Conference Agenda

A connection between Franz Liszt and Maurice Ravel is assumed in the literature, the latter seemingly succeeding the former in both idiomatic piano writing and virtuosic demand. Liszt’s virtuosity propelled his composer-performer-improviser image, but Ravel composed virtuosic piano works that he himself did not play. When pianist Bryan Gordon told Ravel in 1928 that a London gramophone company wanted the composer himself to record his Jeux d’eau (1901), Ravel exclaimed in dismay: “But I have never played it in my life!” Since Ravel rarely performed his own virtuosic works, he necessarily delegated his composed virtuosity to performers. My paper explores how Ravel’s approach to virtuosity carries on and differs from Liszt’s virtuoso legacy, highlighting how composerly expertise became increasingly divorced from performative skill.

The French Archives nationales reveal that during Ravel’s education at the Paris Conservatory only one Liszt piece, the eleventh Rhapsodie hongroise (1853), was assigned for examinations before Ravel’s expulsion in 1903. Though Lisztian virtuosity was popular in 19C Paris, Liszt’s music was conspicuously excluded from the Conservatory’s curriculum, perhaps conditioning a young Ravel already anxious at being perceived as too Romantic or Lisztian to reassess virtuosity as compositional technique versus performance practice. I suggest that Ravel prioritized the composer role not only because it likely outweighed his investments and abilities in performing himself, but also because of his modernist push for complete creative control— implicated with his technology fetishism—to which the virtuoso performer historically posed a challenge. To be both composer and performer would evidently serve as the ultimate form of creative control with no delegation necessary. But unlike Liszt, Ravel was not both, and was thus instrumental, I argue, in the (dis)continuous translation of 19C virtuosity into a 20C context preoccupied with composer control over performer autonomy. Ravel’s investments in modernist ideals and machinic precision coalesce in his expressed appeals to wholly regulate the virtuoso body in the pursuit of mechanical-technical perfection. I challenge the neat categorizations and assumptions that typically separate or connect Liszt and Ravel by reassessing their virtuosic link as a (dis)continuous translation modified by changing attitudes toward musical performance and/as cultural production.

Toward the end of his life, composer Erik Satie wrote on the cover of one of his notebooks (1917) what is now regarded as a statement important to his musical aesthetics (Shattuck 1968, Orledge 1990): “do not forget, the melody is the Idea.” Elsewhere in his notebooks, that same year Satie wrote this lesser-known aphoristic and enigmatic triptych: “Let us be artists unintentionally. The Idea may happen without Art. We should be wary of Art: it is often mere Virtuosity.” Here, Satie distances himself from technical skill and traditional definitions of art, venerating instead the unintentional. How might the technical, even traditional, procedure of melodic composition, associated with Satie’s novel concept of the Musical Idea, and his commitment to unintentionality be related? In sharp contrast to better known theories of the Musical Idea associated with Wagner and Schoenberg, Satie conceptualized the Musical Idea not as an organic totality nor a lost unity, but instead as a strange form of absence that foregrounds the unintentional, the non-human, and paradox.

To substantiate this linkage between Satie’s music and his philosophy, this paper examines the 18-note melody of Satie’s famously repetitive work, Vexations (1893). Scholars have investigated Vexations’ various cultural, literary, music-theoretical, and historical dimensions, with most concluding, frustrated by its “impenetrability,” that the piece is oriented toward some kind of paradox or absence at its core (Orledge 1990, Whittington 1999, Dayan 2009, Whiting 2010, Potter 2016). Building off these investigations, this paper first discusses Satie’s concern with absence and the unintentional as an abiding philosophical focus in several of his published and unpublished writings. Second, it turns to the form and sound of Vexations, and shows how Satie inserts a radical absence into the construction of the melody itself as an undecidable vacillation between the final 18^th melody note and Satie’s inclusion of a ‘blank space’ for a 19^th note. Thus, Satie’s silent, unsounded, 19^th note acts as a kind of musical aphorism consistent with the composer’s philosophy. A provocative instance of silence and unintentionality, Satie’s suspended note anticipates Cagean silence, experimentalism, and the emergence of conceptual art.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, American conductors introduced Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette and his other compositions into the repertoire of U.S. orchestra concerts. While their programming participated in the broader trend of integrating European compositions into American musical life, Theodore Thomas’s 1878 Cincinnati performance of Roméo et Juliette in English translation demonstrates a deeper process of Americanization.

This paper explores the position of Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette in the tensions of identity in late nineteenth-century U.S. musical culture. As Preston 2017 illustrates, English translations of prominent European operas were more accessible to the middle classes and encouraged the development of American identity. This paper continues Preston’s work in an adjacent genre by examining the English translation of Berlioz’s dramatic symphony. Through a comparison of English and French versions of the composition and an analysis of contemporary periodicals, this paper illuminates the role of Roméo et Juliette in Americanizing and increasing the accessibility of programmatic music in U.S. culture.

Cincinnati’s Third Biennial May Festival of 1878 celebrated the opening of Music Hall and concluded with a performance of Roméo et Juliette. Theodore Thomas used a score translated into English and adapted by J.H. Cornell, published by the John Church Company for the Cincinnati Musical Festival Association. Cornell also produced English translations of works such as Wolzogen’s Thematic Guide through the Music of Parsifal, providing accessible versions of Wagner’s and Berlioz’s ideas and compositions that facilitated the American adoption of European music.

Cincinnati newspapers and Church’s Musical Visitor described the composition and encouraged audiences to (re)read Shakespeare’s tragedy in preparation for the performance. The John Church Company advertised scores to the public, promising that carefully reading the score before the concert would enhance the experience. The vernacular adaptation of Roméo et Juliette made Berlioz’s dramatic symphony an engaging and accessible sample of programmatic music, and the culture-bearers of Cincinnati took the opportunity to educate audiences and promote the genre. Reviews lauded the success of the concert and Festival overall, indicating that the Americanized Roméo et Juliette played a significant role in developing American musical culture in Cincinnati and beyond.

Despite the familiarity of Romanticism as a concept in Western music history, the term has long proved elusive. For instance, Jim Samson finds it “best to avoid definition altogether” (2001), while Walter Frisch declares Romanticism “a slippery concept” (2013). Granted that the object of the Romantic imagination is multifarious and hazy, the nature of the pursuit is clear: as reliable a spokesperson for the movement as E. T. A. Hoffmann defined “the essence of Romanticism” as “infinite longing” (1813)—a yearning for what is far and transcendent—synthetically captured by the painter C. D. Friedrich in his iconic Wanderer above the Mist (1818). If being Romantic means reaching beyond the here and now, there must be thresholds one must cross to transcend.

In this presentation I argue that certain salient moments in 19th-century European music function as such thresholds—prompting a shift of consciousness from ordinary to extraordinary states. Romantic thresholds are characterized by (1) a noticeable and often sudden change in musical configuration (usually harmony and/or texture) and (2) compelling narrative cues, which (3) support an interpretation of said change as a motion from an unmarked domain (society, reality, wakefulness) to a Romantically marked one (solitude, fantasy, dreaming). In the Andante of Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, the sociable “Biedermeier domesticity” (Solie 2004) of the first section shifts to the concentrated lyrical individuality of the second section, in a distant key, via a threshold of modulating arpeggios. In Chopin’s Berceuse, the almost total absence of tonal motion makes the first harmonic event in m. 55 a salient threshold, depicting the child’s transition into the realm of Morpheus. I examine further examples in works by Hensel (Piano Trio) and Mahler (Second Symphony).

This paper draws from scholarship on the “uncanny” (Cohn 2004), work by Kallberg (1996, 2007) and Klein (2009, 2012) on Chopin, and neuro-psychological literature on sleep, dreaming, and hypnosis (e.g. Kostopoulos 2012). Ultimately, I propose that a “Threshold Theory” of Romantic music can identify close musical analogues to the Romantic mindset, providing scholars with a useful hermeneutic tool for the analysis of 19th-century music.