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
- 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
Whatever his chosen discourse, Ravel imbued it with extraordinarily new sonorities, his implacably precise taste, sophistication, and transcendental authority triumphing without fail… . For Ravel possessed the weapon of irony—that self-aware intelligence, capable of playing with and within itself, hovering about, always in control. Tempted by so much, it abstains not from the impossible, but from that which would be inhuman. In this, I like to think, may be found the most profound evidence of [our] French genius.
—Jean Zay, French Minister of Education, reading aloud at Ravel's funeral in 1938Music is the art of achieving the sensually perceptible through sound.
—Henriette Faure, student of Ravel, 1920A style … is the duly formulated result of an entire array of scattered tendencies, distant in origin and slow in development: it is the product of time.
—Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, great French and international music critic, 1907Intent
This is not a book solely about irony, nor is it one about musical irony per se. We have, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, few large-scale studies to consult; those addressing irony itself come from relatively recent times, and none pertain significantly (if at all) to music. The present inquiry, therefore, does not attempt to define, sort, or “scale” past and present efforts in using words to write about music, writing about music that incorporates words, trying to write about words as music or—however intriguing—variations thereof. Rather, in view of the phenomenon's slim profile concerning music and its long-acknowledged influence upon literature (or, for that matter, philosophy, art, and life in general), it traces—indeed courts—irony as an attributed, underlying element of one composer's musical style, along with attendant ironies that come to the foreground of stylistic and historical reconsideration. Aspiring to the late Dennis John Enright's model of “practical” rather than theoretical criticism, it is indebted to many others, among them, of course, Harold Bloom, who, in his earlier and more complicated work, also used the phrase “practical criticism,” and to as many previous and original sources as is possible to address and acknowledge within a single, more focused study.
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- Irony and SoundThe Music of Maurice Ravel, pp. 1 - 6Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009