Americanism as Exoticism in the Works of Maurice Ravel

The mid-nineteenth century saw an explosion of nationalist movements in Europe. This came about for a wide variety of reasons; the American and French Revolutions and the ideas of political theorists such as Rousseau served to shift people's loyalties from their "state" to their "people." The political ramifications of these movements were broad and far-reaching, extending through the twentieth century. A growth in national pride and recognition of common ethnic identities led to the emergence of separatist groups within the Austro-Hungarian empire as well as the unification of both Germany and Italy.

This new focus was also reflected in the art of the time. Through national schools and movements had existed before, there was a kind of universality in the arts from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and seventeenth century brought about by a common admiration for classical (ancient Greek and Roman) culture. A vital ingredient of each of these nationalist movements was a renewed interest in the language, art, and literature of each ethnic group. As people became more focused on their national identities, they began to investigate how their art could reflect their culture and help establish this identity.

Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi were both heavily influenced by patriotic feelings in their choices of subject matter. Wagner's greatest works were based on Germanic and Nordic mythology and legend. Verdi's Nabucco and I Lombardi, among others, were viewed as thinly disguised metaphors for the Italian struggle for independence and were, as a result, enormous popular successes. Verdi himself became a symbol of national unity during the Risorgimento years; an anagram using his name-- "Viva Vittorio Emaniele Re d'Italia" ("Long live Vittorio Emaniele, King of Italy")-- even becoming a rallying cry for the Italian unification movement, and he was elected a deputy of the first national parliament in 1861.

Wagner and Verdi were both nationalist figures from countries which had a firmly established artistic tradition stretching back for centuries. In nations without such a tradition, nationalism in music involved much more than choice of subject matter. Composers in these countries were faced with the task of overcoming the dominance of German music in European culture to create their own national music.

The most common solution to this problem was for composers to incorporate aspects of their native folk music into traditional art music genres. Composers such as Dvorák, Smetana, Mussorgsky, and others looked to indigenous folk traditions to help them escape the overwhelming influence of German music. While the use of folk music was not a new idea (the waltz was the result of art composers adapting Austrian Ländler⁽¹⁾, and Chopin often wrote mazurkas and other pieces in the form of Polish folk dances), it had never been used so self-consciously or with such respect.

This sudden increase of interest in folk music resulted in the birth of modern ethnomusicology, as composers and scholars collected and transcribed songs, especially the folk songs of peasants from small villages, whose music was seen as more pure and less likely to be contaminated by the art music tradition. Rimsky-Korsakov and many other great composers of the late nineteenth century published collections of folk songs they had transcribed or arranged. This trend of ethnomusicologist-composers reached its peak in the early twentieth century with Bela Bartók.

France had an extremely strong artistic tradition as old as that of Germany and Italy. By the late nineteenth century,

Paris was indisputably the cultural center of Europe. The arts flourished in the French capital, where a well-established avant-garde tradition had existed since at least the middle of the century and would have considerable impact on the evolution of modern art. The symbolist poets... and the post-Impressionist painters..., placing unprecedented emphasis on purely formal elements at the expense of conventional representational ones, had completely overthrown the main assumptions of nineteenth-century realism, so that by the turn of the century France was already poised at the edge of a new artistic epoch.⁽²⁾

Thus, despite the vitality and innovation of the Parisian art world, French composers found themselves searching for their national identity, as well. However, though they would occasionally turn to folk songs for inspiration, such as in d'Indy's first symphony, the French seemed to find more inspiration in their nation's artistic past, as shown by the large number of performances and publications at this time of works by Gluck, Rameau, and other composers of the grand siècle and earlier eras.

Though they did not appear to have much interest in their own folk traditions, the French began to develop an interest in those of other cultures. French audiences were fascinated by the new sounds they began hearing in the music of other countries that trickled into Paris. Beginning in the late 1880s, the French began an obsession with foreign and exotic art and music that would continue to grow until the first world war. The Paris Universal Exposition of 1889 further fed this craze, bringing music from all over the world, including Javanese gamelan music, to Paris.

For French musicians and audiences, one of the most exciting and fascinating cultures was that of Russia. The composers of the Mighty Handful received an impressive amount of attention from French musicians and audiences. The French obsession with all things Russian was further fed by the arrival of Serge Diaghilev in Paris, who established the Ballets Russes after presenting the first complete performance of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov in Paris in 1908.

Public interest in the exotic was nothing new; people had been curious about other cultures for centuries. Nor was exoticism in art an innovative idea. However, the way in which exoticism began to be used proved to be something new. When eighteenth century Vienna became obsessed with Turkish culture, Mozart included Turkish elements, including aspects of the music of Janissary bands, in his operas. Some of these elements, such as the use of cymbals and some other percussion, even found a permanent niche in western art music. However, at its most basic level, the music of Viennese composers was unaffected by the Janissary influence. Some French composers of the late nineteenth century, however, saw in exoticism a means of escape from German influence.

Two of these composers were Claude-Achille Debussy (1862-1918) and Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). Though often lumped together in the minds of audiences, these composers actually had two very distinct and different compositional styles. Both made extensive use of materials and techniques derived from exotic sources, however, which they each incorporated into their own musical language.

Debussy's use of exoticism tends to draw upon ancient church music and the gamelan music he heard at the Universal Exposition in 1889. He was also heavily influenced by the music of Russian composers, especially Modest Mussorgsky. He took elements from each of these various sources and combined them to create a distinct musical voice.

From the musical heritage of the church, Debussy borrowed modal scales (a device also frequently employed by Gabriel Fauré) and the concept of harmonic planing, which clearly has its origins in organum. From gamelan and other such exotic sources, he borrowed the pentatonic and other exotic scales, as well as the use of stasis and calm as a musical device. From Mussorgsky and others in the Mighty Handful he learned the value of "directness and truth of utterance within a native tradition"⁽³⁾ and to use sounds for their own sake, rather than being constrained and confined by the "rules" of music.

Examples of each of these influences can be seen in Nuages, the first movement of Debussy's Nocturnes (1899). In the first measure, we see an immediate connection to Mussorgsky chord progression, which is a reworking of a progression borrowed from Mussorgsky's song The Holidays are Over.⁽⁴⁾ Use of planing can be seen almost immediately, beginning at measure fourteen (one measure before figure two). Gamelan influence can be seen in the B section of the work, beginning at measure sixty-four (figure seven). The flute and harp play a simple pentatonic melody over the harmonically static background of the rest of the orchestra.

In the same way that Debussy adopted techniques from exotic sources and incorporated them into his "impressionist" (symbolist would probably be a better word) style, using them to create evocative, dreamlike music, Ravel also incorporated exotic features into his music. He tended to use them to create a very different effect, however. Because of the clear, almost neoclassical style of much of his music, the sources for many of his exotic influences tend to appear more obvious than those of Debussy.

There is also a difference in areas of interest between the two composers. While Debussy tended to have an interest in primitivism and early (i.e. pre-medieval) music, Ravel tended to draw more upon the folk music of other European countries, especially Spain (though Debussy did, of course, compose many Hispanicist works), and the musical tradition of France.

Perhaps the work of Ravel's which draws most obviously on the French classical musical tradition is Le Tombeau de Couperin. This work, written during the first world war, consists of several movements written in the form of eighteenth century French dances. It was, as the title makes clear, intended as a tribute to French classical composers. Ravel interrupted the composition of La Valse, another piece drawing on the popular music of a European culture, to begin this work. This direct, acknowledged homage, which can also be seen in Bolero, Valses nobles et sentimentales, Menuet antique, Pavane pour une infante défunte, and many other pieces, stands in contrast to the majority of Debussy's works. Though Debussy wrote works which directly acknowledged their influences (the Sarabande in Pour le piano, Valse romantique, and the Menuet from Suite bergamasque, among others, are examples of such pieces), it was much more common for him to absorb his influences and use them in a more indirect manner.

The presence of American soldiers in France during World War I brought American popular and folk music, especially jazz, to the attention of Parisian society. Though some American and African-American music had found its way to France (Debussy wrote Golliwogg's Cake-Walk, a ragtime piece, in 1908), it was not until the war that it became truly popular with the French. In 1918, Comte Etienne de Beaumont gave a "Negro fête," with music provided by black American soldiers. This was the first private party in Paris to feature American jazz.⁽⁵⁾

Jazz quickly became the new musical obsession of Parisian society. Though considered a folk art and vernacular music in America, jazz was embraced by high culture in Paris. Before long, jazz could be heard everywhere. "At the Marigny Theater, wrote composer Noble Sissle, Louis Mitchell's Jazz Kings had 'Paris by the balls,' and soon, all the French music-halls had to have their jazz band.⁽⁶⁾

Naturally, French artists also became obsessed with this new music. Beginning around 1918, there was a flood of works by French artists drawing on jazz for their inspiration. Cocteau and Satie's Parade, Nijinska's Jazz (a ballet to the music of Stravinsky's Ragtime), Milhaud's La Création du Monde, Poulenc's Les Biches, and many other works all were results of this trend.

Despite all this, jazz was still not viewed by the French as a legitimate art form. The prevailing view was perhaps best expressed by Jean Cocteau in Le Coq et l'Arlequin (1918): "The music-hall, the circus, American Negro bands--all this is as fertilizing to an artist as life itself. To make use of the emotions aroused by such entertainments is not to revert to making art from art. These entertainments are not art. They excite like machines, animals, landscapes, danger."⁽⁷⁾

In a very real way, Paris's love affair with jazz was not a new trend. It was the same obsession with exoticism that had thrived since the 1890s; the French had just found a new culture on which to focus. Having grown tired of Schéhérezade, Le Dieu Bleu, Firebird, and other orientalist entertainment, the French had turned their attention toward America. Russia, Persia, and India were replaced in their imagination with New York and New Orleans, and African-American jazz bands provided the same fascination on a much larger scale that the Javanese gamelan orchestra had provided some three decades prior.

Debussy's death in 1918 prevented the jazz craze from having any notable effect on his music. However, several of his pieces, including Golliwogg's Cake-Walk and Minstrels (piece XII of his Preludes, Book 1) make use of ragtime. American music was never really absorbed into his style the way other music had been, though, and during the same period as the composition of the two aforementioned pieces, he had accused Ravel of wasting his talent by resorting to "factitious Americanism" in his Histoires naturelles.⁽⁸⁾

Ravel, on the other hand, was quite enthusiastic in his enjoyment of jazz, ragtime, and other such American music. His love for jazz became well-known, and he was prone to make lighthearted comments to the effect that he preferred hearing jazz to opera. It seems only natural, then, that he would soon begin incorporating it into his music. The surrealist opera L'Enfant et les Sortilèges contained a ragtime, but the first work by Ravel to make substantial use of jazz techniques was his G major sonata for violin and piano.

Ravel spent four years working intermittently on the Sonate pour Violon et Piano. It might have taken a much longer time to complete, but he began to be pressured by his publisher to complete the piece so it could be performed on a concert of music by Durand composers on 30 May 1927. The piece was written to be played by George Enescu, who, though he wasn't fond of the jazz aspects of the piece, gave the piece an extremely successful premiere with Ravel at the piano on the 30 May concert.

The violin sonata created something of a scandal upon its premiere. Public attention focused on the second movement of the piece, which Ravel had titled "Blues." To use jazz, ragtime, or other popular idioms to create small character pieces or in the dramatic context of an opera or ballet was one thing, but to use such forms for a movement of a serious piece of chamber music was quite another. For Ravel, however, it was a non-issue; he saw no difference between adapting the blues for a movement of a sonata and using a waltz or a bolero as the basis for a fifteen minute orchestra piece. The jazz aspects of the violin sonata stretch far beyond the second movement, however; the whole piece is infused with jazz elements filtered through Ravel's very French mind and ear.

The most obvious jazz element in the first movement is the staccato figure first introduced in the left hand of the piano in measure ten. The grace notes a half step below the principal note bear a resemblance to the pitch bends and other such effects common in jazz and African-American spirituals. The percussiveness of the figure and the repeated notes also resemble similar figures often found in jazz and ragtime music. While the overall mood of this particular movement is more in line with romantically influenced neoclassicism, there is something of the lighthearted spirit of ragtime in the contrast between the lyrical principal theme and the percussive figure, as well.

The second movement is, of course, the most obviously jazz inspired of the three, as its very title would indicate. The movement appropriates the style and idiomatic gestures of the blues rather than structuring itself on the traditional twelve-bar blues harmonic structure. However, despite the jazzy harmonies, melodic line, and rhythms, this movement is unmistakably by a French composer.

The Blues movement opens with a G chord strummed pizzicato on the violin. Ravel's voicing of this triple-stop chord involves two open strings, giving a slight twang to the sound which creates a rather convincing imitation of a banjo player. The unpredictable accents of certain chords beginning in the second measure also recall certain aspects of early jazz.

Harmonically, this movement begins to show its complexity in the seventh measure with the entry of the piano. The violin to this point is clearly in G, but the piano enters with an open-fifth chord on an Ab. Ravel set up this bitonal relationship in the previous movement, and now makes use of the technique to begin to create some of the complex harmonies he learned from listening to jazz musicians.

The next measure (measure eight) gives us our first taste of jazz rhythms in this movement. Here Ravel makes use of swung eighth notes (written as dotted eighth-sixteenth combinations). These swung rhythms are further developed with the entry of the melody in the violin in measure twelve (second measure after figure one). He uses triplets here to create the same swing feel.

In addition, this lick features a portamento across the final notes of the phrase, creating an effect similar to the slides and scoops common to jazz melodies. This effect was hinted at in the first movement in the secondary percussive figure through the use of grace notes. As with the bitonality used to create more complex jazz-inspired harmony, Ravel scattered the seeds of jazz elements throughout the otherwise relatively romantic and traditional first movement. This serves not only to provide unity throughout the piece, but also to make the jazz features of the second movement seem less strange to the listener expecting a more classical piece.

The cadence just before figure two (measure twenty-six) is the first time we get a break in the steady, four-on-the-floor quarter note pulse. To this point, Ravel has provided us with a melody that is blatantly and unapologetically jazzy, featuring rhythmic syncopation, swung rhythms, repeated notes, and scoops and portamentos. After further development, Ravel moves into a B section in which the violin takes over the quarter note "comping" and the piano takes a solo, reminding us that Gershwin owed just as much to Ravel as he did to "real" jazz.⁽⁹⁾

Towards the end of the movement, the violin returns to its faux-banjo role as the piano solos a bit more before they both trade melodic licks and end the movement. The movement ends, as is appropriate in a jazz piece, on an unresolved dissonance-- in this case, a minor seventh.

The third movement of the violin sonata is a perpetuum mobile combining several features of the previous two movements. From the beginning, we hear the grace notes of the first movement's percussive figure again, first in the piano, and then in the violin (measure four). This time, however, the figure is given in augmentation. After this initial statement, the piano and violin take turns imitating each others' licks until figure one (measure fifteen), when the violin takes off on a wild sixteenth note ride that won't stop until the end of the piece.

At measure fifty-one (the bar before figure four) is a gliss leading into a jazzier section. In this section, we run into a melody voiced in diminished octaves and a string of swung eighth note rhythms. In the section after figure six, we run into a variation of the second movement's tune which bears a striking resemblance to one of the principal themes from Gershwin's 1924 Rhapsody in Blue.

At figure fourteen, the violin and piano both begin simultaneously playing variations on the tune from the second movement. The section from here to the end can be viewed as the Ravel equivalent to a shout chorus in a jazz chart. Motives are repeated and allowed to be heard from every angle, increasing intensity until the piece ends on a pure G major chord.

In 1929, Ravel accepted a commission from Paul Wittgenstein, an Austrian pianist who had lost his right arm in World War I, to write a piano concerto for the left hand. Wittgenstein had already commissioned works from Richard Strauss, and would later commission Prokofiev and Britten to do the same. Ravel delivered the work in late fall of 1930, but it had to wait a couple of years for its premiere, since Wittgenstein did not like the piece at first.

The Concerto for the Left Hand is a relatively dark piece of music. Written in a single movement, the piece begins in a manner reminiscent of La Valse, with dark, quiet, low brooding movements in the orchestra. Whether intentional on Ravel's part or not, the similarity between the two beginnings tends to remind the listener that the war in which the pianist lost his arm was a war in which the composer and pianist were fighting against each other.

This concerto also includes numerous jazz elements. The second theme, introduced by the horns in measure eight (one measure after figure one), is a bluesy, syncopated tune which is combined with the primary theme at figure three. The slow movement, which begins at the più lento after figure eight, makes use of a variation on this bluesy theme, featuring lots of juxtaposition of triplets and duplets, with the occasional grace note thrown in for good measure.

Ravel continues to develop this theme through a series of variations and motivic transformation in the orchestra, building to the beginning of the scherzo at figure fourteen (marked Allegro). The longest movement in the piece, the scherzo features the most obvious jazz elements. The brassy orchestration to the beginning of the section brings to mind similar sections in big band pieces, and the clarinet lick three measures after figure fifteen has a very bluesy quality to it. These jazz elements are juxtaposed against an odd-sounding jig-like tune and an incessant pulse in the orchestra. The middle of the scherzo section brings to mind Bolero in its incessant pulse and repetitive melody.

At figure forty-three, we return to a jazzy feel once again before the reprise of the first section, which is interrupted by a cadenza in which several jazz elements come into play. The third measure after figure fifty brings back the second theme again with its blue notes and syncopation. This blues theme is built upon with the return of the orchestra before figure fifty-two, and we end the piece with a reprise of the pulsing jazz band accompaniment from the scherzo, this time without the dark overtones it had in its original statement. However, the ending of the piece seems to be a forced ending, rather than a natural one, which is mildly unnerving after the freedom Ravel allows the music until that point-- yet another characteristic it shares with La Valse.

The G major Concerto pour Piano et Orchestre was one of the last major works composed by Ravel. Ravel wrote this piece with the intention of playing it on a proposed world-wide concert tour. Unfortunately, his health began to fail, and the tour had to be cancelled; the premiere was played by Marguerite Long, instead.

This piece is considerably lighter in character than the D major concerto. It is also more traditional in structure, written in the standard three movement form. Ravel claimed that his models for this piece were Saint-Saëns and Mozart. However, on the foundation of these composers he also layered a healthy amount of jazz, as can be heard right at the beginning of the work. The melodic material of the principal theme is inflected throughout with a certain amount of jazz influence.

The jazz inflections become even more obvious beginning at figure four. The orchestral introductions over the incredibly bluesy piano solo are, once again, much more closely related to Gershwin than either Saint-Saëns or Mozart; the similarity to sections of Rhapsody in Blue and the Concerto in F (1927) cannot be ignored, especially considering the admiration Ravel had for Gershwin, whom he met during his 1928 American tour just prior to beginning this concerto. Similar connections can be seen in the section beginning at figure twelve.

Ravel claimed that the slow movement was based on the larghetto movement of the Mozart clarinet quintet. This movement, though not entirely lacking in jazz features, certainly features far fewer of them than either of the outer movements.

With the third movement, we return to the lighthearted jazzy mood of the first movement. The return is announced with fortissimo brass chords, busy sixteenth note piano figures modeled on those in the Saint-Saëns concerto, and a piercing clarinet solo at the very top of its range. The movement rushes to its conclusion in a frenzied four minute rush of sixteenth notes.

The word "exoticism" tends to bring to mind orientalist works such as Rimsky-Korsakov's Schéhérezade or Stravinsky's Le Rossignol. Rarely is a work using jazz techniques and clichés considered to be a case of exoticism. However, it is clear that Ravel's approach to the materials and techniques relevant to American jazz was the same as his approach to any other foreign music.

European fascination with American folk music can be seen to have its origins in Dvorák's "New World" Symphony and came to its peak with the French jazz craze after the first world war. This fascination was merely a continuation of the interest in and demand for exotic entertainment that had been present for decades and a natural outgrowth of the nationalist search for cultural identity.

Endnotes

1. Leon Platinga, Romantic Music (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984) 342.

2. Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991) 40.

3. Corneel Mertens, "Debussy, Claude," The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1995 ed.

4. Donald J. Grout and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music, 4^th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988) 794.

5. Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998) 104.

6. Garafola 104.

7. Quoted in Garafola 105.

8. Mertens.

9. Gershwin heard Ravel perform this piece in New York with violinist Joseph Szigeti during the French composer's American concert tour in 1928, two years before "I Got Rhythm" was premiered as part of Girl Crazy, but four years after "Fascinating Rhythm" was first sung in Lady Be Good.

Works Cited

Debussy, Claude. Complete Preludes, Books 1 and 2. New York: Dover, 1989.

---. Three Great Orchestral Works in Full Score. New York: Dover, 1983.

Garafola, Lynn. Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998.

Grout, Donald J., and Claude V. Palisca. A History of Western Music. 4^th ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988.

Larner, Gerald. Maurice Ravel. London: Phaidon Press, 1996.

Mertens, Corneel. "Debussy, Claude." The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 1995 ed.

Morgan, Robert P. Twentieth-Century Music. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.

Platinga, Leon. Romantic Music. New York: W.W. Norton, 1984.

Ravel, Maurice. Concerto en sol pour Piano et Orchestre. Paris: Durand, 1932.

---. Concerto pour la main gauche pour piano et orchestre. Paris: Durand, 1937.

---. "Le Tombeau de Couperin" and Other Works for Solo Piano. New York: Dover, 1997.

---. Sonate pour Violon et Piano. Paris: Durand, 1927.