Conference Agenda

For a century, scholarship on Maurice Ravel has drawn on the language of irony, imposture, disguise, and illusion in order to describe the strange effects his music produces and to locate the notoriously aloof composer as a historical subject. Accordingly, Ravel and his works have tempted scholars with the possibility of their “unmasking,” with the recovery of some truth or identity concealed beneath an artificial façade. This temptation has sustained Ravel Studies for so long despite—or because of—its ultimate impossibility: The rhetoric of disguise and disillusionment primes us to think of any “true” face that emerges from behind one of Ravel’s masks as itself another mask. Recognizing this, the three papers that make up this panel do not aim simply to unmask the composer or his works. Instead, they explore the strange and contradictory implications of Ravel’s aesthetic of imposture, and they examine how a discourse centered on artifice has determined the course of Ravel Studies. Finally, using methods that blend historical inquiry with theory and analysis, they introduce new terms and frameworks by which to conceive of the composer and his works. Rather than disappearance and rediscovery, these scholars together might be said to reimagine Ravel Studies according to the logic of the “lost-and-found,” a repository of radical potential whose collection of musical odds and ends confuses the notions of generic and unique, old and new, disappeared and recovered.

Ravel’s compositions feature spectacularly orchestrated passages that at once demonstrate his practice and dedication to existing models, and, particularly after the war, challenge and develop conventional wisdom from the orchestration treatises and compositions he so ardently studied. An intriguing thread within Ravel scholarship highlights the way his compositions evoke certain sounds and effects; however, the objective often aims to unmask some inherent quality in his music in relation to irony or artifice. Timbral observations like Orenstein’s surprise that “the flute will evoke a trumpet, and the piano a gong” or Russ’s claim that “when a harp seems the obvious choice, Ravel substitutes the celesta,” seem to walk right up to one of the most compelling aspects of Ravel’s sound, only to abandon further questioning of it. Musically, Ravel does something similar. Through his orchestrations, he conjures a certain sound or instrumental combination, only to abandon that sound, leaving one wondering if what they heard was real or not.

Ravel’s interest in sound becomes most pronounced in his works and communication after the war. In correspondence, he spoke more and more about jazz, cinema, factories, futurists, as well as the loud speaker, microphone, and radio. His participation in sound recordings as a member of the Thomson Music Committee was charged to “follow the work of engineers closely” and gave him a front seat to technological sound advances. And while he never fully embraced avant-garde techniques, evidence in his music indicates a much more progressive approach to sound than has previously been granted. In many ways, the record age apothegm of “any sound imaginable” can be detected in his late compositions through the ways he orchestrated acoustic instruments to sound like electric and modern sound objects. By looking closely at interwar compositions, my analysis blends orchestration and timbre studies to illustrate new approaches to Ravel’s sound.

Music historians and theorists have long recognized the “unresolved appoggiatura” as a significant feature of Ravel’s works. Still, even as scholars describe the strange sonic effects these ornaments can have, Ravel studies has not yet grappled with the fundamental paradox of their dissonance—and with what this paradox can teach us about this music and its analysis.

The Forlane from Le Tombeau de Couperin exemplifies the contradictory implications of the unresolved appoggiatura. Here, pitches project a melodic resolution because of their dissonance with another sounding note, even as their ultimate irresolution implies that they are harmonic and consonant (and that the other apparently consonant note is in fact the “source” of the dissonance). The density of these ornaments in Ravel’s movement renders its pitch-structure indeterminate, as their ambivalence reveals any claims to certain notes’ structural priority (consonance) as arbitrary. Indeed, the Forlane’s refrain challenges the listener to follow multiple competing interpretations of its harmonic structure simultaneously.

The Forlane’s unresolved appoggiaturas also have implications beyond pitch-structure. Because these ornamental notes encode a Forlane by Couperin (the model for Ravel’s composition) through their modernist artifice, the indeterminacy of the unresolved appoggiaturas shows their representation of this original music to be similarly paradoxical: The more prior music can only be understood on the basis of its artificial representation, and yet this artifice is meaningful only as it refers us to where that original music is supposed to have been. In demonstrating this, Ravel’s movement anticipates and deconstructs later accounts of the work’s neoclassicism in terms of reverent reproduction or uncanny possession.

Lastly, in revealing a slippage between the harmonic and melodic and between the referential and objective, the Forlane’s unresolved appoggiaturas outline an ambivalent position vis-à-vis contemporary néoclassicisme, a movement that decried the evocative harmonies of prewar composers and instead prioritized melody in pursuit of objectivity. Recognizing this, we might revisit the fraught question of Ravel’s relevance to the neoclassicist avant-garde—not to settle the composer’s aesthetic allegiances, but to better appreciate the forces that produce critics’ seemingly contradictory descriptions of the composer as at once a relic of prewar Romanticism and a high modernist.

A valuable find in Ravel schoIarship is an anecdote shared by his student and biographer Roland-Manuel shortly after the composer’s death in 1937. According to Roland-Manuel, Ravel liked to recite the Baudelairean aphorism, “To create a poncif is genius.” Ravel would presumably also have known that this aphorism was a note-to-self, since the next sentence in Baudelaire’s jotting was “I should create a poncif.” What is a poncif? And did Ravel ever take Baudelaire’s directive to heart and try to create one in music?

The most common meaning for poncif is and was “cliché,” but the term also historically refers to a perforated sheet used as a template for creating multiple copies—just as “cliché” and “stereotype” originally referred to devices for mechanical reproduction in both printing and photography. Captivated by such technologies and the role they played in the emergence of mass culture, Walter Benjamin took special note of Baudelaire’s passage in The Arcades Project and interpreted it as the poet’s desire to develop a “market-oriented originality.” Nonetheless, this enthusiasm for the poncif on the part of Baudelaire, Benjamin, and Ravel remained abstract. They neither explained how this concept might apply to (their) art nor provided a concrete example.

My presentation seeks to fill in this gap. I begin by defining the Baudelairean poncif as it applies to art—a creation that forfeits strong claims to originality, good taste, sophistication, and prestige for the sake of augmenting its cultural influence and circulation. I then identify Ravel’s Bolero as a possible example of the artistic poncif and use the latter as a lens through which to view its genesis, musical structure, and performance history.