At the time of his death in 1937, Maurice Ravel was the most celebrated contemporary composer in ...

370 Pages·2009·6.49 MB·English

by  Hayden Fallek

PURLOINED POETICS: THE GROTESQUE IN THE MUSIC OF

MAURICE RAVEL

By

JESSIE FILLERUP
Copyright 2009

Submitted to the graduate degree program in Music and the
faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Kansas
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
Doctor of Philosophy.

____________________________
Chairperson

Committee members: ____________________________

____________________________

____________________________

____________________________

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Date defended: 6 April 2009
The Dissertation Committee for Jessie Fillerup certifies
that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

PURLOINED POETICS: THE GROTESQUE IN THE MUSIC OF

MAURICE RAVEL

Committee:

____________________________
Chairperson

____________________________

____________________________

____________________________

____________________________

____________________________

Date approved: 6 April 2009

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To Michael and Rebecca

Mahalo nui loa

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Early on, I wondered if my experience writing a dissertation would resemble the
fictional Jack Burden’s, who entered a period of inert semi-consciousness known as
“the Great Sleep.” Faced with the prospect of completing his dissertation, Jack slept
fourteen or fifteen hours a night; when he finally woke, it was to contemplate this
thought: “If I don’t get up I can’t go back to bed.”1
I was fortunate to have better reasons for getting up in the morning. Those
reasons begin with my dissertation advisor, Roberta Freund Schwartz, a scholar of
Renaissance music and the blues; she shepherded my project with such care and
conviction that anyone not looking closely would think I was writing about Robert
Johnson, not Ravel. Roberta encouraged me to strive for greater clarity by sloughing
off the stylistic and scholarly accretions that cling to graduate students like barnacles.
I am grateful for her patience and conscientious attention to my writing, as well as her
sustained enthusiasm for this project; her dedication is inspiring.
My students at Washburn University kept me occupied with the practical
things of this world, ensuring that I was never to caught up in esotericism to forget
the symbiotic relationship of research and teaching. I taught three courses a semester

1 Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (San Diego: Harcourt, 1982), 189.
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at Washburn from the time I submitted my dissertation prospectus, and I would not
have had it any other way. I treasure the years I spent with these creative and
industrious students, for whom I will always hold a deep affection. My Washburn
colleagues provided encouragement and support throughout the writing process; they
are inspiring performers, teachers, and leaders whose collegiality was the first of
many lessons I learned from them.
Several friends and colleagues contributed to this project’s development in
unexpected ways. Their comments, suggestions, and criticisms were invaluable, but
so too were the shared desserts, encouraging words, and diverting conversations. For
contributing some combination of these things, I thank Gurminder Bhogal, Jim
Briscoe, Tony Bushard, Keith Clifton, Jim Davis, Hugh Macdonald, Scott Messing,
Katrina Mitchell, and Ellie Olin. I am especially grateful to Carlo Caballero, a
generous and sensitive reader of this dissertation who shared with me his judicious
editing, a connoisseur’s love of words, and a lunch at Stroud’s. My first
musicological friend, Kendra Leonard, showed the true measure of her devotion by
reading the entire document before I submitted it to my committee; I thank her as a
confidant, cohort, and scholar without peer.
I enjoyed a summer of generous financial support from the Hall Center at the
University of Kansas, which brought me into contact with three other Fellows in the
humanities, each of whom enriched my final year of writing. I am also grateful to the
library staffs of the University of Indiana-Bloomington, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Yale University Music Library, and
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University of Kansas Libraries—in particular the staff of the music library, Edwards
campus, and Interlibrary loan. Their assistance and resourcefulness eased the
research process and made remote materials accessible to me.
My parents brought their island wild child from the Hawaiian tropics to an
arid Navajo Indian Reservation, where I roamed the hills behind our trailer, searching
for evidence of lost civilizations in the soil. I owe my parents many things, but chief
among them is their willingness to let me wander, unobserved, that I might grow
curious about the world around me. I grew up in a home that valued learning and the
power of words, both spoken and written, but these would have mattered little
without the gifts of love, faith, and confidence that they imparted to me. It is
humbling to think of the sacrifices they made on my behalf, and to imagine how I
might repay my debt of gratitude. My childhood was brightened and my professional
burdens eased by the support of my siblings, Carrie, Samantha, and Benjamin.
To my husband, Hayden, I write what may seem inscrutable to some readers.
You have not yet read this dissertation; I doubt that you ever will. But this is the
tender mystery between us: you never need to read my words to understand my
thoughts. Your love and support are offered not for an achievement, a performance,
an impressive feather in my cap. They are just for me.
Another leg complete in our great adventure, with open skies ahead.

Leawood, Kansas
14 February 2009

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ABSTRACT

For scholars, the significance of Ravel’s music and the nature of his artistic legacy
remain elusive. Many question why a composer with Ravel’s gifts would cling to
convention—conservative forms, tertian harmonies—in an era of musical revolution.
Ravel’s music is often characterized with incongruous terms: ironic, artificial,
sensual, objective, calculated, novel, precious, decadent, cold, and impressionistic.
Scholars have worked around the problem of Ravel’s style by examining the
transitory masks donned throughout his career: the fakir, the neo-classicist, the
ironist. I submit, however, that the grotesque functions as a recurrent aesthetic theme,
permeating Ravel’s layers of illusion and revealing disruptive forces at play that unify
apparently different musical styles and subvert the apparent conservatism in his
music.
Though scholars have disagreed about the precise nature of the grotesque,
most acknowledge that its fundamental characteristic is a unity among disjunction
achieved by transgressing boundaries and fusing opposites. At the same time,
scholars acknowledge that the grotesque is not a transhistorical phenomenon, since it
assumes various meanings in different eras and cultures. The grotesque’s
transgressive character prevents its identification through taxonomies, which is why I
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attempt no definition of the phenomenon. Instead, I note instances when a viewer or
listener interacts emotionally, psychologically, or physiologically with a work in a
manner that evokes disorientation, confusion, or conflict.
Because the grotesque tolerates and even promotes contradiction while
maintaining formal cohesion, its utility for interpreting Ravel’s music is immediately
apparent. Beyond its efficacy as a modern analytical tool, the grotesque is a
phenomenon with which Ravel was acquainted. The composer applied the term to
the titles of two works—Sérénade grotesque and the “Danse grotesque” from
Daphnis et Chloé—and to the description of automata in L’Heure espagnole.
I characterize the French grotesque by examining Hugo’s 1827 preface to
Cromwell, Théophile Gautier’s Les Grotesques, Baudelaire’s essay, “De l’essence du
rire,” and Berlioz’s Les Grotesques de la musique before turning to the tales and
criticism of Poe—a juncture where Ravel and the French grotesque meet. The four
Ravel works that I examine represent a chronological span of twenty-seven years,
from the composer’s student days to the era following the first World War. Each
work—Sérénade grotesque, L’Heure espagnole, Daphnis et Chloé, and La Valse—
exhibits disjunctive relationships between music, text, rhythm and meter, and gesture;
these, combined with the works’ reception histories, evoke the grotesque’s
characteristic unity among disjunction.
I propose that the grotesque serves three functions in Ravel’s music: 1) it
provides an aesthetic framework for interpreting (not reconciling) Ravel’s diverse
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musical styles; 2) it offers a new context for his long-standing appreciation of Poe;
and 3) it unveils transgressive elements within conventional musical structures.

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................................................................... iv
ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................ vii
LIST OF EXAMPLES ............................................................................................... xiii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ..................................................................................... xvi

PART ONE

CHAPTER

1. INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................1
The Grotesque ..........................................................................................3
Unity and Disjunction ...............................................................................5

2. ENVISIONING THE GROTESQUE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY
FRANCE ..........................................................................................................9
Polemics in Hugo’s Preface to Cromwell ...............................................10
The Grotesque as Literary Criticism: Théophile Gautier .......................16
Baudelaire’s Dualism: “De l’essence du rire” ........................................20
Quintessential Grotesques: The Art of Callot .........................................29
Actors and Acrobats, Dancers and Dwarves ...................................35
The Grotesque as Music Criticism: Hector Berlioz ................................43
French Vernacular Uses of “Grotesque” .................................................46
The Fin-de-siècle Grotesque: A Composite Picture ...............................48

3. POE AND THE FRENCH GROTESQUE ....................................................50
Theories of Poe’s Grotesque ...................................................................51
Arabesque and Grotesque ................................................................55
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