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Jan. 6th, 2012 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI had to hold in all the music I wanted to share with people over the last month and a half, because it would have spoiled my Yuletide story. So here, have a music post.
My single favorite discovery from the past two months was Maurice Ravel's "Kaddish", from "Two Hebraic Songs". Neither of these songs is in Hebrew, mind. "Kaddish" is in Aramaic, the other song is a setting of a Yiddish folksong. But "Kaddish" is an incredible setting of a powerful prayer. It's my second favorite setting of those words now, after Leonard Bernstein's untoppable version. Ravel's is so fluid, so sensual, and grounded in the disappointments of the real world. The shipper in me imagines it as his tribute to the Jewess Emma Bardac, Debussy's second wife. The litgeek in me sets it beside Ravel's "5 Greek Songs" and envisions it as Ravel's struggle with Hegelian dialectic. (The shipper in me sees "5 Greek Songs" as a pretty blatant confession about sexuality) And the practicing Jew in me just sits back in astonishment and listens to passages in the song that just feel so, so right, from a composer who admits in a letter I read that he didn't even know enough of the language to know whether his singer was singing the Aramaic competently.
Other songs, more well known, that I listened to constantly include Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun," whose glissandi drew goosebumps and inspired me to exact the same response from the reader of my fic; Ravel's "Bolero", with Ravel beating time in his famously exacting way (He apparently screamed at Toscanini for adding an accelerando to the conclusion); Both of their string quartets, which each play with the formality and rigidity of the string quartet form with playfulness and bursts of imagination; Debussy's "Petite Suite", especially "En Bateau", whose perfectly formed four handed piano structure enchanted me for about six consecutive repetitions.
Ravel and Debussy are composers I've enjoyed in the past, certainly that I knew enough about that contemplating writing RPF for them for Yuletide wasn't rejected out of hand, but they're not composers I was deeply familiar with. I've always kept French classical music at arms length because my childhood was all about Italian and German classical music and French classical music sounded different enough to sound unfamiliar and a bit intimidating.
But... as music that is unmistakably Modernist without entirely rejecting tonality, there is a major attraction here to this music now. It's a powerful companion to Berg and Schoenberg and Strauss, roughly Ravel's contemporaries: Obviously both sides of the Maginot Line were influencing each other, yet these musical traditions evolved in different directions. I think it's a useful observation to link those evolutions to the differences between French and German visual arts in the same period: Unquestionably one of the links between Schoenberg and Debussy and Ravel is the influence of painting on their music. I think this also links them to their Russian forbears like Mussorgsky, whose "Pictures at an Exhibition" was obviously championed by Ravel. But looking forward instead of backward, this explains the continued French emphasis on harmony as the Germans were lured toward more elusive, more meta-analytic approaches to art.
The other thing that stands out to me in Debussy and Ravel is orchestral color. Ravel was the genius orchestrator, but Debussy was no slouch at it either. It's not easy to do this right, and the story of 19th century classical music is a drift toward bigger and bigger orchestras that drowned out the voices of individual instruments in less expert hands. The 20th century saw, in people from Britten to Bernstein the return of smaller ensembles and focused attention on individuating timbre. I think we need to point to Debussy as one of the most important inspirations for this trend. And I should say that this trend is one of the reasons I don't warm to much of 19th century classical music and greatly prefer the music of the 18th and 20th centuries.
So yeah, Ravel and Debussy are awesome and I was bursting to tell you guys that last month, but I guess now will have to do.
My single favorite discovery from the past two months was Maurice Ravel's "Kaddish", from "Two Hebraic Songs". Neither of these songs is in Hebrew, mind. "Kaddish" is in Aramaic, the other song is a setting of a Yiddish folksong. But "Kaddish" is an incredible setting of a powerful prayer. It's my second favorite setting of those words now, after Leonard Bernstein's untoppable version. Ravel's is so fluid, so sensual, and grounded in the disappointments of the real world. The shipper in me imagines it as his tribute to the Jewess Emma Bardac, Debussy's second wife. The litgeek in me sets it beside Ravel's "5 Greek Songs" and envisions it as Ravel's struggle with Hegelian dialectic. (The shipper in me sees "5 Greek Songs" as a pretty blatant confession about sexuality) And the practicing Jew in me just sits back in astonishment and listens to passages in the song that just feel so, so right, from a composer who admits in a letter I read that he didn't even know enough of the language to know whether his singer was singing the Aramaic competently.
Other songs, more well known, that I listened to constantly include Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun," whose glissandi drew goosebumps and inspired me to exact the same response from the reader of my fic; Ravel's "Bolero", with Ravel beating time in his famously exacting way (He apparently screamed at Toscanini for adding an accelerando to the conclusion); Both of their string quartets, which each play with the formality and rigidity of the string quartet form with playfulness and bursts of imagination; Debussy's "Petite Suite", especially "En Bateau", whose perfectly formed four handed piano structure enchanted me for about six consecutive repetitions.
Ravel and Debussy are composers I've enjoyed in the past, certainly that I knew enough about that contemplating writing RPF for them for Yuletide wasn't rejected out of hand, but they're not composers I was deeply familiar with. I've always kept French classical music at arms length because my childhood was all about Italian and German classical music and French classical music sounded different enough to sound unfamiliar and a bit intimidating.
But... as music that is unmistakably Modernist without entirely rejecting tonality, there is a major attraction here to this music now. It's a powerful companion to Berg and Schoenberg and Strauss, roughly Ravel's contemporaries: Obviously both sides of the Maginot Line were influencing each other, yet these musical traditions evolved in different directions. I think it's a useful observation to link those evolutions to the differences between French and German visual arts in the same period: Unquestionably one of the links between Schoenberg and Debussy and Ravel is the influence of painting on their music. I think this also links them to their Russian forbears like Mussorgsky, whose "Pictures at an Exhibition" was obviously championed by Ravel. But looking forward instead of backward, this explains the continued French emphasis on harmony as the Germans were lured toward more elusive, more meta-analytic approaches to art.
The other thing that stands out to me in Debussy and Ravel is orchestral color. Ravel was the genius orchestrator, but Debussy was no slouch at it either. It's not easy to do this right, and the story of 19th century classical music is a drift toward bigger and bigger orchestras that drowned out the voices of individual instruments in less expert hands. The 20th century saw, in people from Britten to Bernstein the return of smaller ensembles and focused attention on individuating timbre. I think we need to point to Debussy as one of the most important inspirations for this trend. And I should say that this trend is one of the reasons I don't warm to much of 19th century classical music and greatly prefer the music of the 18th and 20th centuries.
So yeah, Ravel and Debussy are awesome and I was bursting to tell you guys that last month, but I guess now will have to do.