Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- A Note to Readers
- Introduction
- Chapter One “Gentle Irony”
- Chapter Two Simple Sound: Ravel and “Crescendo”
- Chapter Three Opposed Sound: Ravel and Counterpoint
- Chapter Four Displaced Sound: Ravel and Registration
- Chapter Five Plundered Sound: Ravel and the Exotic
- Chapter Six Sound and Sense: Ravel and Synaesthesia
- Chapter Seven “Secrets of Modernity”: Irony and Style
- Appendix Ravel’s 1902 Prix de Rome Fugue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
Chapter Five - Plundered Sound: Ravel and the Exotic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- A Note to Readers
- Introduction
- Chapter One “Gentle Irony”
- Chapter Two Simple Sound: Ravel and “Crescendo”
- Chapter Three Opposed Sound: Ravel and Counterpoint
- Chapter Four Displaced Sound: Ravel and Registration
- Chapter Five Plundered Sound: Ravel and the Exotic
- Chapter Six Sound and Sense: Ravel and Synaesthesia
- Chapter Seven “Secrets of Modernity”: Irony and Style
- Appendix Ravel’s 1902 Prix de Rome Fugue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
Summary
[Ravel] had no interests in the metaphysical. His music is not about some better, or other world. It is concerned, rather, with its own world, of sound.
—Jules van Ackere, 1957“Plunder” may unduly unnerve, previous aspects of Ravel's style having been more gently intertwined. Ravel's Exotic was characterized by a wide range of unusually successful appropriations of musical “others”: sensual, on occasion breathtaking, tinged with irony, parody, comedy, even tragedy, they have transcended their times and stand as puzzling musical mirrors to the great colonial conquests of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The panorama of the musically Exotic in European culture is, of course, vast. Félicien David's “Ode-symphonie” Le désert, of 1844, was cited as a turning point in 1889 by a critic of central importance to this (and other) chapters, Julien Tiersot:
With Félicien David the use of folk melody [mélodie populaire] became systematic. We remember the impression of surprise, then enchantment from the first hearing of Le désert: it seemed as if this music, so novel in character for its time, transported its French audience into an unknown world, not only full of seductions and charms, but above all a vibrant, living world. How was this achieved? By the direct use of Oriental folk melodies, by the imitation of their rhythms, their shapes, the sonorities of their instruments; everything having been so thoroughly assimilated by the musician (without betraying original qualities) he created a completely personal art. From the point of view of musical color obtained with the help of mélodies populaires, Le désert marks a date.
First assimilations of “foreign” elements in Western music being impossible to trace, Richard Beyer chose three representative examples in France from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Lully's “Ballet des nations” from Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), Rameau's opera Les Indes galantes (1735) and Grétry's instrumental work La cérémonie du Turque (ca. 1770–90) in his analysis of the Exotic as a principal motivating force behind the use of organum-like musical textures by both Debussy and Ravel. The two composers’ early encounters appear at first blush to have been benign and captivating, Debussy's reaction to the novel sounds of Oriental music at the World Exhibition in 1889 yielding, as Lockspeiser put it, “an inexhaustible gallery of exotic mirages.”
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- Irony and SoundThe Music of Maurice Ravel, pp. 183 - 222Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009
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