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Leading authorities explore, in direct and accessible language, chamber-music masterpieces by twenty-one prominent composers since 1900.
Spotlighting the four women of the Lafayette Quartet, a leading Canadian ensemble, Rounds offers both a comprehensive history of the beloved instrumental form and an inside view of the complex world of professional quartet players, revealing the exultation and heatache that are the performing artists' daily fare. A treat for every music lover, whether player, listener or composer.
Maurice Ravel: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him, his compositions, and his influence as a composer and theorist.
The music of Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), beloved by musicians and audiences since its debut, has been a difficult topic for scholars. The traditional stylistic categories of impressionism, symbolism, and neoclassicism, while relevant, have offered too little purchase on this fascinating but enigmatic work. In Ravel the Decadent, author Michael Puri provides an innovative and productive solution by locating the aesthetic origins of this music in the French Decadence and demonstrating the extension of this influence across the length of his oeuvre. From an array of Decadent topics Puri selects three--memory, sublimation, and desire--and uses them to delineate the content of this music, pinpoint its overlap with contemporary cultural discourse, and link it to its biographical context, as well as to create new methods altogether for the analysis and interpretation of music. Ravel the Decadent opens by defining the main concepts, giving particular attention to memory and decadence. It then stakes out contrasting modes of memory in this music: a nostalgic mode that views the past as forever lost, and a more optimistic one that imagines its resurrection and reanimation. Acknowledging Ravel's lifelong identity as a dandy--a figure that embodies the Decadence and its aspiration toward the sublime--Puri identifies possible moments of musical self-portraiture before stepping back to theorize dandyism in European musical modernism at large. He then addresses the dialectic between desire and its sublimation in the pairing of two genres--the bacchanal and the idyl--and leverages the central trio of concepts to offer provocative readings of Ravel's two waltz sets, the Valses nobles et sentimentales and La valse. Puri concludes by invoking the same terms to identify a topic of "faun music" that promises to create new common ground between Ravel and Debussy. Rife with close readings that will satisfy the musicologist, Ravel the Decadent also suits a more general reader through its broadly humanistic key concepts, immersion in contemporary art and literature, and clarity of language.
Stravinsky's influence on Debussy in 1910-13, rarely discussed, is demonstrated here in the many modernistic features of such works as the Preludes Book II, Khamma, and Jeux. This book reassesses the relationship between Debussy and Stravinsky, two of the most important composers of the early twentieth century. When the Russian composer traveled to France in 1910 to attend the premiere of his first ballet, The Firebird, he was invited to dine at the French composer's house, and a photo of the two commemorates the beginning of their friendship. Stravinsky was already acquainted with many of Debussy's earlier works, and Debussy was introduced to the Russian composer's first three ballets between 1910 and 1913. Stravinsky's early works contain Debussy-like passages, as in the opening measures of his opera The Nightingale, which echoes the opening measures of Debussy's "Nuages." As author Mark McFarland here shows, however, the adoption on Debussy's part of characteristics from Stravinsky's style is, perhaps surprisingly, no less substantial. Debussy borrowed motifs from both The Firebird and Petrushka as well as the Russian tradition of Leitharmony in his little-known ballet Khamma, and Stravinsky's ballets, including The Rite of Spring, seems to have sparked an exploration into octatonic harmony in Debussy's second book of piano preludes. McFarland's close analysis of parallel passages and usages in works of the two composers also reveals that Debussy eventually distanced himself from Stravinsky, perhaps fearing to seem like an acolyte rather than an innovator. His borrowings from Stravinsky (and Russian style) gradually disappear, as McFarland demonstrates by close attention to passages in some of the late works, which move in the direction of a neoclassicism that Stravinsky himself would soon adopt and expand further.
This Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to the life, music and compositional aesthetic of French composer Maurice Ravel (1875–1937). Leading international scholars offer a powerful reassessment of this most private and elusive musician, examining his work in detail within its cultural context. Supported by many music examples, the volume explores the full range of Ravel's work - piano repertory, chamber works, orchestral music, ballets, songs and operas - and makes illuminating comparisons with the music of Couperin, Gounod, Chabrier and Debussy. The essays present the latest research focusing on topics such as Ravel's exoticism and Spanishness and conclude by analysing the performance and reception of his music, including previously untranslated reviews. Marking the 125th anniversary of Ravel's birth, the Companion as a whole aims to secure a solid foundation for Ravel studies in the twenty-first century and will appeal to all enthusiasts and students of his music.
Exploring the many dimensions of Debussy's historical significance, this volume provides new perspectives on the life and work of a much-loved composer and considers how social and political contexts shape the way we approach and perform his works today. In short, focused chapters building on recent research, contributors chart the influences, relationships and performances that shaped Debussy's creativity, and the ways he negotiated the complex social and professional networks of music, literature, art, and performance (on and off the stage) in Belle Époque Paris. It probes Debussy's relationship with some of the most influential '-isms' of his time, including his fascination with early music and with the 'exotic', and assesses his status as a pioneer of musical modernism and his continuing popularity with performers and listeners alike.