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PURLOINED POETICS: THE GROTESQUE IN THE MUSIC OF MAURICE RAVEL By JESSIE FILLERUP Copyright 2009 Submitted to the graduate degree program in Music and the faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy. ____________________________ Chairperson Committee members: ____________________________ ____________________________ ____________________________ ____________________________ ____________________________ Date defended: 6 April 2009 The Dissertation Committee for Jessie Fillerup certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: PURLOINED POETICS: THE GROTESQUE IN THE MUSIC OF MAURICE RAVEL Committee: ____________________________ Chairperson ____________________________ ____________________________ ____________________________ ____________________________ ____________________________ Date approved: 6 April 2009 ii To Michael and Rebecca Mahalo nui loa iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Early on, I wondered if my experience writing a dissertation would resemble the fictional Jack Burden’s, who entered a period of inert semi-consciousness known as “the Great Sleep.” Faced with the prospect of completing his dissertation, Jack slept fourteen or fifteen hours a night; when he finally woke, it was to contemplate this thought: “If I don’t get up I can’t go back to bed.”1 I was fortunate to have better reasons for getting up in the morning. Those reasons begin with my dissertation advisor, Roberta Freund Schwartz, a scholar of Renaissance music and the blues; she shepherded my project with such care and conviction that anyone not looking closely would think I was writing about Robert Johnson, not Ravel. Roberta encouraged me to strive for greater clarity by sloughing off the stylistic and scholarly accretions that cling to graduate students like barnacles. I am grateful for her patience and conscientious attention to my writing, as well as her sustained enthusiasm for this project; her dedication is inspiring. My students at Washburn University kept me occupied with the practical things of this world, ensuring that I was never to caught up in esotericism to forget the symbiotic relationship of research and teaching. I taught three courses a semester 1 Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (San Diego: Harcourt, 1982), 189. iv at Washburn from the time I submitted my dissertation prospectus, and I would not have had it any other way. I treasure the years I spent with these creative and industrious students, for whom I will always hold a deep affection. My Washburn colleagues provided encouragement and support throughout the writing process; they are inspiring performers, teachers, and leaders whose collegiality was the first of many lessons I learned from them. Several friends and colleagues contributed to this project’s development in unexpected ways. Their comments, suggestions, and criticisms were invaluable, but so too were the shared desserts, encouraging words, and diverting conversations. For contributing some combination of these things, I thank Gurminder Bhogal, Jim Briscoe, Tony Bushard, Keith Clifton, Jim Davis, Hugh Macdonald, Scott Messing, Katrina Mitchell, and Ellie Olin. I am especially grateful to Carlo Caballero, a generous and sensitive reader of this dissertation who shared with me his judicious editing, a connoisseur’s love of words, and a lunch at Stroud’s. My first musicological friend, Kendra Leonard, showed the true measure of her devotion by reading the entire document before I submitted it to my committee; I thank her as a confidant, cohort, and scholar without peer. I enjoyed a summer of generous financial support from the Hall Center at the University of Kansas, which brought me into contact with three other Fellows in the humanities, each of whom enriched my final year of writing. I am also grateful to the library staffs of the University of Indiana-Bloomington, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Yale University Music Library, and v University of Kansas Libraries—in particular the staff of the music library, Edwards campus, and Interlibrary loan. Their assistance and resourcefulness eased the research process and made remote materials accessible to me. My parents brought their island wild child from the Hawaiian tropics to an arid Navajo Indian Reservation, where I roamed the hills behind our trailer, searching for evidence of lost civilizations in the soil. I owe my parents many things, but chief among them is their willingness to let me wander, unobserved, that I might grow curious about the world around me. I grew up in a home that valued learning and the power of words, both spoken and written, but these would have mattered little without the gifts of love, faith, and confidence that they imparted to me. It is humbling to think of the sacrifices they made on my behalf, and to imagine how I might repay my debt of gratitude. My childhood was brightened and my professional burdens eased by the support of my siblings, Carrie, Samantha, and Benjamin. To my husband, Hayden, I write what may seem inscrutable to some readers. You have not yet read this dissertation; I doubt that you ever will. But this is the tender mystery between us: you never need to read my words to understand my thoughts. Your love and support are offered not for an achievement, a performance, an impressive feather in my cap. They are just for me. Another leg complete in our great adventure, with open skies ahead. Leawood, Kansas 14 February 2009 vi ABSTRACT For scholars, the significance of Ravel’s music and the nature of his artistic legacy remain elusive. Many question why a composer with Ravel’s gifts would cling to convention—conservative forms, tertian harmonies—in an era of musical revolution. Ravel’s music is often characterized with incongruous terms: ironic, artificial, sensual, objective, calculated, novel, precious, decadent, cold, and impressionistic. Scholars have worked around the problem of Ravel’s style by examining the transitory masks donned throughout his career: the fakir, the neo-classicist, the ironist. I submit, however, that the grotesque functions as a recurrent aesthetic theme, permeating Ravel’s layers of illusion and revealing disruptive forces at play that unify apparently different musical styles and subvert the apparent conservatism in his music. Though scholars have disagreed about the precise nature of the grotesque, most acknowledge that its fundamental characteristic is a unity among disjunction achieved by transgressing boundaries and fusing opposites. At the same time, scholars acknowledge that the grotesque is not a transhistorical phenomenon, since it assumes various meanings in different eras and cultures. The grotesque’s transgressive character prevents its identification through taxonomies, which is why I vii attempt no definition of the phenomenon. Instead, I note instances when a viewer or listener interacts emotionally, psychologically, or physiologically with a work in a manner that evokes disorientation, confusion, or conflict. Because the grotesque tolerates and even promotes contradiction while maintaining formal cohesion, its utility for interpreting Ravel’s music is immediately apparent. Beyond its efficacy as a modern analytical tool, the grotesque is a phenomenon with which Ravel was acquainted. The composer applied the term to the titles of two works—Sérénade grotesque and the “Danse grotesque” from Daphnis et Chloé—and to the description of automata in L’Heure espagnole. I characterize the French grotesque by examining Hugo’s 1827 preface to Cromwell, Théophile Gautier’s Les Grotesques, Baudelaire’s essay, “De l’essence du rire,” and Berlioz’s Les Grotesques de la musique before turning to the tales and criticism of Poe—a juncture where Ravel and the French grotesque meet. The four Ravel works that I examine represent a chronological span of twenty-seven years, from the composer’s student days to the era following the first World War. Each work—Sérénade grotesque, L’Heure espagnole, Daphnis et Chloé, and La Valse— exhibits disjunctive relationships between music, text, rhythm and meter, and gesture; these, combined with the works’ reception histories, evoke the grotesque’s characteristic unity among disjunction. I propose that the grotesque serves three functions in Ravel’s music: 1) it provides an aesthetic framework for interpreting (not reconciling) Ravel’s diverse viii musical styles; 2) it offers a new context for his long-standing appreciation of Poe; and 3) it unveils transgressive elements within conventional musical structures. ix CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................................................................... iv ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................ vii LIST OF EXAMPLES ............................................................................................... xiii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ..................................................................................... xvi PART ONE CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................1 The Grotesque ..........................................................................................3 Unity and Disjunction ...............................................................................5 2. ENVISIONING THE GROTESQUE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE ..........................................................................................................9

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