The Operas of Maurice Ravel


Book Description

Maurice Ravel's operas L'Heure espagnole (1907/1911) and L'Enfant et les sortilèges (1919–25) are pivotal works in the composer's relatively small œuvre. Emerging from periods shaped by very distinct musical concerns and historical circumstances, these two vastly different works nevertheless share qualities that reveal the heart of Ravel's compositional aesthetic. In this comprehensive study, Emily Kilpatrick unites musical, literary, biographical and cultural perspectives to shed new light on Ravel's operas. In documenting the operas' history, setting them within the cultural canvas of their creation and pursuing diverse strands of analytical and thematic exploration, Kilpatrick reveals crucial aspects of the composer's working life: his approach to creative collaboration, his responsiveness to cultural, aesthetic and musical debate, and the centrality of language and literature in his compositional practice. The first study of its kind, this book is an invaluable resource for students, specialists, opera-goers and devotees of French music.




Resonant Recoveries


Book Description

"French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars illustrates that coping with trauma was a central concern for French musicians active after World War I. The losses and violent warfare of World War I shaped how interwar French musicians-from those fighting in the trenches and working in military hospitals to more well-known musicians-engaged with music. Situated at the intersections of musicology, history, sound and performance studies, and psychology and trauma studies, Resonant Recoveries argues that modernists' compositions and musical activities were sonorous locations for managing and performing trauma. Through analysis of archival materials, French medical, philosophical, and literary texts, and the music produced between the wars, this book illuminates how music emerged during World War I as an embodied technology of consolation. Resonant Recoveries demonstrates that music making came to be understood by French interwar musicians as a consolatory practice that enhanced their abilities to remember lost loved ones, gave them opportunities to perform their grief publicly and privately, allowed them to create healing bonds of friendship, and soothed them with sonic vibrations and the rhythmically regular bodily movements required in order to perform many French neoclassical compositions. In revealing the importance music making held for interwar French musicians, this book refigures French modernist music as a therapeutic medium for creators, performers, and audiences, while also underlining the importance of addressing trauma, mourning, and people's emotional lives in music scholarship"--




The Cambridge Companion to Ravel


Book Description

A comprehensive introduction to the life, music and compositional aesthetic of Maurice Ravel.







Ravel


Book Description

The standard Ravel biography by the world's foremost authority — brilliantly detailed and documented, filled with quotations from letters, interviews with the composer's friends, an illuminating analysis of each of his works, a study of his musical esthetics and language, a complete catalog of his works, and a discography. "Highly recommended" — Choice. Includes 48 illustrations.




Composing the Citizen


Book Description

"Jann Pasler's remarkable Composing the Citizen reaches well beyond what any book concerned with music in society has ever attempted. Concentrating on France of the Third Republic, from the 1870s through the early 1900s, she demonstrates convincingly how music--whether new, old, popular, or élite, whether performed at institutions of state (such as the Opéra), the Folies Bergère, concert halls, or the zoo--helped to redefine what it meant to be French under evolving political circumstances. Equally adept in the languages of history, sociology, political science, reception history, and music analysis, Pasler establishes music's cultural significance and implicitly illuminates the role it can still play in countries like the United States."--Philip Gossett, The University of Chicago and University of Rome, La Sapienza "Composing the Citizen offers nothing less than a new paradigm for the study of musical cultures. Rather than forcing French music into the moulds developed for the Austro-German canon, Pasler simply studies the social uses of music in fin-de-siècle France. Her painstaking archival research allows her to present an astonishingly detailed account of musical practices, tastes, and activities; new names and genres come to the fore to engage in a variety of dynamic artistic scenes most of us never knew--or only thought we did by virtue of having read Proust. A masterwork of a scholar at the very peak of her career."--Susan McClary, MacArthur Fellow 1995 and author of Georges Bizet: Carmen and Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madgrigal "Utilité publique: a common-sense republican notion of sweeping consequence. In this greatly anticipated volume Jann Pasler uses it as touchstone, showing how and why musical life so mattered in Third-Republic France: layer after layer of it, in a journey that takes us past the Opéra and Conservatoire to the pops concerts, department stores, the zoo, the world's fairs, the overseas colonies. Companionable as a well-worn Baedeker, seductive as Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years, this exquisitely styled and paced achievement is also a compelling read."--D. Kern Holoman, author of Berlioz and The Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 1828-1967




Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bartok


Book Description

The authors explore the means by which two early 20th-century operas - Debussy's 'Pelléas et Mélisande' (1902) and Bartók's 'Duke Bluebeard's Castle' (1911) - transformed the harmonic structures of the traditional major/minor scale system into a new musical language.




The Indian Cottage


Book Description




Musical Biography


Book Description

The contributors to this volume challenge the view that biography has little importance for music history, analysis, and criticism. Collectively, they reassert biography's centrality and relevance, and demonstrate biography's potential to speak not only to the crucial questions that music analysis and criticism raise, but also to more general epistemological questions about the nature of music history itself.




The Art of French Piano Music


Book Description

An essential resource for scholars and performers, this study by a world-renowned specialist illuminates the piano music of four major French composers, in comparative and reciprocal context. Howat explores the musical language and artistic ethos of this repertoire, juxtaposing structural analysis with editorial and performing issues. He also relates his four composers historically and stylistically to such predecessors as Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, the French harpsichord school, and Russian and Spanish music. Challenging long-held assumptions about performance practice, Howat elucidates the rhythmic vitality and invention inherent in French music. In granting Fauré and Chabrier equal consideration with Debussy and Ravel, he redresses a historic imbalance and reshapes our perceptions of this entire musical tradition. Outstanding historical documentation and analysis are supported by Howat’s direct references to performing traditions shaped by the composers themselves. The book balances accessibility with scholarly and analytic rigor, combining a lifetime’s scholarship with practical experience of teaching and the concert platform