This is not a book solely about irony, nor is it one about musical ironyper se.We have, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, few large-scale studies to consult; those addressing irony itself come from relatively recent times, and none pertain significantly (if at all) to music. The present inquiry, therefore, does not attempt to define, sort, or “scale” past and present efforts in using words to write about music, writing about music that incorporates words, trying to write about words as music¹ or—however intriguing—variations thereof.² Rather, in view of the phenomenon’s slim profile concerning music...

Among acclaimed critics and historians of theBelle époque,Louis Laloy used the above phrase to describe Ravel’s maturing musical thought in 1907,¹ as did René Chalupt, the first compiler of the composer’s correspondence, in describing his epistolary style long thereafter.² Though “gentle irony” and cognates surface repeatedly throughout and beyond Ravel’s lifetime, Norbert Albrecht’s judgment of some thirty years ago in the distinguished German literature still obtains: long after the composer’s death, irony remainsterra incognitain terms of Ravel criticism.³ To retrace responsibly within limited space we may begin with Henry Bidou’s thoughts at Ravel’s death: early biographer...

In 1911, Victor Debay wrote an essay in the widely readCourrier musicalentitled “L’Anémie,” in which he lamented the current state of musical affairs: too much “weakness” (even decadence) manifested itself among the most promising composers of the day—Maurice Ravel, for instance, from whom one had expected so much, was entirely too preoccupied with matters of technique and most especially of “sound,” the novel explorations of which had become for him an end in itself.¹ Ravel’s career was securely established by 1911. Through considerable patience, he had managed to construct a remarkably promising career almost entirely outside the...

The history of counterpoint in French music is rich indeed, intertwined with the teaching of harmony and the larger composition curriculum at the Paris Conservatoire.¹ Ravel’s training in the late 1890s under André Gédalge provided the foundation for an elegant and imaginative contrapuntal virtuosity, the subtleties and consequences of which merit further attention. As Roland-Manuel and Alfred Cortot (among others) recognized, the art of opposed musical sounds comprised one of the most tensile stylistic threads running through all of Ravel’s music.² As a young student, Nadia Boulanger recalled discovering the composer ofJeux d’eaudoing his exercises cheerfully, along with...

The question of register—a specific range of the total pitches available to an instrument—was an important aspect of orchestration taught at the Paris Conservatoire during Ravel’s youth, the more specific relevance of which, of course, is attested to in the treatises of Berlioz (1844, 1855), Gevaert (1885), and Widor (1904; modeled after Berlioz), which we know Ravel consulted frequently.¹ We know, too, that Ravel was interested in writing a treatise on orchestration,² though it was his good friend and colleague Charles Koechlin who eventually succeeded in doing so, and on a comprehensive scale.³ Ravel’s interest in the extreme...

“Plunder” may unduly unnerve, previous aspects of Ravel’s style having been more gently intertwined. Ravel’s Exotic was characterized by a wide range of unusually successful appropriations of musical “others”:¹ sensual, on occasion breathtaking, tinged with irony, parody, comedy, even tragedy, they have transcended their times and stand as puzzling musical mirrors to the great colonial conquests of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The panorama of the musically Exotic in European culture is, of course, vast. Félicien David’s “Ode-symphonie”Le désert,of 1844, was cited as a turning point in 1889 by a critic of central importance to this (and...

Among many influences of Ravel’s youth were clearly those springing from Baudelaire’s “doctrine of correspondences,” or (as the phenomenon became known later) synaesthesia, the simultaneous stimulation and/or perception of different senses.¹ With deep roots in German Romanticism, synaesthesia found a culmination of consequence in the French Symbolist aesthetics of thefin de siècle.While Martin Cooper may have been correct in dubbing Debussy “supreme transliterator from one sense to another, . . . the musician who more than any other artist fulfilled Baudelaire’s theory of correspondence between the arts.”² Cooper’s certainty resembles that of Edward Lockspeiser questioned in the preceding...

Some final associations remain between the touchstones of deception, wager, and style, and our one proposed intermediary and theoretical exemplar, inspired by Jankélévitch’s text on irony alone: that of “juggling”—of what a composer might (or might not) have been negotiating, before putting into place negations that excite to this day irony’s classic effect: “What? But how can this be so?!” To play the tables at Monte Carlo would be one thing, wagering notes in the concert hall quite another, as Roland-Manuel realized at the premiere ofL’enfant et les sortilègesin 1926. Presaging Jankélévitch’s aesthetic, he declared that of...