ex. lighting cues, 72–73 Lindenlaub, Théodore, 192, 205, 206 listening, modes of, 202–205, 203n31 Liszt, Franz, 59, 113 Little Boy (Risset), 213 livrets: of La Boîte à joujoux, 74; of Daphnis et Chloé, 92, 172, 175; of Les Entretiens, 50–51; of La Valse, 10, 200, 201, 203, 214, 220 Logier, Johann Bernhard, 112–113, 113n74 “lollidogginess,” 33–34 Long, Marguerite, 106, 109, 111–112, 115–116 Longus, 87, 92, 169, 175 loss, 227, 228, 238–240 Louange pour l’immortalité de Jésus (Messiaen), 42–44, 43ex. Loughridge, Deirdre, 5, 205 Lucia di Lammermoor (Donizetti), 57 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 68 luthéal, 10 Lyford, Amy, 118 machines: Boléro and, 135, 144–145, 146; interdependence of human and, 130–131; in postwar years, 98–106; Ravel as, 111; Ravel’s fascination with, 13, 102–103; Ravel’s music as, 93; soldiers as part of, 100–101. See also mechanization Macknik, Stephen, 8, 238

Index Maelzel, Johann, 28 magical machines, 28. See also automatons “Magical Transformation” card trick, 29–30, 31 magic circle, 178, 180, 182, 191 magic lanterns, 6, 197–199, 204–205, 223, 223n77 magic shows. See conjuring tricks “Magie” (Mallarmé), 12, 180 Mahler, Gustav, 70, 222 Maillardet, Henri, 13 main enchantée, 7, 126–128, 127ex., 129, 131 Malagueña (Ravel), 82, 86. See also Rapsodie espagnole (Ravel) Malherbe, Henry, 192 Mallarmé, Stéphane: on art representing virtual world, 20; conjuring tricks and, 12; experience of reading and, 238; “incantatory stroke” of verse, 21; knowledge of Keats’s work, 183; magic circle and, 180; musical language of, 178–179; poetic worlds and, 180, 182; potential of the void in, 135, 189; setting of poems by Debussy, 182–183 Ma mère l’Oye (Ravel), 2, 49–50, 75–81, 235. See also Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête (Ravel); Le Jardin féerique (Ravel) man-machine hybrids. See mechanomorphs Marliave, Joseph de, 116 Marnold, Jean, 81–82, 159 Martinez-Conde, Susana, 8 Massenet, Jules, 56 maternal loss, 227, 239 “Maurice Ravel” (Calvocoressi), 25–26 “Maurice Ravel ou l’esthétique de l’imposture” (Roland-Manuel), 2, 106 Mawer, Deborah: on circus music in Feria, 84; on mechanization in Boléro, 94, 103, 146, 147; on Ravel’s mask, 13; on La Valse, 195, 218–219 McCombie, Elizabeth, 178 mechanical assistants. See automatons mechanical imagery, 99–100 mechanical motion of the body, 150 mechanization: in Boléro, 147; in Concerto for the Left Hand, 121–127, 125fig.; distrust of, 100; and embodiment, 94–98; in G Major Piano Concerto, 116; in Ravel’s music, 93–94. See also machines mechanomorphs: factory workers as, 132; organic-mechanical hybridity of, 116, 131n117; soldier amputees as, 100; Wittgenstein as, 131–133 Méliès, Georges, 221–222 memento mori, 86 memoirs, 27

277

memory: as a conjuring trick, 10; as involuntary, 10, 224–225, 247; link to place, 245–247; of loss, 239–240 Mephisto Waltz No. 1 (Liszt), 59 La Mer (Debussy), 69 Messiaen, Olivier, 42–44, 43ex. Metamorphoses (Ovid), 169 metamorphosis. See transformation meter, changes of, 83, 84, 121, 161, 187, 190 method and effect, 8–11, 138, 143 Méthode (Kalkbrenner), 115 Méthode complète pour la harpe (Labarre), 61 Metropolis (1926 film), 103 Meurthe, Henry Deutsch de la, 104 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 56, 57 military machine, soldiers as part of, 100–101 mimetic function: of ascents, 76–77, 171; of harp glissandos, 7, 65, 74 Miroirs (Ravel), 3, 164. See also Oiseaux tristes (Ravel); La Vallée des cloches (Ravel) misdirection: ascents as, 7; in Boléro interviews, 136; in Les Entretiens, 54; fashion as, 26–27; harp glissandos as, 62–63; modes of listening and, 204; Poe and, 11–12; in Second Sight effect, 31; of time, 9–11, 241, 244, 247; types of, 30–32; in La Valse, 221. See also attentional focus mise-en-scène: of Daphnis et Chloé, 248; of L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, 229–231, 230fig., 240, 241, 244n29, 245, 247, 248; of Ma mère l’Oye, 75–76; of Petrushka, 48; of La Valse, 220 modal/chordal openings, 158–159 mode, changes of, 68 moment bienheureux, 225, 239 moment form, 162–163 moments, plurality of, 167 Monet, Claude, 246 Monteverdi, Claudio, 184 mortality, 84, 85–86, 239 Le Moteur humain et les bases scientifiques du travail professionnel (Amar), 99 motherhood, 227 motion, apparent, 40–42, 41n87, 45, 48 motion, embodied, 37 motion, kinetic, 44 motion, musical, 35–48; in Boléro, 140ex.; as conjuring trick, 44–48; glissandos and, 181; as metaphorical, 35–37; as perceptual, 37, 142–143; perpetuum mobiles and, 38–40; as phenomenon of consciousness, 36; role of human performers in, 37; temporal proximity as, 41–42; tension between stasis and, 10, 45, 139; through circularity, 162. See also stasis

278

Index

motion, paradoxes of, 35 motional stasis, 138, 139, 143, 163 motive x, 199, 200–202, 201ex., 203, 203n31, 205, 218, 221 motivic structure of La Valse, 197, 199–200 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 108 “MS. Found in a Bottle” (Poe), 11 Musée du Val-de-Grâce, 118 music: gesture in, 19–20; as virtual reality, 195 musical aviation, 104–105 musical language of Mallarmé, 178–179 musical repetition, 164. See also circularity musical stasis. See stasis music and poetry, 180 mystery clock, 151, 152fig. mythic time, 58 Nadar, 24 negative space, 177 Nichols, Roger, 25–26, 55, 101, 124, 137–138 Nijinska, Bronislava, 192 Noël des jouets (Ravel), 49 noise, 148–149, 179 nostalgia, 223, 227, 245 nothingness, illusion of, 191, 235. See also void Nouveau Traité d’instrumentation (Gevaert), 56 The Nutcracker (Tchaikovsky), 56, 65 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats), 183–184, 185 Oiseaux tristes (Ravel), 164, 165ex. Ombres chinoises (Théâtre de Séraphin), 21 Ondine (Debussy), 162 Opéra-Comique, 229, 230fig. Op. 33 String Quartets (Haydn), 136 Orenstein, Arbie, 145 Orfeo (Haydn), 68 L’Orfeo (Monteverdi), 184 ornament in French music, 167 ostinato: as altering temporality, 86–87; in Boléro, 94, 139, 145, 146; in Feria, 85ex.; in Le Gibet, 157, 162–163; as kinetic motion, 44–45; musical stasis and, 42–44, 162; in Oiseaux tristes, 164; in Prélude à la nuit, 82, 83ex., 84, 86; in “Raindrop” prelude, 166–167 Ovid, 169 Pacific 231 (Honegger), 104 Paderewski, Ignacy Jan, 122fig. Paganini, Niccolò, 24 Panchasi, Roxane, 100 Pan et Syrinx (Boucher), 175, 176fig.

parody in La Valse, 221 Parsifal (Wagner), 63, 65 Le Pas d’acier (Prokofiev), 145 Pasler, Jann, 161 pastiche, 176–177 Pâtissier (automaton), 14, 27–28, 31 patter, 68–69, 221 Paul, L. A., 41 Pearsall, Edward, 38, 40, 42 Pearson, Roger, 185, 186 Les Pêcheurs de perles (Bizet), 56 Pénélope (Fauré), 66 Penrose stairs illusion, 213 Pepper’s Ghost, 198, 198n21 perception: as activity of exclusion, 195; aesthetic vs sensory, 92; of discrete musical elements, 142; manipulation of, 32 (See also illusions; inattentional blindness; misdirection; priming); nature of, 30–32, 33–35 “perceptual confusion,” 143 perpetual ascent: in L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, 234; in Le Jardin féerique, 76–80, 77ex., 211–215, 217–218; spectrograms of, 213; in La Valse, 196, 208, 209, 218, 221 perpetual reanimation, 73 perpetuum mobiles: Boléro as not, 148–149; Concerto for the Left Hand as, 124–125; in L’Escalier du diable, 212; as inspired by the human body, 96–97; musical motion and, 38–40; as paralyzed, 45, 48; Ravel pieces as, 94; thermodynamics and, 97–98 Perrault, Charles, 50 perspective, inversion of, 235, 237 Petrushka (Stravinsky), 45–48, 46ex., 47ex., 66, 139, 163, 227 phantasmagoria: evolution of, 6, 205; magic lanterns and, 198, 223, 223n77; in Tragédie de Salome, 71; in La Valse, 3, 199, 222 “The Philosophy of Composition” (Poe), 11 Photiadès, Constantin, 119 Phrygian Gates (Adams), 38, 39ex., 40 Phylidor, Paul, 198, 205 pianism, three-handed, 119–120 pianists: hands as emblems of selfhood, 128–129; as machines, 130–131; teaching by, 112–113, 115; as virtuosos, 7, 113–115, 117, 120, 128 piano, treatment of in G Major Piano Concerto, 109–111 Le Piano (Long), 115 Piano Concerto no. 5 in F Major, “L’Egyptien“ (Saint-Saëns), 109–111

Index piano concertos, mechanization and, 98 piano criticism, 115 piano glissandos, 74 Piano Sonata No. 2 (Chopin), 38, 39, 39ex. pitch circularity, 78–79 place, memory linked to, 245–247 “Placet futile” (Debussy), 182 “Placet futile” (Ravel), 177 “plurality of moments,” 161–162 Poe, Edgar Allan: on artifice over nature, 20; the grotesque and, 217–218; on literary novelty, 202; misdirection and, 221; poetic composition by, 180; Ravel’s fascination with, 11–12; Sleeping Beauties and, 86; on structure of The Raven, 137–138; use of misinformation, 219–220; vertige and, 207–208, 218–219 poetic metaphor, 182 poetry and music, 180 popular music, 74 portamentos, 59–60 Poueigh, Jean, 193, 229 Pougin, Arthur, 67 Poulenc, Francis, 38, 39ex., 44–45, 139 Poulet, Georges, 240, 246 Prélude à la nuit (Ravel), 82, 83ex., 84, 86. See also Rapsodie espagnole (Ravel) Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Debussy), 60, 69 Prelude and Fugue in E minor, BWV 548 (Bach), 78–79 Prelude in DH major, op. 28, no. 15 (Chopin), 164–167, 166ex. Prelude in E minor, op. 28, no. 4 (Chopin), 164 priming, 8–9, 32, 238 Princess (L’Enfant et les Sortilèges), 234–236, 236ex., 237, 238, 240 La prisionnière (Proust), 26 Prokofiev, Sergei, 145 Le Prophète (Meyerbeer), 56 prostheses, 14, 100–101, 118, 127, 131, 132. See also main enchantée Proust, Marcel, 10, 245–246. See also Swann’s Way (Proust) Prudhomme, Sully, 193 Prunières, Henry, 107, 111–112, 116 Puri, Michael: on Daphnis et Chloé, 88–89, 172; on human and machine in Ravel’s music, 95; on Introduction et Allegro, 60; on involuntary memory and Ravel, 225; on similarities between Ravel and Proust, 10, 10n16; on La Valse, 196, 220

279

“The Purloined Letter” (Poe), 11–12, 221 Quatour pour la fin du temps (Messiaen), 42 “Raindrop” prelude (Chopin). See Prelude in DH major, op. 28, no. 15 (Chopin) Randal, Marcelle, 84 Rapsodie espagnole (Ravel), 3, 81–87 Ravel, Édouard, 84, 84n69, 102 Ravel, Marie, 227 Ravel, Pierre-Joseph, 84, 84n69, 97, 102, 104 The Raven (Poe), 137–138 Raykoff, Ivan, 120, 129 reading, experience of, 238 recherché, 7, 182 registral convergence, 79–80, 80ex., 212, 216ex. repetition, involuntary, 73 Repp, Bruno, 37 Das Rheingold (Wagner), 58 Richert, Félix, 115 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 56–57, 59–60, 66, 67, 71, 163 rising motion. See ascending scales; perpetual ascent Risset, Jean-Claude, 213 The Rite of Spring (Stravinsky), 163 Rivière, Jacques, 156 Robert, Étienne-Gaspard (aka Robertson), 198, 205 Robert-Houdin, Émile, 28–29 Robert-Houdin, Eugène, 22fig., 27–28, 31–32 Robert-Houdin, Jean-Eugène: on artifice in life and stage magic, 26; automatons and, 13–14; as a dandy, 13, 23–24; impact on conjuring, 2; on people wanting to be deceived, 18; stage identity of, 22fig., 24–25; as theatrical artisan, 21, 28, 149; unveiling of methods by, 22–23, 27; use of patter, 221 Robertson (Étienne-Gaspard Robert), 198, 205 Rochberg, George, 163 Le Roi de Lahore (Massenet), 56 Roland-Manuel, Alexis: on illusory trumpets, 235; on the main enchantée, 7, 119; on Ravel as illusionist, 2, 3, 106, 247; on “Soupir,” 177 Roméo et Juliette (Berlioz), 70 Der Rosenkavalier (R. Strauss), 222 Rosenthal, Manuel, 5 Le Rossignol (Stravinsky), 227 rotational motion: in “Descent into the Maelström,” 219; in La Valse, 194–195, 196, 208, 209, 211ex., 212ex., 214–215, 217, 218, 219. See also vertige (vertigo)

280

Index

Rouché, Jacques, 71, 227 Rózsa, Miklós, 66 Ruben, Peter Paul, 175 Rubinstein, Ida, 144, 192 Rubin’s vase, 15n30, 184, 186fig., 196 “running in place,” 45–47, 164 Russ, Michael, 87, 119 Russian composers, Ravel’s interest in, 7, 67, 163–164 Russolo, Luigi, 103 Rutsky, R. L., 133 Sadko (Rimsky-Korsakov), 66 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 56, 109–111 Salome (R. Strauss), 71 Salzedo, Carlos, 61 Samazeuilh, Gustave, 107, 116 Samson et Dalila (Saint-Saëns), 56 Sand, George, 166 Sardanapale (Berlioz), 59 Scheherazade (Rimsky-Korsakov), 56, 71, 163 Schindler, Anton, 37 Schmitt, Florent, 71–73 Schumann, Robert, 39–40 Schwab, Raymond, 193 scientific explanation for conjuring tricks, 19, 31–32 Scruton, Roger, 36–37 Second Sight effect, 28–29, 31, 221 self-presentation, 26–27 sentimental lyricism, 107 “Se purs ongles” (Mallarmé), 180 Sérénade grotesque (Ravel), 174 sexuality, 26 Shattuck, Roger, 239–240 Shéhérazade (Ravel), 245. See also “Asie” (Ravel) Shepard scales, 6, 213 Shove, Patrick, 37 Sibelius, Jean, 56 sight-reading, 25 silence: substitution of sound for, 181; treatment of, 187, 188 Simons, Daniel, 32 Sinfonia (Berio), 222, 223 Sirènes (Debussy), 69 Sleeping Beauty (fairground entertainment), 86 Sleeping Beauty (Tchaikovsky), 56, 65 sleight of hand, 25, 107, 144 Smart, Mary Ann, 65 Smetana, Bedřich, 56 Smith, A.D., 33

Snegurochka (Rimsky-Korsakov), 67 Soirées fantastiques, 2, 18, 21–22, 23, 32 soldier amputees, 14, 100–101, 118–119, 129, 132 soldiers as part of military machine, 100–101 “somatosensory afterimage,” 238 Sonata for Violin and Cello (Ravel), 151, 153ex. “Sonnet en yx” (Mallarmé), 180 sound: personification of, 206; as substitution for silence, 181; treatment of by Bertrand, 167 “Soupir” (Debussy), 182 “Soupir” (Mallarmé), 177–179 “Soupir” (Ravel), 180, 181–182 spectral impressions in La Valse, 206 spectrograms, 148–149, 149ex., 213 Spellbound (1945 film), 66, 66n33 Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en prose (Baudelaire), 156 stage design. See mise-en-scène stasis: in Boléro, 140ex.; circularity as, 191; in Le Gibet, 157–162; ostinato and, 42–44, 162; perception of, 48, 142–143; in “Soupir,” 178, 181; in “Surgi de la croupe et du bond,” 187; tension between motion and, 10, 45, 139. See also motion stasis, illusion of, 143 static motion, illusion of, 138, 139, 143, 163 Steinhof, Eugen, 231, 234, 245 Steinmeyer, Jim, 13 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 163 Strauss, Johann, 193, 195, 222 Strauss, Richard, 57, 71 Stravinsky, Igor, 45–48, 46ex., 47ex., 139, 162, 163, 223, 227 String Quartet in F Major (Ravel), 8–9, 9ex., 78 Stückchen (Schumann), 39–40 Studies on Chopin’s Études (Godowsky), 117 supernatural: conjuring tricks and, 18–19; magic lanterns as, 199; use of harmonics as, 70. See also phantasmagoria “Surgi de la croupe et du bond” (Mallarmé), 177, 183, 184–191, 235 “Surgi de la croupe et du bond” (Ravel), 154, 186–191, 188ex. sur la touche bowing, 69–70, 75, 82, 88, 248 Swan Lake (Tchaikovsky), 57, 68 Swann’s Way (Proust), 6, 198–199, 215, 217, 224, 240 Symphonie fantastique (Berlioz), 56 Symphonies of Wind Instruments (Stravinsky), 162 Symphony in D minor (Franck), 220, 221

Index Symphony No. 2 (Mahler), 222 Symphony No. 5 (Beethoven), 37 Symphony of Psalms (Stravinsky), 45 Taruskin, Richard, 47–48 Taylor, Benedict, 163 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 65 temporal dimensions of perceptual experience, 34 temporal estrangement, 184 temporality: as altered, 86–87; of dreams, 167; as fourth dimension of space, 245–247; of the grotesque, 173–174; theories of, 161–162 temporal passage: in L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, 247; in “Le Gibet” (Bertrand), 156; meter changes and, 190; in music, 247; sense of motion through, 41–42 temporal proximity, 60, 241, 244 Thalberg, Sigismond, 114–115, 114fig., 119–120, 130 Théâtre de Séraphin (Ombres chinoises), 21 “The Gold Bug” (Poe), 11 Thermodynamics, Laws of, 97–98, 148 Third Barcarolle (Fauré), 109 Thirteenth Artillery Regiment, 101 Thompson, G. R., 218 Timbrell, Charles, 112 time: misdirection of, 9–11, 241, 244, 247; uniform vision of, 161 timelessness, 163 Time Regained (Proust), 246 Toccata (Ravel), 130 Tod und Verklärung (R. Strauss), 57 Le Tombeau de Couperin (Ravel), 105, 116. See also Toccata (Ravel) La Tragédie de Salome (Schmitt), 71–73 Traité du verbe (Ghil), 178 Traité général d’instrumentation (Gevaert), 59 transformation: as affective, 196; art as, 20; ascending passages and, 7, 218; in Les Entretiens, 50–55, 54–55; lack of motifs of, 74; methods of evoking, 68; narratives of, 219; Ravel’s machines and, 105; soldier amputees and, 132; of Wittgenstein, 131–135; World War I and, 133 transformational ascent: in Daphnis et Chloé, 234, 248; in G Major Piano Concerto, 108–109; harp glissandos as, 54–55, 57–58, 67, 244; loss and, 238; as transportive, 239 Treadwell, James, 63, 65 treatises, orchestration, as behind the times, 70 tremolos: in Daphnis et Chloé, 88; evoking

281

enchantment, 71–72, 75; in Le Jardin féerique, 76; as patter, 68–69; in “Surgi de la croupe et du bond,” 187 trick books, 27 Trois mouvements perpétuels (Poulenc), 38, 39ex., 44–45, 139 Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (Ravel), 154, 177, 182, 188ex. See also “Soupir” (Ravel); “Surgi de la croupe et du bond” (Ravel) trompe l’oreilles, 151 trumpet illusion, 2, 235 the Turk (automaton), 13–14, 28 Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (Boccioni), 43 utopian ideals, 129 La Vallée des cloches (Ravel), 3 La Valse (Ravel): ballet production of, 192; chromatic ascents in, 215tab., 216ex.; circularity in, 209, 210ex.; coiling spring motive in, 210–211, 211ex.; conflict in, 195–196, 220; destructive ending of, 221; disjunctive views in, 203, 204ex., 218; enchantment in, 202; equilibrium, 204; as evoking ghosts shows, 6; gestural language of, 209; interviews on, 10; livret for, 10, 200; misdirection in, 221; motive × in, 199, 200–202, 201ex., 203, 203n31, 205, 218, 221; motivic structure of, 197, 199–200; nostalgia and, 223; perpetual ascent in, 196, 218; personification of sound in, 206; phantasmagoria in, 3, 199, 222; registral convergence in, 216ex.; reviews of, 192–194; rotational motion in, 194–195, 196, 208, 209, 211ex., 212ex., 214–215, 217, 218, 219; similarities with “Descent into the Maelström,” 219–220; similarities with “Masque of the Red Death,” 218–219; spectral impression in, 206; vertige in, 205–208, 209, 218 Vanishing Ball illusion, 32 “vanishing lady” stage illusion, 221–222 Varèse, Edgard, 163 Veber, Marie-Rose, 49 verisimilitude, 220 Vers une architecture (Le Corbusier), 99–100 vertige (vertigo): in “Descent into the Maelström,” 219; disjunctive qualities of, 217; and the grotesque, 196–197, 217; in “Imp of the Perverse,” 207–208; nostalgia and, 223; perpetual ascents and, 214; in La Valse, 3, 205–208, 218

282

Index

Vienna, 194 Viñes, Ricardo, 11, 26 virtual reality, 19–20, 179, 195, 202 virtuosity, pianistic, 7, 113–115, 117, 120, 128 Viviane (Chausson), 65–66 voids: creative potential of, 189, 191, 235; as illusory, 10, 154; as inaccessible, 244; somethingness of, 238; in “Surgi de la croupe et du bond,” 189 Voiles (Debussy), 162 von Helmholtz, Hermann, 14 von Kempelen, Wolfgang, 13–14, 28 Vuillard, Édouard, 167–169, 168fig. Vuillermoz, Émile, 106

Walker, Alan, 113–114 A Walk to the Paradise Garden (Delius), 77 Die Walküre (Wagner), 69 Warner, Marina, 53, 54 Watkins, Glenn, 105, 130 Webern, Anton, 163 “Whirlwind of Death” spectacle, 84, 84n69, 86 Wilde, Oscar, 20, 115 Wittgenstein, Paul, 106, 117–118, 121, 129, 129n108, 131–135 workers as automatons, 132 World War I. See the Great War

Wagner, Richard, 63, 65, 69

Zeno, 35 Zuckerkandl, Victor, 35, 36

Yaraman, Sevin, 195

CALIFORNIA STUDIES IN 20TH-CENTURY MUSIC Richard Taruskin, General Editor 1. Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater, by W. Anthony Sheppard 2. Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, by Simon Morrison 3. German Modernism: Music and the Arts, by Walter Frisch 4. New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification, by Amy Beal 5. Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studiesin the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality, by David E. Schneider 6. Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism, by Mary E. Davis 7. Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier 8. Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Art Music, by Klára Móricz 9. Brecht at the Opera, by Joy H. Calico 10. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media, by Michael Long 11. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits, by Benjamin Piekut 12. Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981, by Eric Drott 13. Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War, by Leta E. Miller 14. Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West, by Beth E. Levy 15. In Search of a Concrete Music, by Pierre Schaeffer, translated by Christine North and John Dack 16. The Musical Legacy of Wartime France, by Leslie A. Sprout 17. Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe, by Joy H. Calico 18. Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier 19. Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968, by Lisa Jakelski 20. Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay across Disciplines, by Pierre Schaeffer, translated by Christine North and John Dack 21. Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono’s Selected Writings and Interviews, edited by Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi 22. The Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Their Contemporaries, 1930–1951, edited by E. Randol Schoenberg, with an introduction by Adrian Daub 23. Stravinsky in the Americas: Transatlantic Tours and Domestic Excursions from Wartime Los Angeles (1925–1945), by H. Colin Slim, with a foreword by Richard Taruskin 24. Middlebrow Modernism: Britten’s Operas and the Great Divide, by Christopher Chowrimootoo

25. A Wayfaring Stranger: Ernst von Dohnányi’s American Years, 1949–1960, by Veronika Kusz, translated by Viktória Kusz and Brian McLean 26. In Stravinsky’s Orbit: Responses to Modernism in Russian Paris, by Klára Móricz 27. Zoltan Kodaly’s World of Music, by Anna Dalos 28. Awangarda: Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music, by Lisa Cooper Vest 29. Magician of Sound: Ravel and the Aesthetics of Illusion, by Jessie Fillerup

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