Page 91 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

we see ourselves as others see us. That is, we catch glimpses of ourselves through reflections in store windows, superim- posed over pots and pans.
Ravel dedicated these pieces to members of Les Apaches, a musical society he more or less led. Although the Apaches took a while to understand the works dedicated to them, Miroirs changed modern music, building on Emmanuel Chabrier’s base. They are all highly virtuosic and use techniques begun by Liszt to convey the colors of Impressionist painting.
Noctuelles (Moths): Intricate rhythmic patterns depict the frenzied wheeling and fluttering of these pests. Occasional szforzandi are either collisions or impetuous swattings by the composer. Ravel may have put them into Miroirs to get rid of them, the way Dvořák put the scarlet tanager into his “American” Quartet, because it was annoying him.
Oiseaux tristes (Sad Birds): Ravel described this as “birds lost in the torpor of a dark forest during the hottest summer hours.”
Une barque sur l’océan (A Boat on the Ocean): Arpeggios stand in for waves. The simple title camouflages this im- mense paean to the ocean.
Alborada del gracioso (The Jester’s Aubade): An aubade is a song or poem about lovers separating at dawn. (A serenade is a song about lovers separating in the evening.) Chabrier had written an aubade in 1883, inspired by his four-month trip to Spain. John Donne’s poem “The Sun Rising” is an aubade. Debussy would five years later write a similar jaunty episode, “Général Lavine—eccentric,” a deconstructed cakewalk about an American clown who appeared in the Marigny Theatre in Paris in 1910.
In this Aubade, Ravel uses a moto perpetuo framework on which he hangs bursts of Spanish themes. A single-note rec- itative in the middle is reminiscent of Liszt’s Légends, where
he uses an operatic narrative recitative to isolate important themes, the way Rachmaninoff used single notes on rare occasions (such as the beginning of the Piano Concerto No. 3) to highlight his underlying themes.
La vallée des cloches (The Valley of the Bells): This is an exploration of bell sonorities. Mompou’s family made bells. Russian bell chimers played on un-tuned bells. Peter the Great introduced Hemony bells into Russia, French-tuned bells used in carillons, the rows of bells found in bell towers. Bells were used frequently by Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Mussorgsky. In Tarkovsky’s movie Andrei Rublev, an enormous bell is cast, an iconic scene, representative of the soul of Russia. The Tsar Kolokol III, or king of bells, located at the Kremlin, weighs more than 445,000 pounds. In Debussy’s “Sunken Cathedral,” you can hear the cathedral bells of the lost city of Ys, even though
it is submerged beneath the waves. Ys was the birthplace
of Isolde. Nicholson Baker, in Traveling Sprinkler, says that such bell pieces are about “all sunken frightening beautiful artful ruined human things.” It’s about the sunken cathedral in Rimbaud’s Illuminations, the ruined underwater abbey in H.G. Wells’s story “In the Abyss,” Swinburne’s crumbling wave-gnawed town of Dunwich, the article Proust wrote in 1904 about the death of cathedrals, and the watery bells in the song Brahms wrote in 1860 on Müller’s poem about the mythic city on the Baltic, Vineta.
2018 Summer Season 91