Inhalt: 1 Introduction. - 2 "Gentle Irony". - 3 Simple Sound: Ravel and "Crescendo". - 4 Opposed Sound: Ravel and Counterpoint. - 5 Displaced Sound: Ravel and Registration. - 6 Plundered Sound: Ravel and the Exotic. - 7 Sound and Sense: Ravel and Synaesthesia. - 8 "Secrets of Modernity": Irony and Style. - 9 Appendix: Ravel's 1902 Prix de Rome Fugue. - 10 Notes. - 11 Bibliography. - 12 Index.
Beschreibung:
What is it about Boléro, Gaspard de la nuit, and Daphnis et Chloé that makes musicians and listeners alike love them so? Stephen Zank here illuminates these and other works of Maurice Ravel through several of the composer's fascinations: dynamic intensification, counterpoint, orchestration, exotic influences on Western music, and an interest in multisensorial perception. Connecting all these fascinations, Zank argues, is irony. His book offers an appreciation of Ravel's musical irony that is grounded in the vocabularies and criticism of the time and in two early attempts at writing up a "Ravel Aesthetic" by intimates of Ravel. Thomas Mann called irony the phenomenon that is, "beyond compare, the most profound and most alluring in the world." Irony and Sound, written with insight and flair, provides a long-needed reconsideration of Ravel's modernity, his teaching, and his place in twentieth-century music and culture. [Verlagsangabe]
co-funded by the European Commission