Soothing Movements the Consolatory Potential Ofmusique Dépouillée’S Rhythm and Repetition

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3 Soothing Movements The Consolatory Potential ofMusique Dépouillée’s Rhythm and Repetition

And if we go back still further in the past, we realize that rhythm ruled the whole world: the first music of religious rites based on magic formulas, the “charms” exercised in Egypt by magicians, the obsessive repetitions that one finds today in our orchestrations (and especially Stravinsky). Does the public understand that a work in which the rhythm is well-regulated brings a certain euphoria? —Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous1

It was January 24, 1921, at the Salle des Agriculteurs in Paris. The Société Musicale Indépendante was holding a special concert comprising the music that La Revue musicale had commissioned from numerous preeminent composers for a special issue—“Tombeau de Debussy”—dedicated to Debussy, who had died in March 1918. The virtuoso violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange adjusted her weight in her chair, pulled her arm up so that her bow hovered just above her violin’s strings, and subtly flipped her short, bobbed hair to the side, hoping this would leave it out of her face for the duration of this excerpt from Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and ’Cello. Seated several meters away, the cellist and former soldier Maurice Maréchal watched her intently, waiting for her to begin. She thought about the last time she had played this movement publicly: it had been in the spring of 1920, just after Ravel had drafted it, in one of the Princesse de Polignac’s famous salons.2 The room had been packed with the Princesse’s coterie, but

1 Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous: L’Homme, l’ami, le musicien, preface by Colette, with drawings by Luc-Albert Moreau (Geneva: Éditions du milieu du monde, 1945), 46–47: “Et si l’on remonte encore plus dans le passé on se rend compte que le rythme a régi le monde entière: la première musique des rites religieux basée sur les formules magiques, les ‘charmes’ exercés en Egypte par les magiciens, avec les répétitions obsédantes qu’on retrouve aujourd’hui dans nos orchestrations (Stravinsky particulièrement). Le public comprend-il qu’une œuvre dont le rythme est bien équilibré lui apporte une euphorie certaine?” 2 See Hélène Jourdan-Morhange’s account of what I believe must have been one of the first and only public performances of the Sonate pour Violon et Violoncelle prior to the premiere at the Société Musicale Indépendante’s concert at Salle Pleyel on April 6, 1922, in Mes Amis musiciens (Paris: Les Éditeurs français réunis, 1955), 44–45.

Resonant Recoveries. Jillian C. Rogers, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190658298.003.0004 Soothing Movements 137

Maréchal and Ravel had been there, as had Juliette Meerowitch, who would pass away suddenly only a few weeks later, while on tour in Brussels.3 Meerowitch had been such a central figure in helping Jourdan-Morhange to process—through music, friendship, and conversation—the death of her husband, Jacques, in combat at Verdun in March 1916.4 The two losses had seemed too much to bear, but then she had met Ravel and so many others who had helped to support her during those difficult years. Hélène took a deep breath—partly from remem- bering, and partly to prepare herself—and began to play. The first five measures were just her—a rhythmic, mechanical ostinato with eighth-note up-bows and quarter-note down-bows, a pattern that she would con- tinue for another eleven measures after Maréchal entered with a lilting, intricate melody. Ravel had managed to get the two of them to play together like a well-oiled machine: throughout this movement they play syncopated quarter notes against one another, forcing them to subdivide and lock into a rhythmic groove with each other. Although Jourdan-Morhange’s part and Maréchal’s often interlocked or alter- nated in rhythmic precision, Ravel almost never permitted them to double one another. This increased their solo exposure, but also made it so that when one of them played more expressive melodic material, the other supported them with repetitive motor rhythms or, at the very least, a consistent and immovable pulse. These aspects of Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and ’Cello—not only the expressive opportunities it provided, but also the mechanistic ways in which the rhythmic regularity and repetition of the piece were mutually constitutive—made it difficult to play, but, perhaps more importantly, brought Jourdan-Morhange a comforting sense of stability that had lately seemed hard to achieve in her everyday life. She met eyes briefly with Maréchal as they both softly smiled in their slight rhythmic swaying—they were in this groove together.5 Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and ’Cello is one of several pieces written in the years immediately following the composer’s military service and his mother’s death in January 1917 that demonstrates a shift in his compositional style. Although Ravel’s postwar musical style is rather eclectic, his compositional choices after 1917 generally exhibit starker and more contrapuntal music that often contains rhythmic regularity and ostinato passages.6 Put another way, many of the pieces

3 The pianist Juliette Meerowitch and Jourdan-Morhange frequently performed together in the late teens before Meerowitch passed away in April 1920 due to, in Jourdan-Morhange’s words, a “mysterious illness.” See Mes Amis musiciens, 45. 4 His obituary appears in “Deuil,” Le Figaro, April 1, 1916, 3. 5 Although extant sources that would provide us with Jourdan-Morhange’s thoughts and feelings on this evening do not seem to exist, the sources that remain allow us to imagine the scene I have just suggested. 6 Numerous scholars have noted the shift in Ravel’s style after 1917, including several of Ravel’s contemporaries. See, for example, Gurminder Bhogal, Details of Consequence: Ornament, Art, and Music in Paris (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 287–309 and Roger Nichols, Ravel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 215–303. Barbara Kelly has convincingly suggested that, 138 Resonant Recoveries from this period are repetitive and groove-oriented, often even more so than some of the repetitive pieces of his youth.7 As I have addressed elsewhere, many of Ravel’s postwar compositions feature marked repetition and rhythmic regularity heightened by his instructions to performers to keep the tempo extraor- dinarily steady; by contrast, in repetitive passages of his pre-war compositions, such as Jeux d’eau (1902), the Sonatine (1905), and Le Gaspard de la nuit (1908), Ravel indicated that these sections should be performed in a more fluid and rubato-laden manner.8 Numerous of the compositions that Ravel wrote between the war and his death in 1937 that showcase repetition and strict rhythmic regularity were either intended for performance by people who had recently lost loved ones, or feature dedications to people who had died or people or who were in mourning, as Ravel himself was at the time.9 His Sonata for Violin and ’Cello was no exception. He had composed the first movement for La Revue musciale’s special “Tombeau de Debussy,” which appeared as a supplement in December 1920, and he dedicated the completed sonata to Debussy. In addition, Jourdan-Morhange—as my opening to this chapter relayed—lost her husband in 1916 and her close friend and performing partner, Juliette Meerowitch, in 1920. Maréchal had experienced his fair share of tragedy in the preceding years as well: his fiancé died in 1913, and during his military service he was forced to cope with the death of numerous friends who were killed in battle.10 Ravel had known both musicians—but was closer with Jourdan-Morhange—while he composed the sonata. He had even asked Jourdan-Morhange by letter if certain movements, techniques, and pitches

while Ravel’s style certainly shifted in the late 1910s, it makes more sense to think about his late style(s) as varied and multiple instead of monolithic. See Kelly, “Ravel’s Timeliness and His Many Late Styles,” in Late Style and Its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature, and Music, eds. Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 158–173.

7 Serge Gut has pointed out that Ravel’s tendencies toward repetition are apparent even in his earliest compositions in “Le phénomène répétitif chez Maurice Ravel: De l’obsession à l’annihilation incantatoire,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 21, no. 1 (June 1990): 29–46. 8 For more information about this shift in Ravel’s style, and the ways in which his postwar pieces, especially those dedicated to friends who had lost loved ones, differ substantially from his pre-war compositions in terms of the rhythmic regularity and repetition they require, see Rogers, “Mourning at the Piano: Marguerite Long, Maurice Ravel, and the Performance of Grief in Interwar France,” Transposition: Musique et sciences sociales 4 (August 2014), https://journals.openedition.org/ transposition/739, particularly paragraphs 34–36. 9 Bhogal has suggested that we take care not to attribute Ravel’s stylistic change after 1917 to the war, pointing out that Ravel already composed in a repetitive style in the pre-war years (see Bhogal, Details of Consequence, 301). In “Mourning at the Piano,” however, I show how Ravel’s pre-war compositions, even those that are rather repetitive and rhythmically regular, ask performers to em- ploy far more rubato than his later compositions, thereby requiring more “robotic” performances. 10 Maurice Maréchal, “Carnets de Guerre,” in Deux Musiciens dans la Grande Guerre, ed. Luc Durosoir (Paris: Tallandier, 2005), 217–344. Soothing Movements 139 were possible on the violin.11 Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and ’Cello therefore raises questions concerning relationships between grief, trauma, and music in this increasingly popular rhythmic, repetitive style. In particular, this piece and the many other rhythmically regular, repetitive, and “mechanistic” pieces that Ravel composed for grieving and traumatized friends during this period prompt us to consider the conduciveness of this new musical style—which emerged during the war—to helping people console themselves in the wake of grief and trauma.12 One notable and common feature of the French modernist repertoires of the interwar years is the prevalence of repetitive, ostinato-oriented, and rhythmically regular music. From Erik Satie’s Musique d’ameublement (1917–1920), Germaine Tailleferre’s String Quartet (1919), and Honegger’s Pacific 231 (1923), to Stravinsky’s Octet (1923) and Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos (1932), many pieces of the French music scene between 1915 and 1935 exhibit what has been described—both at the time and by music scholars today—as a mechanical aesthetic.13 Whether functioning as odes to or warnings against modern life, evocations of musical prim- itivism, manifestations of instantanéisme, or neoclassical recollections of Europe’s bygone musical past, such passages, appearing in myriad genres, instrumentations, and harmonic idioms, might be considered part and parcel of the texture of French music writ large in the first half of the twentieth century.14 Although the specific reasons composers gave for such stylistic choices vary, as do the guises and traditions in which this music appears, so-called mechanical music nevertheless presents a thread that runs through a large portion of the music written by composers living in France after World War I. In addition, many amateur and professional performers preferred repetitive, perpetual-motion-oriented music, as evidenced by the interest in Baroque composers, styles, and genres—frequently featuring similarly repetitive, moto perpetuo passages—in the interwar period.15

11 Maurice Ravel to Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, March 1, 1920, in A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews, ed. Arbie Orenstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 199–200. 12 Gut puts forward a number of reasons for Ravel’s repetitive, ostinato-oriented music, including that Ravel was trying to signal the “end of a world” with pieces like Boléro, and, in alignment with the critic André Suarès, that in this repetition we can hear “the darkness (mal) that has perhaps tormented Ravel throughout his life.” See “Le phénomène répétitif,” 43–45. Gut does not consider the role that World War I may have played in Ravel’s repetitive tendencies, in part because he does not consider here (a) the ways in which Ravel’s postwar repetition differs from his pre-war repetition; and (b) the commonalities between Ravel’s postwar repetition and that of his contemporaries within their particular social context. 13 Derrick Puffett referred to this as “the ostinato machine” in “Debussy’s Ostinato Machine,” in Derrick Puffett on Music, ed. Kathryn Bailey Puffett (London: Routledge, 2011/2017), 231–286. 14 For more on instantaneism and its aesthetics of the moment and focus on perpetual motion, see Caroline Potter, Erik Satie: A Parisian Composer and His World (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2016), 228–229; and David Trippett, “Composing Time: Zeno’s Arrow, Hindemith’s Erinnerung, and Satie’s Instantanéisme,” The Journal of Musicology 24, no. 4 (2007): 522–580. 15 J. S. Bach’s compositions and his musical aesthetic were especially popular at this time, so much so that many people described the 1920s and 1930s in France in terms of a “return to Bach.” See Marcel Delannoy, “Bach et les musiciens d’aujourd’hui,” Revue international de musique (1950): 181– 183, BnF, Mus., 4-VM-93 <1950, no. 8>; Charles Koechlin, “Retour à Bach,” La Revue musicale 140 Resonant Recoveries

Interwar French musicians and critics often referred to this style asmu - sique dépouillée. Samuel Dorf has described the style dépouillé as embodying a “classical simplicity . . . echoing what at the time were the ideas of the cubist aesthetic,” characteristic of the musical style of post–World War I French modernist composers like Satie and Stravinsky.16 In her analysis of Ravel’s interwar music alongside that of Satie and Stravinsky, Gurminder Bhogal has defined dépouillement as “a metaphor for a set of musical techniques, which operate on a diminutive scale and are characterized by the expression of simple melodies and tightly knit counterpoint through transparent textures and uniform rhythms.”17 Indeed, style dépouillé was a term that critics frequently used to describe the music of Ravel, Satie, and Stravinsky in the 1920s. While style dépouillé, along with nouveau classicism and néoclassicisme, were phrases typically used in the reception of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, in Le Coq et l’arlequin, Jean Cocteau used dépouillé to describe the rhythmically straightforward esprit nouveau of Satie’s music.18 For musicians such as the composer and music critic Albert Roussel— whose career spanned from the fin de siècle through to his death in 1937—this postwar style was considered a “return to Bach,” characterized by “a return to more distinct lines, more strongly charged traits, a more vigorous rhythm, [with] harmony ceasing to be considered as the dominant concern of the musician.”19 Scholars have often attributed the appearance of this musical style to French composers’ rejection of the lush Romanticism of much pre-war French music, which, before though perhaps especially during the Great War, had been associated with Austro-Germany’s, and even more specifically, Wagner’s influence. Musicologists have also considered style dépouillé as one result of the growing interest in neoclassicism in the interwar period, evident in the development of a musical style that featured the clarity, simplicity, and balance of French and Latin- derived musics from the eighteenth century and earlier.20 In addition, scholars

(1926): 1–12; René Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, 1919–1939 (Paris: Éditions du Milieu du Monde, 1946), 23–24.

16 Samuel Dorf, “Listening Between the Classical and the Sensual: Neoclassicism in Parisian Music Culture, 1870–1935” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2009), 144–227. 17 Bhogal, Details of Consequence, 305. 18 Scott Messing, Neoclassicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept through the Schoenberg/ Stravinsky Polemic (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 129–149; Jean Cocteau, Le Coq et l’arlequin: Notes autour de la musique (Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1918), 30–31. 19 Albert Roussel, “Réflexions sur la musique d’aujourd’hui,” trans. Robert Bernard, in Albert Roussel (Paris: La Colombe, 1948), 121–123, from “Rozwazania O Musyce Wspolczesneg,” Muzyka 3 (March 20, 1928): 107–108; reprinted in Albert Roussel, Lettres et écrits, ed. Nicole Labelle (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), 270–271; 271. 20 Esteban Buch, “‘Les Allemands et les Boches’: La Musique allemande à Paris pendant la Première Guerre Mondiale,” Le Mouvement social 3 (2004): 45–69; Jane Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War; Messing, Soothing Movements 141 have rightly attributed the mechanical aspects of much musique dépouillée to musicians’ fascinations with the machines and sounds of modern life. Ravel’s Boléro (1928) has often been understood as inspired by the love he developed for factories as a child, and, as Glenn Watkins has argued, we might also understand the “Toccata” from Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917) as informed by the composer’s interests in aviation’s machinery both during and after the war.21 Caroline Potter, in her recent study of Satie’s music, has related the mechanical aspects of Satie’s œuvre to his interest in the barrel-organ—then a popular, if nos- talgic, instrument—as well as an interest in film that he shared with many of his contemporaries.22 Interests in mechanical objects in the machine age are also evident in the work of a whole host of composers who, although not born in France, spent much of their time in Paris and with French musicians, for instance Igor Stravinsky, Alfredo Casella, and Gian Francesco Malipiero, all of whom wrote pieces for the newly invented pianola.23 The fascination with mechanical objects and the machinistic music of the interwar period has often been accompanied by a concern for the ways in which this music, in focusing on machines, threatens qualities that have been considered “human.” For instance, José Ortega y Gasset argued in 1925 that French modernists sought the “dehumanization of art,” something that has been of espe- cial concern for historians and critics approaching pieces such as Satie’s Musique d’ameublement, Antheil’s Ballet mécanique, and Stravinsky’s Les Noces.24 For numerous music scholars—from Richard Taruskin and Scott Messing to Caroline Potter and Daniel Albright—musique dépouillée, due to its perceived austerity, might be read as a specifically neoclassical style that undermines, obfuscates, or even precludes emotional expression.25 However, Émile Vuillermoz had a different view ofdépouillement in Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and ’Cello, and especially its third movement, understanding it not as an indication of Ravel’s

Neoclassicism in Music; Jann Pasler, Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

21 See Deborah Mawer, “Musical Objects and Machines,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Deborah Mawer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 47–67; Glenn Watkins, Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 176–195. 22 Potter, Erik Satie, 94. 23 Carolyn Abbate, “Outside Ravel’s Tomb,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 465–530. 24 José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art, trans. Helene Weyl (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968). 25 Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 4: “Music in the Early Twentieth Century” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 59–129, 477–494, 561–598; Messing, Neoclassicism in Music, 152; Potter, Erik Satie, 143, 174–175; Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 192–194. 142 Resonant Recoveries

“renunciation” of emotion, but rather as an often misunderstood expressivity in which “despite himself, [Ravel] unmasks his heart.”26 Roussel argued similarly— although more broadly—in 1928 that the turn toward classicism should not be “interpreted as a sign that this music will be unexpressive and indifferent.” He continues: “it would be absurd to assert that the feeling of the musician will no longer play a role in the composition of works. [ . . . ] It is, on the contrary, this feeling that will transfigure the sonorous material and will give it this interior illumination in which is recognized without possible debate the imprint of a given ar t i s t .” 27 For at least some musicians, the mechanistic qualities of music in the style dépouillé did not indicate a negation of emotion tout court. It has been not only the privileging of machines over humans that has caused anxiety for those engaging with this particular musical style, but also the ways in which new mechanical modes of sound (re)production might suggest the era- sure of the performer, both symbolically and literally. Carolyn Abbate addresses this in her article on Ravel’s “mechanical music,” arguing that Le Tombeau de Couperin exhibits the composer’s grief concerning the loss of the performing musician engendered by the pianola and other musical machines.28 In the case of Ravel and many of his contemporaries, however, I would argue that this was often experienced not so much as a loss as an opportunity. As already mentioned, Ravel had been fascinated with mechanical objects and places since spending time as a child in his engineer father’s factory, and found these to be fruitful sources of musical inspiration.29 Potter provides an alternative to Abbate’s way of understanding mechanical music’s effects in writing that Satie’s aesthetic in Musique d’ameublement is “machine-like music for which human performers are essential.”30 The other ethical concern has been that much of this music demands that performers at least somewhat imitate machines.31 It is this last point that

26 Émile Vuillermoz, “L’Édition musicale. Maurice Ravel: ‘Sonate’ pour violon et violoncelle,” Le Temps, May 19, 1922. 27 Roussel, “Réflexions sur la musique d’aujourd’hui,” 121–123, from “Rozwazania O Musyce Wspolczesneg,” Muzyka 3 (March 20, 1928): 107–108; reprinted in Roussel, Lettres et écrits, 271: “doit-il être interprété comme un signe que cette musique sera inexpressive et indifférente? Il serait absurde de prétendre que la sensibilité du musicien ne jouera désormais plus aucun rôle dans la composition d’une œuvre. [ . . . ] C’est, tout au contraire, cette sensibilité qui transfigurera la matière sonore et qui lui donnera cette illumination intérieure où se reconnaît sans discussion possible l’empreinte de l’artiste élu.” 28 Abbate, “Outside Ravel’s Tomb,” 465–530. 29 Maurice Ravel, “Finding Tunes in Factories,” in A Ravel Reader, 398–400. 30 Potter, Erik Satie, 176. 31 Abbate addresses this concern in “Outside Ravel’s Tomb,” as does Deborah Mawer in “Musical Objects and Machines,” 47–67; 64; see also Puffet, “Debussy’s Ostinato Machine.” Potter also suggests that the liminal nature of mechanical music and musicians contributes to mechanical music being perceived as “sinister”; see Potter, Erik Satie, 37. Bhogal makes a similar suggestion about the “loss of human agency” that might occur in pieces utilizing style dépouillé in Details of Consequence, 307. Soothing Movements 143

I investigate further in this chapter, with an eye toward re-reading the mechanical performance required in much musique dépouillée not as denying performers agency, but rather as a musical technology of consolation in the wake of war. In what follows, I argue that repetitive, ostinato-driven, and often rhythmically regular musique dépouillée was significant for those attempting to recover from grief and trauma in the years following World War I.32 By situating the ad- vent of this musical style within the context of the paramount interest in rhythm and rhythmic gymnastics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France, and in particular the gymnastique rythmique of the music pedagogue Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, I contend that one of musique dépouillée’s recognized benefits was that it required musicians’ bodies to move in particular ways, and that these bodily movements may have been consoling for those coping with trauma. The frequency with which musicians who were deeply affected by the war either participated in rhythmic gymnastics and other sports, or composed, performed, or listened to rhythmically regular music, further supports the idea that the style dépouillée was an important bodily technology of healing and consolation in interwar France.33 As I show, a rich body of literature emerged at this time from psychology, physiology, and medicine that touted the physical, psychological, and emotional benefits of certain kinds of bodily movement. Although Ravel was certainly not the only composer to understand musique dépouillée as helpful in processing grief and trauma, he offers an especially interesting case study, and so I return to his compositions at various points throughout this chapter. My hope is that in demonstrating the physical, psychological, and emotional benefits of musique dépouillée, this chapter offers a new perspective on French interwar neoclassicism that takes into consideration the need that many musicians had for sonic stability, regularity, and comfort during and after so many years of living in unpredictable and disorienting sound worlds. In so doing, I turn the received narrative about mechanical modernism as “inhuman” on its head, demonstrating that music in the style dépouillée is paradoxically deeply human, even while sounding machinistic.

32 In a thought-provoking parallel, Paul Attinello questions whether minimalist music of the 1980s—which shares repetition and rhythmic regularity with musique dépouillée—could “at least partly be a cultural response to the threat of AIDS” in “Fever/Fragile/ Fatigue: Music, AIDS, Present, and . . . ,” in Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music, eds. Neil Lerner and Joseph N. Strauss (New York: Routledge, 2006), 13–22; 19–20. 33 Michel Faure has pointed out the interest in sports among Third Republic musicians, especially in the interwar period, demonstrating some of the ways in which this interest appears in his analysis in compositions through a return to Greekness, representations of sports in pieces like Honegger’s Skating-Rink , or increased attention to “urban” machinery and locales where sporting events might take place. See Faure, Musique et société, du second empire aux années vingt: Autour de Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Debussy et Ravel (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), 197–214; and Faure, Du Néoclassicisme musical dans la France du premier XXe siècle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1997), 181–190. 144 Resonant Recoveries

Rhythmic Fascination in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century France

Interwar musicians’ understandings of musical rhythm as a consolatory bodily technology emerged out of a burgeoning theoretical interest among musicians in fin-de- siècle France in the origins and physiological aspects of rhythmic experience. Although Dalcroze would come to be a central figure in the promotion of the health benefits of rhythmic musical movement in interwar Paris, Dalcroze’s interest in music and movement was part of more widespread French cultural and scientific fascinations with both musical rhythm and bodily exercise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the first figures to prompt investigations into rhythmic practices was the Swiss music theorist Mathis Lussy, who published one of the first book-length studies of rhythm and rhythmic practice in 1883. In the avant-propos to the book, he justified the necessity of his study, pointing out that rhythm had been heretofore neglected, even though it had been exceedingly important for Greek musicians.34 Composer, critic, and editor Victor Wilder praised Lussy’s study in a review for Ménestrel, expressing particular interest in Lussy’s proposition that the origins of musical rhythm were located in the regular movements of the body, including respiration.35 The depth and variation of interest in musical rhythm is demonstrated by the wealth of publications that addressed this topic, outlined in Table 3.1, that emerged in the 1880s and 1890s from theoreticians in myriad fields, including music theory, music history, performance, physiology, and psychology. Following Lussy’s lead, numerous authors addressed the importance of rhythm around this time, often advocating for scientific attention to rhythm by describing it as the most significant and yet undervalued aspect of music. In a 1905 piece for Le Mercure musical, the composer and music critic Armande de Polignac described rhythm as “the soul of music” and “of an essence more vital than melody and harmony.”36 In his 1909 study, La Logique du rythme musical, du Abbé Marcetteau similarly understood rhythm as “the form” of sound, as “the soul in that it vivifies it, spiritualizes it in part by the play of accentuation.”37 For numerous musicians, it was precisely rhythm’s ability to affect the nervous system that made it such a significant parameter of music. Clarinetist and composer Émile Stiévenard wrote in the Bulletin français de la S.I.M in 1909 that

34 Mathis Lussy, Le Rythme, son origine, sa function et son accentuation (Paris: Heugel, 1883). 35 Victor Wilder, “Du Rythme musical: À propos d’un nouveau livre de M. Mathis Lussy,” Ménestrel 49, no. 37 (August 12, 1883): 292–294. 36 Armande de Polignac, “Le Rythme,” Le Mercure musical 1, no. 2 (June 1, 1905): 57–58: “l’âme de la musique”; “d’une essence plus vitale que la mélodie et l’harmonie.” 37 Abbé Marcetteau, La Logique du rythme musical (Paris: Au Bureau d’édition de la “Schola,” 1909), 3. Soothing Movements 145

Table 3.1 French Texts Addressing Rhythm and Movement, c. 1850–1950

Publication Author Text Date

1856 Eugène Escallier Des Indications thérapeutiques fournies par le rhythme des phénomènes morbides 1859 Alexander Bain The Emotions and the Will 1865 Pierre Gratiolet De la physionomie et des mouvements d’expression 1868 Etienne-Jules Marey Du mouvement dans les fonctions de la vie 1880 Leon Reuschel Le Rôle de la mélodie, du rythme et de l’harmonie dans la musique chez tous les peuples de l’Europe depuis le Moyen-Âge jusqu’à l’époque actuelle 1880 Mathis Lussy Traité de l’expression musicale 1883 Mathis Lussy Le Rythme, son origine, sa fonction et son accentuation January 1886 Mathis Lussy “Corrélation entre la mesure et le rythme,” Ménestrel 1886 Abbé Jérôme- Essai sur le rythme en général et ses principales Dieudonné Tardif applications au chant 1886 Etienne-Jules Marey La Machine animale: Locomotion terrestre et aérienne 1887 Charles Féré Sensation et mouvement: Études expérimentales de psycho-mécanique 1889 Paul Souriau L’Estéthique du mouvement 1889 Charles Henry Éléments d’une théorie générale de la dynamogénie, autrement dit du contraste, du rythme et de la mesure: Avec applications spéciales aux sensations visuelle et auditive 1890 Fernand Lagrange Physiologie des exercices du corps 1891 Auguste Teppe Les Principes de tonalité et de rythme 1892 Raoul La Grasserie De l’élément psychique dans le rythme et de ses rapports avec l’élément phonique: Études de rythmique et d’esthétique 1895 Alfred Giraudet Mimique: Physionomie et gestes d’après le système de F. del Sartes 1896 Marie Jaëll La Musique et le psychophysiologie 1898 Émile Gouget Histoire musicale de la main, son rôle dans la notation, la tonalité, le rythme et l’exécution instrumentale: La Main des musiciens devant les sciences occultes 1899 Juan Cordero Un Essai sur l’unité du rythme Continued 146 Resonant Recoveries

Table 3.1 Continued

Publication Author Text Date 1901 Maurice Griveau La Sphère de beauté: Lois d’évolution, de rythme et d’harmonie dans les phénomènes esthétiques 1904 Marie Jaëll L’Intelligence et le rythme dans les mouvements artistiques June 1, 1905 Armande de Polignac “Le Rythme,” Le Mercure musical 1906 Gaston Deschamps Le Rythme de la vie 1906 Émile Gymnastique Rythmique, vol. 1 Jaques-Dalcroze 1907 Henri Goujon L’Expression du rythme mental dans la mélodie et dans la parole February and Émile Stiévenard “Le Rythme,” Bulletin français de la S.I.M., 5e March 1909 année, No. 2–3 July 15, 1909 Jean d’Udine (né “Qu’est-ce que le gymnastique rythmique?” Albert Cozanet) Bulletin français de la S.I.M. 1909 Abbé C. Marcetteau La Logique du rythme musical 1910 Émile Le Rythme au théâtre Jaques-Dalcroze 1911 Jean d’Udine “La Coordination des mouvements,” Bulletin de l’Institut Psychologique, no. 2 May 15, 1911 Elie Poirée “La Musique et la geste,” Revue musicale S.I.M. July 15, 1911 Anselme Vinée “Le Rythme de vibrations et rythme musical,” Revue musicale S.I.M. 1912 Edmond Monod Mathis Lussy et le rythme musical May 1, 1914 René Dumesnil “Psycho-Physiologie du Rythme Musical: Essai Historique et Critique,” Mercure de France 1914 Armand Demelin La Connaissance émotionnelle 1916–1924 Émile Le Rythme bulletin Jaques-Dalcroze 1916 Émile Exercices de plastique animée Jaques-Dalcroze 1916 Émile La Rythmique Jaques-Dalcroze 1918 Émile “La Rythmique, la plastique animée et la danse,” Jaques-Dalcroze Le Guide musical January 15, Jean d’Udine “La Danse: Hier et demain,” Courrier musical 1919 October Émile “La musique et l’enfant,” Ménestrel 24 and 31, Jaques-Dalcroze November 7 and 14, 1919 Soothing Movements 147

Table 3.1 Continued

Publication Author Text Date November René Dumesnil “Sur le rythme musical,” Mercure de France 16, 1919 1919 Anselme Vinée “Rythme et mètre unitaire,” Bulletin de la Société française de Musicologie, T.1, No. 4 1919 Dr. A. Challamel De l’influence de l’horloge sur le rythme du cœur 1919 Reynaldo Hahn De l’interprétation dans le chant: Le Rythme et la prosodie December André Schlemmer “La Méthode Jaques-Dalcroze,” Ménestrel 16, 1919, and January 1, 1920 February 20 Émile “L’Initiation du rythme,” Ménestrel and 27, 1920 Jaques-Dalcroze September 24 Émile “Le Rythme et l’imagination créatrice,” and October Jaques-Dalcroze Ménestrel 1, 1920 1920 Henri Dussart Influence du rythme de l’activité et de la répartition des pauses sur le rendement, au cours du travail musculaire 1920 Oscar Louis Forel Le Rythme: Étude psychologique 1921 Jean d’Udine Qu’est-ce que la danse? 1921 René Dumesnil Le Rythme musical: Essai historique et critique 1922 R. Barillot Du Rythme de l’écriture et de ses variations dans les graphismes des aliénés 1922 Émile “La Technique de la ‘Plastique Vivante,’ ” La Jaques-Dalcroze Revue de Genève February 9, André Schlemmer “La Rythmique et les aveugles,” Ménestrel 1923 August 15, Elie Fauré “Rythme de l’art,” Europe 1923 February Ernest Ansermet “Qu’est-ce que la ‘Rythmique’?” Le Rythme, 1924 numéro spécial, no. 12 [December Émile “Le Rythme: La Rythmique et l’éducation,” 1924] Jaques-Dalcroze Conferencia: Journal de l’université des annales [August] Isabel de Etchessary “Le Rythme: Le Mouvement et la danse,” 1925 Conferencia: Journal de l’université des annales November 1, Émile “La Technique intérieure du rythme,” La Revue 1925 Jaques-Dalcroze musicale 1926 Maurice Emmanuel “Le Rythme d’Euripide à Debussy,” Compte Rendu de 1er Congrès du Rythme Continued 148 Resonant Recoveries

Table 3.1 Continued

Publication Author Text Date 1926 Paul Souriau L’Entrainement au courage 1926 Pierre-Charles-Louis Le Rythme du cœur au cours de l’activité Merklen musculaire et notamment des exercices sportifs January 1933 Dom B. de Malherbe “Aux sources premières du rythme et de la musique,” La Revue musicale, 14e année, numéro 132 1935 Jean de La Gymnastique de la volonté Vignes-Rouges September– Jean Sergent “Rythme poétique et musique,” La Revue October 1935 musicale 1936 Gaston Bachelard “Rythmanalyse,” La Dialectique de la durée 1938 Matila C. Ghyka Essai sur le rythme April 15, 1938 J. Estève “Réflexions sur le rythme,”La Revue musicale 1939 Jean des Le Bonheur: Recettes d’optimisme Vignes-Rouges 1942 Anne Osmont Le Rythme: Créateur de forces et de formes 1947 Jean des Dictionnaire de la guérison Vignes-Rouges n.d. Service Vers une éducation du sens rythmique: Exercices départemental de la en salle de classe et sur espace libre avec: chants, jeunesse et des sports jeux dansés, évolutions, rondes, petites danses. de la Vienne

“rhythm is the active element in music in the sense that it acts especially on the nervous system.” For Stiévenard, rhythm “stimulates the will, develops force, electrifies the nervous fibers and facilitates certain efforts by regulating them.”38 He proceeded to give examples of instances when rhythm had had a positive effect on the nervous systems of individuals, citing the “joy of children for military music” and “the courage and endurance of the soldier” that was “excited by the rhythm of a drum.”39

38 Emile Stiévenard, “Le Rythme,” Bulletin français de la S.I.M. (February 15, 1909): 123–134; 125: “Le rythme est l’élément actif de la musique en ce sens qu’il agit particulièrement sur le système nerveux. [ . . . ] il stimule la volonté, développe la force, électrise les fibres nerveuses et facilite certains efforts en les réglant.” 39 Ibid., 125: “la joie des enfants pour la musique militaire” and “le courage et l’endurance du soldat sont excités par le rythme du tambour.” Soothing Movements 149

The physiological effects of musical rhythm dominated discussions of rhythm in the decade immediately preceding World War I. This is evident not only in Stiévenard’s article, but also in the work of the physician, literary critic, and mu- sicologist René Dumesnil. Trained in medicine and literature at the Sorbonne, Dumesnil published on literature, medicine, and music throughout his career. Just before World War I began, Dumesnil completed Le Rythme musical: Essai historique et critique, which, as he told his readers in the avant-propos of the volume when it was eventually published in 1921, was prevented from being published due to the onset of the conflict. Several segments of the book, however, appeared in Le Mercure de France prior to the book’s full publication, including an article entitled “Psycho-physiologie du rythme musical” that the journal published in 1914. In this lengthy essay, Dumesnil addressed myriad topics related to the physiological and psychological attributes and effects of musical rhythm. Like many theorists of rhythm before him, he argued for the centrality of rhythm to human activity and perception in noting that scientists differentiate sounds based on the rhythms of their vibrations, and that “rhythm is the constant law of muscular movements, and the energy of rhythmic movements is in strict relation with their frequency.” He asserted that “rhythm is thus a physiological necessity” and that musical rhythm “will be a corollary to the beating of the pulse, to the rhythm of walking.”40 One of Dumesnil’s main goals in this essay was to extol the therapeutic benefits of musical rhythm. He cites Nicolas de Blégny’s twelfth-century story, as told by Enlightenment-era physiologist Albrecht von Haller, of treating a wounded soldier and “discover[ing] by chance that the beating of a drum placed close to him during this operation singularly facilitated it and even procured in the patient an agreeable sensation.”41 After addressing how sound and rhythm affect not only the ear but also the whole body, Dumesnil returns to Blégny’s tale in order to argue that it “shows that tactile perception of rhythmic trembling is not free from playing a role more important than or- dinarily believed in the ensemble of strong, complex reactions of music on an organism.”42 For Dumesnil, it was not only the sound of rhythm, but also the

40 René Dumesil, “Psycho-physiologie du rythme musical: Essai historique et critique,” Le Mercure de France (May 1, 1914): 71–100; 76–77: “le rythme est la loi constante des mouvements musculaires et l’énergie des mouvements rythmiques est en rapport fixe avec leur fréquence”; “le rythme est donc une nécessité physiologique”; “le rythme musical serait un corollaire des battements du pouls, du rythme de la marche, etc.” 41 Albrecht von Haller, Physiologie, cited in ibid., 80: “découvert par hasard que les battements d’un tambour placé près de lui durant cette opération la facilitaient singulièrement et procuraient même au patient un agréable sensation.” 42 Ibid., 82: “montre que cette perception tactile de l’ébranlement rythmique n’est pas sans jouer un rôle plus important qu’on ne croit d’ordinaire dans l’ensemble des réactions fort complexes déterminées par la musique sur l’organisme.” 150 Resonant Recoveries feeling of it, that had positive or negative effects on one’s body. He likely came to know more about this in the years that followed this publication, when he served as a military doctor during the war, the experiences of which he detailed in L’Âme du médecin (1936). Although Dumesnil did not draw much from his war experiences for the book version of his essay on rhythm, he nevertheless expanded his discussion of rhythm’s physiological and emotional benefits to focus in his monograph even more on rhythm as healing. Most notably, he included the perspective of Goethe, as reported by Philarète Chasles, that “all emotion is musical. Rhythm expresses the shock of emotion and its condensed evolution. Rhythm walks, runs, is pre- cipitated, is broken. Whoever invents a new rhythm makes the blood in our veins circulate in a new way; it is the master of our pulse, it calms it or activates it in turn.”43 For Dumesnil, rhythmicized sound could have a profound effect on a person’s physical state of being and mood. And he was not alone among his modernist colleagues in understanding musical rhythm as holding physiological and at times therapeutic importance.

Mind-Body in Motion: Rhythm, Movement, and Health in Late Nineteenth-Century France

Dumesnil’s and other musicians’ ideas concerning relationships between rhythm and physiology were intertwined with transnational and international nineteenth-century discourses that addressed correlations between physiology and psychology—between movement, sensation, and physical health on the one hand, and mental and emotional states and processes on the other. Turning to these broader, international conversations about relationships between movement and emotion provides additional context for understanding how compel- ling assertions about the emotional and health benefits of musical movement would come to be in the early twentieth century. Aside from anthropologists and philosophers such as Charles Bell and Charles Darwin, who asserted specific connections between emotional states and their physiological and/or physiognomical expression, the Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain was one mid-nineteenth-century scholar whose argument that

43 Philarète Chasles, quoting Goethe in Études sur l’Allemagne ancienne et moderne (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1973; repr. Paris: Librairie d’Amyot, 1854), 347; cited in René Dumesnil, Le Rythme musical: Essai historique et critique (Paris: Mercure de France, 1921), 38: “Toute émotion est musicale. Le rythme exprime le choc de l’émotion et son évolution condensée. Le rythme marché, court, se précipite, se brise. Quiconque invente un nouveau rythme fait circuler le sang dans nos veines selon un mode nouveau; il est maître de nos pulsations, il en apaise ou en active le cours.” Soothing Movements 151 all emotional responses were embodied was especially influential throughout Europe. He wrote in his 1859 text The Emotions and the Will:

The state of Feeling, or the subjective consciousness which is known to each person by his own experience, is associated with a diffusive action over the system, through the medium of the cerebral hemispheres. In other words, the physical fact that accompanies and supports the mental fact, without making or constituting that fact is an agitation of all those bodily members more immediately allied with the brain by nervous communication.44

Bain acknowledged the cultural basis of emotion and emotional expression in noting that people are often taught to suppress certain emotions, but he simultaneously argued that, even if humans weren’t aware of their bodies participating in the feeling of an emotion or its expression, “no emotion, however tranquil, is possible without a full participation of the physical system.”45 Bain relies on this understanding of emotion in order to suggest that in instances of emotional suffering, comfort might be achieved through physical and conscious “active exercise,” or through “the exercise of the intellect.”46 Bain even suggested that “the effusive arts of song, the drama, music, the dance, with the forms and ceremo- nial used in the intercourse of society,” had the potential to vent, diffuse, or alter emotions.47 Bain’s ideas concerning the mind-body- emotion nexus provided the foundation for the fields of physiology and psychology in France throughout the nineteenth century.48 The psycho-physiologist Charles Féré, in Sensation et mouvement (1887), addressed correlations between physical and psychological states. He was especially concerned with how different vibratory movements, sensations, postures, and physiological processes in the body could shape or be shaped by a person’s emotional or psychical state. Just two years later, Paul Souriau published L’Esthétique du mouvement, in which he argued that physical movement could have a profound effect on mood, psychology, and well-being:

Movement will bring to us a positive physical pleasure. When we commit our- selves to an exercise, into which we place a lot of energy, all [bodily] functions

44 Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1859), 5. This text was widely read in France after it was translated into French from at least 1885. 45 Ibid., 8. 46 Ibid., 34. 47 Ibid., 65. 48 For additional examples of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century interest in movement, see Robert Brain, The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de- Siècle Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015), 52–63. 152 Resonant Recoveries

accelerate, the heart beats faster, respiration grows in frequency and depth, and we experience a general feeling of wellbeing. We live more intensely and are happy to live.49

According to Souriau, the movements and processes—whether physical or psychological—that made people happiest were those that brought them pleasure through minimizing effort and maximizing efficiency.50 In one chapter, Souriau based his definitions of effort and efficiency on the “natural rhythms” of the body, which, he explained, tend to be regular and repetitive, whether these occur consciously or unconsciously.51 Souriau asserted that each person has an “interior rhythm” created and disseminated throughout the body; however, in his formulation, an individual’s “interior rhythm” can be disturbed by the differing rhythmic vibrations of sound reaching the ears. Prefiguring music sociologist Tia DeNora’s assertions by more than a century, he suggested that music is a wonderful tool for “re-establishing” one’s “natural” or “interior” bodily rhythm:

Rhythmic entrainment is one of the most remarkable effects of music. When I listen to a fanfare, I don’t content myself to hear the sounds just as they are emitted: I sing them in myself, I make rhythmic movements in my throat, which, in virtue of the law of unification, must regulate also the cadence of my steps.52

For Souriau, then, music had the capability, through re-establishing rhythmic regularity, to make the body move more efficiently, thus enhancing pleasure and happiness. The physiologist Fernand Lagrange echoed Féré’s and Souriau’s arguments, asserting in Physiologie des exercices du corps (1890) that the gymnastic exercises that were then taking France—and Europe more broadly—by

49 Paul Souriau, L’Esthétique du mouvement (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1889), 16: “Enfin le mouvement nous procurera un plaisir physique positif. Quand nous nous livrons à un exercice où nous mettons beaucoup d’énergie, toutes les fonctions s’accélèrent, le cœur bat plus vite, la respiration augmente de fréquence et de profondeur, et nous éprouvons un sentiment général de bien-être. Nous vivons davantage et sommes heureux de vivre.” 50 Broader consideration of how an interest in efficiency sometimes accompanied ideas about modernity is outside the scope of this chapter. For one example of this tendency, see Emily Thompson, who discusses a similar interest in efficiency in the United States in the early twentieth century inThe Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 122–130. 51 Souriau, L’Esthétique du mouvement, 50–70. 52 Ibid., 70: “l’entraînement rythmique qui est un des effets les plus remarquables de la musique. Quand j’écoute une fanfare qui passe, je ne me contente pas d’entendre les sons à mesure qu’ils sont émis: je les chante en moi-même, je fais des efforts rythmiques du gosier, qui, en vertu de la loi d’unification, devront régler aussi la cadence de mes pas.” See Tia DeNora,Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 75–108. Soothing Movements 153 storm should be modified from person to person based on their physiological, psychological, and contextual specificities. In order to do this, he said, it was necessary to study how bodies operated in different modalities and degrees of exertion. Like Féré and Souriau, Lagrange understood an intimate, nuanced connection between bodily movement in the form of exercise and a person’s nervous system, emotions, and psyche. He saw music as an “entraining” art that could produce “peace of mind” in people, helping them to avoid “any depressive emotion.”53 Numerous nineteenth-century musicians paid attention to and developed the correlations between movement and emotions suggested by Souriau, Féré, Lagrange, and other psycho-physiologists. In several instances these musicians based their pedagogical methods on these correlations. The influential pianist, composer, and teacher Marie Jaëll worked closely with Féré as she developed her own understanding of the psycho-physiological links between the brain and the fingers that informed her pedagogical and artistic approach to playing the piano.54 Jaëll demonstrated her awareness of contemporary psycho-physiology in many of her writings, such as La Musique et le psychophysiologie (1896) and L’Intelligence et le rythme dans les mouvements artistiques (1904), where she cited not only Féré but also other important nineteenth-century figures in this and related fields, such as Alexander Bain, Étienne-Jules Marey, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Herbert Spencer.55 In La Musique et le psychophysiologie, Jaëll supported Bain’s assertion that the mind and body are not separate, but rather intimately and absolutely intertwined. She then used his work from The Mind and the Body to assert the importance of the pianist’s awareness of the physiological processes involved in any particular movement at the piano.56 Jaëll’s texts are littered with astute references to and expansions of contemporary psycho-physiology. Especially significant for grasping how early twentieth-century musicians understood the link between movement and emotion is the fact that Jaëll used discoveries from psycho-physiology to assert that the physical movement that takes place during music making significantly affects sensory perception (including auditory perception), as well as how and what people think and feel.57 As I discussed in chapter 2, Jaëll’s psycho-physiological theorizations of piano playing considered the relationship between the vibrations of the piano and

53 Fernand Lagrange, Physiologie des exercises du corps (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1890), 189, 354–355. 54 Thérèse Klipffel, “Biographie,” inMarie Jaëll: “Un Cerveau de philosophe et des doigts d’artiste,” ed. Laurent Hurpeau, with a preface by Alban Ramaut (Lyon: Symétrie, 2004), 5–32; 21–27. 55 Étienne-Jules Marey was one of the most notable physiologists in the nineteenth century, writing texts such as Du Mouvement dans les fonctions de la vie (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1868) and La Machine animale: Locomotion terrestre et aérienne, 4th ed. (Paris: Germer Baillière et Cie, 1886). 56 Marie Jaëll, La Musique et le psychophysiologie, 2nd ed. (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926), 5, 24. 57 Ibid., 37, 47–48. 154 Resonant Recoveries the performer as she played it. However, Jaëll was also fascinated with rhythm and its effects on the human mind, body, and emotions, as she demonstrated in almost all of her texts. In La Musique et le psychophysiologie, Jaëll contended that one of the three “essential foundations” in the “art of interpretation” was to “possess a unified conception of rhythm, in which rhythmic animation never deviates, because the assimilation of the smallest perceptible differences, in the modification of time in the same measure, has been acquired.”58 She built on this argument in L’Intelligence et le rythme dans les mouvements artistiques (1904), where she argued for the importance in musical performance of being conscious of every movement you make, claiming, as Dalcroze also alleged at about the same time, that for musicians, “consciousness [of movement] is so little developed that one could accuse it of rhythmic blindness.”59 For Jaëll this was an especially important aspect of musical performance to develop since the perception of movement, or kinesthesia, was intimately intertwined with consciousness, and having a more developed consciousness was integral to developing the level of musical thought that would improve one’s musical abilities, especially in terms of “musical touch” at the piano. Finally, in her method book Le Toucher (repr. 1927), Jaëll asserted that rhythmic phenomena had the potential to “re-establish order, and to change in this way the current of my thoughts,” even doing away with obsessive thoughts.60 She suggested that there was an “influence exercised by exterior rhythms on interior rhythms” and that, depending on the effects of these, there was “more or less well-being that comes of them.”61 For Jaëll, rhythm provided “images” of bodily entrainment that “oriented” people.62 This way of thinking about rhythm as bodily entrainment is also evident in some of the pedagogical pieces that Jaëll wrote for children, for instance in Sept pièces faciles.63 One of Marie Jaëll’s contemporaries, François Delsarte, offers another significant example of discourse concerning the relationship between movement, health, emotion, and the arts in the late nineteenth century. In the mid-nineteenth century, Delsarte—who had trained at the Paris Conservatoire as a singer, but,

58 Ibid., 97–98: “L’exécutant doit également posséder une conception unifié du rythme, dans laquelle l’animation rythmique ne dévie jamais, parce que l’assimilation des plus petites différences perceptibles, dans les modifications des temps d’une même mesure, a été acquise.” 59 Jaëll, L’Intelligence et le rythme dans les mouvements artistiques (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1904), 27– 28: “la conscience est si peu développée qu’on pourrait l’accuser de cécité rythmique.” 60 Jaëll, Le Toucher musical par l’éducation de la main (Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1927), 50. 61 Ibid., 52: “Ces contrastes des émotions éprouvées peuvent nous renseigner sur l’influence exercée par les rythmes extérieurs sur les rythmes intérieurs et sur le plus ou moins de bien-être qui s’en dégage.” 62 Ibid., 53. 63 Unfortunately, I have not been able to determine a definitive composition date for this suite of piano pieces, although the Bibliothèque Nationale de France catalogue lists it as being published 1899. Soothing Movements 155 after losing his voice, turned to teaching theater—began to develop a system for producing “realistic” emotional expression for the stage through examining how different kinds of bodily movement were central to performing emotions. In its US manifestation, Delsarte’s method, which he called his “System of Expression,” involved a series of gymnastic exercises designed to increase efficiency and thus grace of bodily movement. As one of his pupils and champions Eleanor Georgen explained, Delsarte’s exercises “act as a health restorer.” Moreover, if performed correctly, these expressive, movement-oriented exercises would allow their practitioners to outwardly express “inward emotions” effectively. Thus, claimed Georgen, the Delsarte system was beneficial for everyone from schoolchildren to “preachers, lawyers, orators, elocutionists or actors.”64 As Selma Landen Odem has demonstrated, Delsarte’s system was extremely influential in theater and music in the mid- to late nineteenth century, influencing everyone from actors, such as Edmond Got and Denis Stanislas Montalant, to dancers Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, and music teachers Nina Gorter and Dalcroze.65

Dalcroze and Wartime/Interwar Conceptions of Rhythm, Movement, and Health

Beginning around 1905, the relationship between musical rhythm, physical health, and mental and emotional well-being drew increased attention in Europe through the work of the Swiss composer and pedagogue Émile Jaques-Dalcroze and his Parisian student and collaborator, the dance instructor and scholar Jean d’Udine (né Albert Cozanet). After studying at the Geneva Conservatory, Dalcroze first became known in Europe as a composer. Following the success of his operatic and symphonic works in and beyond Paris, he became increasingly invested in pedagogy after noticing the difficulty that many of his students had in keeping time. Noting the absence of a systematic method for teaching students rhythm in the same way that solfège teaches pitch and harmony, Dalcroze developed a pedagogical system he called gymnastique rythmique or la rythmique, publishing the first of several method books in 1906. After taking classes with Dalcroze, d’Udine became enamored of this new pedagogical methodology, opening his own studio in Paris since Dalcroze was then based in Hellerau, and advocating the benefits ofgymnastique rythmique in music journals, such as the

64 Eleanor Georgen, The Delsarte System of Physical Culture (New York: Butterick, 1893), 5–7. 65 Selma Landen Odom, “Delsartean Traces in Dalcroze Eurythmics,” Mime Journal 23: Essays on François Delsarte (April 2005): 138–150. For more information on the influence and performance of Delsarte’s system in Parisian musical and artistic circles at the fin de siècle, see Samuel N. Dorf, Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance from Paris to Delphi, 1890–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 47–106. 156 Resonant Recoveries

Le Courrier musical, and at conferences, such as those held at the Institut Général Psychologie in Paris in January 1911.66 Although Dalcroze and d’Udine gained some success with their method in the years prior to World War I, gymnastique rythmique began to really take off in the years during and after the war. Between 1914 and 1940, Dalcroze published a slew of method books and texts that addressed the theoretical and physiological motivations of his method.67 In addition, during this time he published dozens of articles on different aspects of hisgymnastique rythmique in music journals in Paris, Geneva, and London, including La Revue musical, Le Monde musical, Comœdia, Conferencia, Mercure de France, Le Guide musical, and Revue de Genève. In this same period, he established centers for the study of gymnastique rythmique in Geneva, Paris, and London. He then began publishing a Bulletin that emerged from his work at his institute, and, at the same time, began teaching at the Paris Conservatoire and the École Normale de Musique, newly established by Alfred Cortot in 1919.68 In 1926 he held an international conference in Geneva dedicated to research on rhythm.69 Meanwhile, d’Udine continued to teach and write about Dalcroze’s method, opened his own school for teaching gymnastique rythmique in Paris (the École du Rythme), developed his own take on Dalcroze’s method that he explicated in his 1926 book, Traité complet de géométrie rythmique, and published several books on the topic of music, dance, and gymnastique rythmique in the Qu’est-ce que . . . ? series. The interwar years were therefore especially fruitful ones for the teaching and institutionalization of rhythmic gymnastics à la Dalcroze. The rhythmic, movement-based music pedagogy that Dalcroze brought to music schools in Germany, Switzerland, and France (and later to England and the United States) had broader aims than creating more proficient musicians. Dalcroze saw his brand of eurhythmics as a way to “calm the mind, strengthen the will, and establish order and clarity.”70 While music played an integral role in Dalcroze’s method—serving as the medium through which bodily

66 Jean d’Udine, “La Coordination des mouvements et la culture de la volonté par la Gymnastique Rythmique de Jaques Dalcroze,” Bulletin de l’Institut Psychologique, no. 2 (1911), BnF, Tolbiac, 8-R PIECE-12720. 67 Dalcroze published a method book, La Gymnastique rythmique (Paris: Alcan, 1915); a more theoretical discussion of his method, Le Rythme, la musique et l’éducation (Lausanne: Jobin, 1920); and an additional method book, Coordination et disordination des mouvements corporels (Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1935). 68 Several, although not all, issues of this bulletin are currently held at BnF, Mus., BP-368; AdS, 8-RO-12838. 69 The proceedings of this conference are in Compte Rendu du Ier Congrès du Rythme tenu à Genève du 16 au 18 août 1926, ed. Alfred Pfrimmer (Geneva: Secrétariat de l’Institut Jaques-Dalcroze, 1926). 70 Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Méthode de Jaques-Dalcroze: La Rythmique, enseignement pour le développement de l’instinct rythmique et métrique, du sens de l’harmonie plastique et de l’équilibre des mouvements, et pour la régularisation des habitudes motrices (Lausanne: Jobin, 1916–1917), 7: “De Soothing Movements 157 movements were performed—music making was not so much the end goal of the process as a key element to achieving the results he desired. In his words, “Music is a considerable psychic force, a result of our animist and expressive functions that, by way of its power of excitation and regularization, can regulate all of our vital functions.”71 Believing that everyone has “a music in them” that “constitutes an individual’s personality,” Dalcroze thought that an educational system that had as its goal “establishing close relations between the conscious and the unconscious, as well as stimulating and then ordering our sensations and our feelings, had to develop our personality,” with “personality” here defined as the music that all people have in themselves.72 He added that this was particularly necessary after the war, arguing that “only an artistic education grounded in large part in physical exercise could calm our overexcited nervous systems.”73 According to Dalcroze, he had found a way to calm tense, stressed individuals through his novel blend of musical art and rhythmic bodily movements that was not quite dance, but rather a kinesthetically focused, rhythmic, musical gymnastics. In so doing, he saw in his method a way to contribute to building a better, stronger, and more mindful postwar society. After 1914, Dalcroze increased demand for his method by emphasizing how it could assist in postwar social reconstruction. Like other music pedagogues— d’Udine, for example—he occasionally made the case for his corporeally engaging musical practice’s ability to prepare children and other citizens to defend the homeland, or at the very least to “fight for self-mastery and the power to place themselves, fully equipped, at the service of the human race.”74 More than this, however, Dalcroze touted the physiological, emotional, and psychological benefits of his method for individuals coping with war-related conditions and disorders. In a 1919 article he wrote for Le Monde musical, Dalcroze argued

plus ces exercices tendent à créer des habitudes motrices plus nombreuses, des réflexes, à obtenir pour le minimum d’effort le maximum d’effet, à tranquilliser ainsi l’esprit, à renforcer la volonté et à instaurer l’ordre et la clarté dans l’organisme.”

71 Ibid., 8: “C’est que la musique est une force psychique considérable, une résultante de nos fonctions animiques et expressives qui, de par son pouvoir d’excitation et de régularisation, peut régler toutes nos fonctions vitales.” 72 Ibid.: “Tout homme doit avoir la musique en soi. . . . Cette musique constitue la personnalité d’individu. J’estime qu’une éducation ayant pour but d’établir des relations intimes entre le conscient et l’inconscient, de stimuler, puis d’ordre nos sensations et nos sentiments, doit développer notre personnalité.” 73 Ibid., 10: “Après tout l’excitation guerrière qui nous anime en cette triste époque, il convient de songer sérieusement à demain. Une fois la guerre terminée, il ne faut pas que notre exaltation tombe à plat et meure faute d’aliments. Seule, une éducation artistique faisant une large part à l’exercice physique pourra apaiser notre système nerveux surexcité.” 74 Jaques-Dalcroze, Rhythm, Music and Education, trans. Harold F. Rubinstein (London: Riverside Press, 1967), x. See also Jean d’Udine, Qu’est-ce que la danse? (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1921), 7. 158 Resonant Recoveries that his method was the key to healing neurasthenia, a nervous and physical disorder—often linked to war trauma—from which Ravel and many others suffered during and after the war.75 Moreover, in a 1918 Le Guide musical article, he wrote that the ultimate goals of gymnastique rythmique were improved psychic focus, physical economy, and the development of character, achieved through “a regularization of nervous response for hypersensitive or disordered individuals.”76 The idea that musical movement could help one exteriorize their emotions in ways that were physiologically and psychologically beneficial was another key aspect of Dalcroze’s method, and one that intersected with theories of modern dance. In his 1921 book Qu’est-ce que la danse? d’Udine bemoaned how people of the upper classes had been taught to police their bodies from childhood, leading them to adopt “as complete a motor impassivity as possible” that, while poten- tially making them appear “greatly distinguished,” also rendered them “perfectly inexpressive, morose, and boring.”77 Like Dalcroze, d’Udine understood dance as something not to be performed on stage, but rather as an activity that was beneficial for everyone in society. He asserted that dancing could be advantageous in helping us to express “our sentimental selves”: “through such a nuanced expression of our sentimental emotions, and through its moving power, it translates, with as much force as the orchestra of a piece by Beethoven or Wagner, the storms of the soul.”78 Dalcroze similarly underlined the personal and societal benefits of emotional exteriorization through musical movement. He suggested that “evolving rhythmically and giving our entire bodies and souls to music is one of the greatest joys there is. Is it not joy of a supreme order to exteriorize without constraint [our] sorrows and joys? . . . This jouissance . . . provokes the

75 See A Ravel Reader, 154–206; Ravel’s correspondence between September 14, 1914, and September 21, 1920, is of particular interest. Neurasthenia was the term used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to describe a disorder that was understood at the time as somewhat akin to shell shock. While neurasthenia is not the same as the ailment that doctors today call post- traumatic stress disorder, it does share a number of symptoms with that disorder. For more on neurasthenia and its impact on another modernist composer, Charles Ives, see Gayle Sherwood, “Charles Ives and ‘Our National Malady,’” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 555–584; and Gayle Sherwood, “Charles Ives and Neurasthenia: A Response to Stuart Feder,” in Journal of the American Musicological Society 54, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 641–643. 76 Jaques-Dalcroze, “La Rythmique, la plastique animée et la danse,” in Le Guide musical 61, nos. 38–40 (1918): 652: “Tout ont pour but suprême un accroissement de la concentration psychique, une organisation claire de l’économie physique, une augmentation de la personnalité, grâce à une éducation progressive du système nerveux, un développement de la sensibilité chez les sujets insensibles ou peu sensibles et, au contraire, une régularisation des réactions nerveuses chez les individus hypersensibles et désordonnés.” 77 d’Udine, Qu’est-ce que la danse?, 13–14: “une impassibilité motrice aussi complète que possible”; “fort distinguées”; “parfaitement inexpressives, moroses et ennuyeuses.” 78 On d’Udine’s idea of music as an everyday practice, see Qu’est-ce que la danse?, 192–195; 194: “Par son expression si nuancé de nos émois sentimentaux, par son pouvoir pathétique, elle traduit, avec autant de puissance que l’orchestre d’un Beethoven ou d’un Wagner, les orages de l’âme.” Soothing Movements 159 blossoming of altruistic qualities necessary to a natural social life.”79 According to Dalcroze, the joy of evolving rhythmically by giving oneself to music had the ability to guide people to altruism. The physiological, mental, psychic, and emotional benefits of Dalcroze’s rhythmic practices were extolled by numerous interwar medical doctors and psychologists, many of whom Dalcroze quoted in his Bulletin. The doctor Maurice Delort, for instance, witnessed “in the health of men so troubled and unbalanced that come to me . . . an infinite gratitude for those who teach the beautiful law of rhythm.”80 Another doctor, André Schlemmer, published an article in Ménestrel in 1920 that Dalcroze reprinted in the Bulletin, in which he praised the mood-altering benefits of Dalcroze’s method by focusing on the joy that eurythmic practice brings:

Joy to feel that music live in oneself, joy to feel one’s body stronger, more one’s own, thirsting for movement; joy to be master of oneself, to have the desire to desire; joy to be able to satisfy one’s soul; joy of being inundated with natural, social, and spiritual forces. . . . A lesson of rythmique is a perpetual effort of the entire being; it keeps without ceasing a very serious and pedagogical character, and yet we can affirm, without fear of being contradicted by anyrythmicien , that no worry, no sadness is able to put up resistance to a session of rythmique, regardless of how little the professor might be well-inspired or [how little] the atmosphere of the class might be as it should be.81

For Schlemmer, Dalcroze’s method had the potential to alter the emotions of those who practiced it.82

79 Jaques-Dalcroze, “La Rythmique, la plastique animée et la danse,” 659: “La joie d’évoluer rythmiquement et de donner tout son corps et toute son âme à la musique qui nous guide et nous inspire est une des plus grandes qui puissent exister. . . . N’est-ce pas une jouissance d’ordre supérieur . . . que d’extérioriser sans contrainte nos douleurs et nos joies . . . cette jouissance . . . provoque l’épanouissement des qualités d’altruisme nécessaires à l’établissement d’une vie sociale naturelle.” 80 Maurice Delort [Ancien interne des Hôpitaux de Paris] to Jaques-Dalcroze, November 1923, published in Bulletin de l’Institut Jaques-Dalcroze (1924): 61: “Je vois dans la santé des hommes tant de troubles et de déséquilibres qu’il me vient, plus qu’à un autre, je pense, une infini reconnaissance pour ceux qui enseignent la belle loi du rythme.” 81 André Schlemmer to Jaques-Dalcroze, November 1923, published in Bulletin de l’Institut Jaques-Dalcroze (1924): 63: “Joie de sentir la musique vivre en soi, joie de sentir son corps plus fort, plus soi, assoiffé de mouvement; joie d’être maître de soi, d’avoir envie de vouloir; joie de pouvoir étancher son âme; joie d’être inondé de forces naturelles, sociales, spirituelles. Une leçon de Rythmique est un perpétuel effort de tout l’être; elle garde sans cesse un caractère très sérieux et pédagogique, et pourtant nous pouvons affirmer, sans crainte d’être contredit par un seul rythmicien, qu’aucune préoccupation, aucune tristesse ne peut résister à une séance de rythmique, pour peu que le professeur soit bien inspiré et que l’atmosphère du cours soit ce qu’il doit être. . . .” 82 Schlemmer also published a report on a conference organized by Jaques-Dalcroze on “la Rythmique et les aveugles” (la Rythmique and the blind) in which he says that “it is, [Jaques- Dalcroze] tells us, by the music that a blind person must find not only their best auditory joys, artistic and mental, but also the education of their tactile and muscular senses, the liberty, the equilibrium, 160 Resonant Recoveries

A closer look at two interwar French doctors—Léon Weber-Bauler and Oscar Louis Forel—who worked intimately with Dalcroze sheds light on how doctors and musicians understood rhythmic musical movement as beneficial for emotional well-being. Léon Weber-Bauler worked at the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze in the 1920s. He asserted in a 1924 article that the Dalcrozian method could improve an individual’s entire well-being, allowing one not only to express emotions through musical movement, but also to improve one’s reflexes.83 He wrote, “To be assimilated to the rhythms that emerge from repetition and automatisms is definitely to listen, comprehend, express oneself, and to help others understand that which nature gives us so freely, our own psychological life, and that of others.”84 Two years later, Weber-Bauler presented a paper at the first Congrès du Rythme in Geneva on his use of rhythmic gestures in psychotherapeutic work with patients suffering from nervous conditions including depression, phobias, abulia, and asthenia. In addition to detailing how he built on Émile Coué’s autosuggestive method by asking patients to perform bodily gestures in time that come to be associated with specific ideas, emotions, or feelings, Weber-Bauler emphasized the effectiveness he found in using rhythmic massage on patients.85 By “distinctly rhythmicizing” his manipulations, he relayed, he “creates a material hold, a veritable physical possession of the patient by the doctor” in which the “rhythmic maneuvers tend to interrupt the [patient’s psychic] fixation, since movement means mutation, and rhythm means harmonization, order, and re- flex.”86 These movements, he observed, could return the patient to a calm state, and the joy of their movements, and even a feeling of sureness and of confidence in themselves.” Schlemmer, “La Rythmique et les aveugles,” Ménestrel (February 9, 1923): 67.

83 I will focus here on Léon Weber-Bauler. However, a broader study might be undertaken detailing the medical and psychotherapeutic communities’ reception of the méthode dalcrozienne. Other medical professionals include the speakers at the 1er Congrès du Rythme in 1926, the proceedings of which were published in Compte Rendu du Ier Congrès du Rythme, cited earlier. 84 Weber-Bauler, “Le Rythme et le bilan d’esprit,” Le Rythme (Méthode Jaques-Dalcroze), publié par l’Institut Jaques-Dalcroze , Numéro spécial, no. 12 (1924): 26–29; 27: “Or, s’assimiler des rythmes, issus de la répétition et générateurs d’automatismes, c’est en définitive apprendre à s’écouter, à saisir, à exprimer, à faire comprendre aussi aux autres, ceux que nous répartissent si libéralement la nature, notre propre vie psychologique ou celle des autres hommes.” 85 In the 1920s the psychologist Émile Coué began publishing texts on his method of autosuggestion, whereby patients adopted positive mantras in order to improve their self-image and mood. See Émile Coué, Maîtrise de soi-même par l’autosuggestion consciente (Nancy: C. Pierson, 1924; reprinted from 1923 edition published by the author); René Centassi, Tous les jours, de mieux et mieux: Émile Coué et sa méthode réhabilités (Paris: R. Laffont, 1990); and Hervé Guillemain,La Méthode Coué: Histoire d’une pratique de guérison au XXe siècle (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2010). 86 Weber-Bauler, “Le Rôle du geste rythmé dans la pratique psychothérapeutique,” in Compte rendu du Ier Congrès du Rythme, 345–349; 347: “Mais j’ai modifié la méthode primitive en deux points; d’une part en rythmant très nettement mes manipulations et, d’autre part en étudiant mes attitudes motrices et mes gestes, auxquels je donne, au plus haut degré possible, une allure également rythmique. . . . Or, les manipulations, succédant à une analyse du caractère du malade et des circonstances de la vie par la méthode verbale, créent une emprise matérielle, une véritable possession physique du malade par le médecin, du plus puissant effet suggestif, sans parler de l’effet de Soothing Movements 161

“relieve psychodynamic tensions,” and make the patient more receptive to the therapeutic verbal suggestions of the therapist.87 Weber-Bauler stressed how important it was that the psychotherapist be the dispenser of these massages, since this “places the doctor in intimate, material, and corporeal contact with the patient in order to create a real or suggested sensation of strength and har- m ony.” 88 Seemingly influenced by Henri Bergson’s theorizations of embodied memory, Weber-Bauler asserted that gestures, movements, and touches were stronger purveyors of memory than words.89 He urged other psychotherapists to practice rhythmic massage on their patients and perform rhythmicized and spatialized gestures with them in order to comfort, relax, and reassure them, while simultaneously helping them to work through their psychic trauma ver- bally and gesturally. By adopting rhythmic movement, psychotherapists could help patients improve or dispel their nervous conditions, or at least suggest new psycho-physiological pathways for coping with their physical and psychological ailments. He added that while these gestures were effective on their own, music, including the musical-rhythmic exercises of Dalcroze’s method, could be a helpful supplement.90 The psychologist Oscar Forel touted the benefits of rhythmic practice for psychological and physiological health in the years following World War I. Forel’s doctoral thesis—a psychological study of rhythm—detailed his understanding of the relationship between rhythmic practice and mental/emotional health, as well as how he saw Dalcroze’s method as interacting with both.91 From Forel’s thesis we learn that he imagined a fundamental relationship between emotion and movement that was created through rhythm:

The passions are externalized through motor responses; they modify our regular rhythms. Musical rhythm is the same in imitating these modifications up through the most subtle details. [ . . . ] In both cases, it’s a matter of détente ou d’excitation suivant le cas. D’autre part l’action des manœuvres rythmées tend à rompre la fixation, car qui dit mouvement dit mutation, qui dit rythme dit harmonisation, ordre, automatisme.”

87 Ibid., 347: “L’effet verbal suggestif et pédagogique, aidant l’effet périphérique de la manipulation rythmée, pénètre sous forme d’images motrices du même caractère harmonieux, tend à ramener le calme ou à rompre les tensions psychodynamiques sans aucune fatigue pour le malade puisqu’il reste passif dans l’attitude de la réceptivité.” 88 Ibid., 346: “Il faut que le massage soit pratiqué, non pas par un baigneur, mais par le médecin psychothérapeute lui-même et il faut que les manipulations aient, en dehors de l’effet organique, deux buts: mettre le médecin en contact intime, matériel, corporel, avec le malade et arriver à une sensation réelle ou suggérée, de force et d’harmonie.” Emphasis in the original. 89 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Macmillan, 1912). I discuss Bergson’s ideas about memory at the fin de siècle, as well as his influence on French modernist musicians, in greater detail inchapter 4. 90 Weber-Bauler, “Le Rôle du geste rythmé dans la pratique psychothérapeutique,” 348. 91 Oscar Louis Forel, Le Rythme. Étude psychologique (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1920). 162 Resonant Recoveries

movements: the affective sphere expresses itself through movements, with a preference for movements that generate noise; sonorous rhythms, in return, penetrate the affective sphere and deliver to it their movements.92

Building on the ideas of nineteenth-century philosophers and physiologists like Féré and Souriau, Forel asserted that regular and repeated rhythms were capable of transforming human emotions:

When . . . we are already taken by a violent emotion, the perceived rhythms, the rhythms of a well-organized music in particular, impose their will by their intensity and their tenacious repetition; they act by putting into order our disordered emotions since they strongly support those of our own rhythms to which they correspond and against which the arrhythmia of our emotion comes to be broken or with which it finishes by becoming confused, subjugated little by little, contained, and enclosed.93

He emphasized this connection a few pages later in writing that “rhythms that are imposed on us from the outside (by music, for example) will act necessarily, quantitatively, on our affective sphere. From this a logical conclusion emerges: rhythms can have an important moral and social influence at the same level of all other types of suggestion (reading, speech, painting, etc.).”94 The con- viction and emphasis with which Forel wrote these words suggests that this was what he set out to prove in his thesis, and the next section—devoted entirely to Dalcroze’s gymnastique rythmique—seems to confirm this reading. While returning consistently to the idea that social education prevents many people from exteriorizing and expressing their felt emotions, Forel provided numerous examples of instances when music—and specifically musical rhythms—had been used to provide mentally ill, grieving, or traumatized people, or those with nervous system issues, with means for expressing feelings,

92 Ibid., 56: “Les passions s’extériorisent par des réactions motrices; elles modifient nos rythmes habituels. Le rythme musical est à même d’imiter ces modifications jusque dans les détails les plus subtils. [ . . . ] Dans les deux cas il s’agit de mouvements: la sphère affective s’exprime par des mouvements, de préférence par des mouvements générateurs de bruit; les rythmes sonores, en retour, pénétrant la sphère affective et lui communiquent leurs mouvements.” 93 Ibid., 64: “Lorsque au contraire nous sommes déjà en proie à une émotion violente, les rythmes perçus, les rythmes d’une musique bien ordonnée en particulier, imposent leur volonté par leur intensité et leur répétition tenace; ils agissent en mettant de l’ordre dans nos émotions désordonnées, car ils secondent puissamment ceux de nos propres rythmes auxquels ils correspondent et contre lesquels l’arythmie de notre émotion vient se briser ou avec lesquels elle finit par se confondre, subjuguée peu à peu, contenue et englobée.” 94 Ibid., 70: “les rythmes qui nous sont imposés du dehors (par la musique par example) agiront nécessairement qualitativement sur notre sphère affective. D’où la conclusion logique: les rythmes peuvent avoir une influence morale et sociale importante au même titre que tout autre suggestion (la lecture, la parole, la peinture, etc.).” Emphasis in the original. Soothing Movements 163 or receiving release and/or relief from distress, even if only temporarily. He articulated that he was searching for a healing methodology not based on speech, but rather “a rational method of re-education and teaching destined to teach the realization of the infinitely varied movements of the affective sphere, and [that] would contribute to perfecting the results of a psychotherapy still too ‘intellectual’ and symptomatic, and not psycho-physiological enough.”95 Ideally, he said, this should be a treatment that occurs quickly with the express goal of assisting people with the kind of psycho-physiological re-education he felt they required:

It is necessary to provide them with a special school of psycho-physical re- education that provides them with their lost confidence by giving them physical flexibility, skill, and endurance, at the same time as giving them direction and mastery of their motor system. A method analogous to that of Dalcroze but specially adapted to the psycho-therapeutic goal that we have indicated, would be without doubt capable of rendering great services to neurology.96

Forel was especially concerned with the benefits of a multifaceted rhythmic engagement that would allow people to create and entrain their bodies through a large variety of rhythms, often at the same time. This kind of rhythmic engagement, in fostering independence of limb movement and other kinds of bodily “rhythmic dissociation,” could ostensibly assist people in physiologically and psychologically preparing for a wide variety of situations that they might encounter. His experiments in training soldiers in gymnastics, for instance, demonstrated that

these exercises represent in some way a gymnastics of attention and will, they develop necessarily the quality of motor activation and mental relaxation through the fact even of their diversity. This method fights with success against “laziness,” this is to say, against the tendency elsewhere very useful, that obeys the law of least effort, of that of the economy of forces.97

95 Ibid., 99: “une méthode rationnelle de rééducation et d’enseignement destinée à apprendre la réalisation des mouvements infiniment variés de la sphère affective, contribuerait à parfaire les résultats d’une psychothérapie encore trop ‘intellectuelle’ et symptomatique, et pas assez psycho-physiologique.” 96 Ibid., 99: “il leur faut une école spéciale de rééducation psycho-physiologique qui leur rende la confiance perdue en leur donnant la souplesse, l’habilité et l’endurance physique, en même temps que la direction, la maîtrise de leur système moteur. Une méthode analogue à celle de Dalcroze mais adaptée spécialement au but psycho-thérapeutique que nous avons indiqué, serait sans doute à même de rendre de grands services à la neurologie.” Emphasis in the original. 97 Ibid., 102: “Ces exercices représentent en quelque sorte une gymnastique de l’attention et de la volition, ils développent nécessairement la qualité de l’innervation motrice et assouplissement l’esprit par le fait même de leur diversité. Cette méthode lutte avec succès contre la ‘paresse,’ c’est à dire contre la tendance d’ailleurs très utile, qui obéit à la loi du moindre effort, à celle de l’économie des forces.” 164 Resonant Recoveries

He closed his thesis in the same way that he closed the paper that he presented at the 1er Congrès du Rythme in Geneva in 1926, arguing that the “psycho- physiological reeducation” provided by Dalcroze’s Rythmique would “come to perfect the results of the psychotherapeutic treatment . . . and repair the wrongs of a defective education that hinders the free flourishing of the harmonious play of the plastic functions of the nervous system.”98 For Forel, Dalcroze’s eurhythmics provided a model for a psychologically and physiologically beneficial pedagogy that could be used with a wide variety of populations, including soldiers, children, and civilian adults. Ideas concerning relationships between music, movement, and health were not limited to Dalcroze and the doctors and musicians in his circle. Articles that appeared in Paris médical between 1914 and 1918 do not focus on music specifically as a means of therapy for wounded and traumatized soldiers, though authors frequently addressed other movement-based therapies such as mécanothérapie, physical education, and massage. Mécanothérapie, in particular, focused on movement, and the pages of Paris médical exhibited features that included all of the latest devices for helping wounded men to regain feeling, strength, and mobility in limbs and muscles that had been injured in the war.99 As we learn not from Paris médical, but rather from a nurse named Laurence Binyon who worked at the hospital at Royaumont Abbey during the war, sometimes nurses used musical instruments to facilitate mécanothérapie, especially when other devices were in short supply:

In an upper room, devoted to massage and the exercising of stiffened limbs— mécanothérapie as the doctors call it—I found a dwarf harmonium and a sewing-machine. After asking what these were for, she was told that they had been found in the abbey building and impressed into the hospital service. For exercising arms and feet both these instruments were discovered to be as admirable as the most costly and up-to- date apparatus.100

Therapies that centered on movement and music were key aspects of the popular psychology books published by Jean des Vignes-Rouges (né Jean Taboureau) in the decades immediately following the war. A soldier and psychologist, Vignes-Rouges published two very well-received war novels before the end of the war, but turned to writing psychology texts after the Armistice.

98 Forel, “Le Rôle du rythme en physiologie et psycho-pathologie,” in Compte rendu du 1er Congrès du Rythme, 307–16; 316. 99 See Paris médical, (March 20, 1915); (August 28, 1915); (October 9, 1915); (January 6, 1917). 100 Laurence Binyon, For Dauntless France: An Account of Britain’s Aid to the French Wounded and Victims of the War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918), 245. Soothing Movements 165

These texts were designed to reach all readers, even those without much experience in psychology and physiology. Vignes-Rouges’s focus on personal happiness, as well as the wide range of approaches he suggests to achieving happiness, make these books appear as forerunners to today’s popular self- help literature. Vignes-Rouges prescribed activities, tactics, and procedures for achieving happiness, health, and well-being in books like La Gymnastique de la volonté (1935); Le Bonheur: Recettes d’optimisme (1939), Dissipez vos soucis! La Psychanalyse au service du bonheur (1939); and Dictionnaire de la guérison (1947). Seeming to follow on Coué’s then-popular methods, Vignes-Rouges suggested in La Gymnastique de la volonté that readers begin utilizing a variety of mantras, which he calls “mental gymnastic exercises,” in order to achieve their preferred states of being. But he also emphasized that his theorizations of well-being were predicated on a body-mind connection in which one’s emotions, thoughts, and feelings influenced the state of one’s body and vice versa. Although he does not mention Dalcroze or d’Udine, Vignes-Rouges must have been at least somewhat familiar with their theorizations since he suggested that well-being was dependent on one’s actions and body being ap- propriately rhythmicized, both at macro (i.e., rituals, meals, etc.) and micro (i.e., in one’s circulation, breathing, and bodily movements) levels. He noted that each person has a different rhythm or different rhythms that work(s) best for him or her, and that sound, including music, had the ability to alter bodily rhythms. In order to strengthen one’s rhythmic sense, he recommended working with a metronome. Vignes-Rouges even seems to prefigure Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy, a movement- based therapeutic technique developed for trauma survivors in the 1990s that sounds remarkably similar to what he described in La Gymnastique de la volonté:

One can even closely associate the visual image [a line graph representing some desired aspect of self] and the auditory image in listening to the beating of a metronome, while the eyes follow the waves or the zig-zags of the line. After a few sessions of exercises of this type, it will suffice to glance at the graph in order to call back to order our unconscious and to place it in the cadence that we judge useful for our activity.101

101 Jean des Vignes-Rouges, La Gymnastique de la volonté: Méthode pratique d’éducation du caractère (Paris: Éditions J. Oliven, 1935), 173–174: “On peut même associer étroitement l’image visuelle et l’image auditive en écoutant les battements d’un métronome pendant que les yeux suivent les ondulations ou les zig-zags de la ligne. Après quelques séances d’exercices de ce genre, il suffira d’un coup d’œil sur le schéma pour rappeler à l’ordre notre inconscient et le mettre à la cadence que nous jugeons utile de donner à notre activité.” 166 Resonant Recoveries

Although Vignes-Rouges does not seem to be especially concerned with trauma here, his suggestion regarding a connection between rhythmic eye movement and consciousness prefigures psychologists’ findings that EMDR can help to alle- viate flashbacks, hyperarousal, and other aftereffects of traumatic events by integrating these into consciousness through rhythmic eye movements made while focusing on the traumatic event.102 In Bonheur and the Dictionnaire de guérison, Vignes-Rouges suggested further ways that happiness might be achieved. In Bonheur he focused largely on eating well, practicing smiling through “facial gymnastics,” seeking out laughter and happy people, and keeping one’s body in good shape, which could keep the mind in good shape and one’s emotions positive. In his Dictionnaire, Vignes- Rouges reiterated many of these suggestions for happiness, while also underlining the extent to which he understood emotions, thoughts, and physical bodies as connected; he suggested that willful thought had the ability to reshape our bodies and thus mood and well-being. Many modalities of healing that he discussed in his Dictionnaire are body- and movement-based: gestural therapy, rhythmic therapy, intentional immobility, massage, reflexology, speech- and other voice-based therapies, and music therapy. At the beginning of his entry on music therapy, he asserted that at the time, “all psychologists are just about in agreement to concede that music is born of movement,” in particular, internal bodily movements such as breathing and the pumping of blood.103 In Vignes- Rouges’s formulation, music therapy worked in a few distinct ways: not only did it operate through vibrations (a way of thinking that I detailed in chapter 2), but it also could change a person’s mood and provoke people to change their bodily movements, either through calming them (i.e., slowing down their bodily functions), or through stimulating their bodies to pump blood faster and breathe more quickly.104 Although Vignes-Rouges did not cite Dalcroze or any of his associates, his emphasis on music’s and movement’s abilities to influence health and well-being aligned with many of Dalcroze’s ideas. This would suggest, then, that the two men were operating in similar philosophies of thought concerning the potentiality of music and movement to positively affect physical, psychological, and emotional states.

102 See Roger M. Solomon and Francine Shapiro, “Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing: A Therapeutic Tool for Trauma and Grief,” inDeath and Trauma: The Traumatology of Grieving, eds. Charles R. Figley, Brian E. Bride, and Nicholas Mazza (Washington, DC: Taylor & France, 1997), 231–245; and Bessel Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Viking, 2014), 248–262. 103 Jean des Vignes-Rouges, Dictionnaire de la guérison: Hygiène mentale, traitement psychique des maladies, conseil et exhortations aux maladies (Paris: Éditions J. Oliven, 1947), 188. 104 Ibid., 188–192. Soothing Movements 167

Gymnastique rythmique in Parisian Modernist Musical Circles

Gymnastique rythmique, as publicized by Émile Jaques-Dalcroze and Jean d’Udine, was extremely popular with French modernist musicians and dancers, including many who had survived difficult emotional experiences during and after the war. The most famous musicians in Paris were familiar with Dalcroze’s method, especially given his positions on the faculty and the frequent demonstrations that he gave at the École Normale de Musique and the Paris Conservatoire when he was living in Paris in the early 1920s. Alfred Cortot, a virtuoso pianist and the director of the École Normale de Musique, was a fan of his method, as indicated by a letter he wrote to d’Udine in May 1910 asking if he would be willing to teach a private session of gymnastique rythmique to him, his wife, and several of their friends.105 It may have even been d’Udine who suggested that Cortot hire Dalcroze to teach at the École Normale in the 1920s. Nadia Boulanger—one of Cortot’s and Dalcroze’s colleagues at the École Normale—was also definitely aware of Dalcroze’s method since she wrote in her agenda for March 5, 1923: “Séance J. Dalcroze.”106 In the 1910s, Dalcroze’s method began to shape training and choreography of modern dance in Paris. In her memoirs, the famous Ballets Russes choreog- rapher and dancer Bronislava Nijinska recounted a visit to Dalcroze’s studio in Hellerau in the winter of 1912–1913 with her brother, Vaslav Nijinsky, and the Ballet Russes’s impresario Serge Diaghilev prior to Le Sacre de printemps’s premiere, as well as Diaghilev’s decision to hire one of Dalcroze’s students, Marie Rambert, to work with the company’s dancers in preparation for this production’s difficult choreography.107 In addition, as Lynn Garafola has addressed, some of Paris’s most famous dancers—such as Caryathis (née Elise Toulemon), Ariane Hugon, and Djemil-Anik—studied with d’Udine at his École du Rythme.108 In 1917, Jacques Rouché, the director of the Paris Opéra, appointed Jane Erb as the director of a newly formed eurhythmics department within the Opéra’s Corps du Ballet. Rouché claimed to have been inspired by visiting Dalcroze’s school in Hellerau in 1913 and 1914.109 Although many dancers, composers,

105 Alfred Cortot to Jean d’Udine, May 5, 1910, BnF, Opéra, LAS CORTOT (ALFRED) 10. 106 Nadia Boulanger, Agendas, March 5, 1923, BnF, Mus., Res. Vmf. Dos. 90. 107 Bronislava Nijinska, Early Memoirs, trans. and ed. Irina Nijinska and Jean Rawlinson, with an intro. by Anna Kisselgoff (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 451–455. In Nijinska’s telling, bringing in a rythmicienne to work with the Ballet Russes’s professional dancers did not go over especially well. For information regarding Dalcroze’s pre–World War I career and his influence on the choreography of the Ballets Russes in the early twentieth century, see Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 101–108. 108 Lynn Garafola, “Forgotten Interlude: Eurythmic Dancers at the Paris Opéra,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 13, no. 1 (Summer 1995): 59–83; 63–64. 109 Ibid., 65. 168 Resonant Recoveries choreographers, and musicians objected to Rouché’s establishment of the eurhythmics department at the Paris Opéra, a good number of others—including modernist composers such as Arthur Honegger—approved of the decision.110 A lengthy “testimonial” segment of Dalcroze’s Bulletin from 1924 provides overwhelming evidence that the most active and pedagogically notable interwar French musicians knew and respected Dalcroze’s method. Over more than fifty pages, praise for Dalcroze’s method appears from performers, composers, critics, doctors, and professors from Switzerland, France, Germany, England, Denmark, Spain, and the United States. The portion of the testimonials segment devoted to commentators in France reads like a “who’s who” of postwar Parisian musical life, demonstrating the support that existed for Dalcroze eurythmics among everyone from temperamental critics like Gaston Carraud and Théodore Lindenlaub, to conductors such as Camille Chevillard and Gabriel Pierné. Some of Paris’s most notable composers lauded the benefits of Dalcroze’s method. Regardless of their individual political or ideological positions, musicians as varied as Vincent d’Indy, Joseph Guy-Ropartz, Arthur Honegger, Gabriel Fauré, André Messager, and Albert Roussel all confirmed the physiological and pedagogical advantages of the method. Similarly, several pianists who often resided in opposing stylistic or methodological camps spoke positively about the benefits of Dalcroze’s methods for their students’ development as well as their own playing, including Blanche Selva, Edouard Risler, Marie Panthès, Isidor Philipp, and Ernest Lévy. Many musicians stressed not just the benefits of Dalcroze’s method for music education but also the ways in which Dalcroze eurhythmics helped them to establish balance or order vis-à- vis their emotions during difficult times. The -pop ularity of Dalcroze’s method—often taught through d’Udine—among modernist musicians during and after World War I is especially striking. Those in avant- garde social circles, as well as musicians who were training at the Conservatoire, often took advantage of Dalcroze’s method during the war. Germaine Tailleferre—the composer of numerous style dépouillé compositions, for instance her String Quartet, which dates from the war—relayed in her memoirs the social and emotional importance of Dalcroze eurythmics:

Our established existence in the war began to weigh heavily with upsetting news that we feared, the daily worry that we felt for my brother and brother-in- law, both still at the front. Big Bertha began her regular bombardment of Paris. . . . And yet nothing had changed in the sad monotony of my existence; the only distraction that I allowed myself consisted of doing gymnasatique rythmique according to Jaques-Dalcroze’s method, in the company of the violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange and the daughter of Jacques Rouché. Léon-Paul Fargue,

110 Ibid., 66. Soothing Movements 169

who was their friend, attended our course, hidden behind curtains, and we benefited from all of his antics; his presence reassured us and helped us to bear the horror and the boredom of this existence.111

In her account, Tailleferre stresses the emotional importance that participating in gymnastique rythmique held for her during a stressful and trying time, while also indicating the popularity of the method within Parisian musical circles. It is notable, for instance, that Jourdan-Morhange’s husband was killed in 1916, and that both she and Léon-Paul Fargue were or would become close friends with Ravel and Marguerite Long, both of whom were struggling with losses in the years during and after the war. Similarly, Jean Cocteau wrote in 1923 that “in the midst of a vague, confusing, fluctuating, impressionist time, you saved the movement of the body. You knew how to maintain a straight line between the old order and the new order. Through the mediation of the late Thévenaz, in 1913 you helped me to understand the urgency of rhythm and of a deep architecture. I send you my great gratitude.”112 Thus during the teens and 1920s—as France and Paris in particular were coping with widespread physical, emotional, and cultural trauma—rhythm in a wide variety of forms was being touted and experienced as an important technology of the body that could aid not only in musical practices but also in health, mood, concentration, and well-being. Musicians in interwar Paris not only participated in and openly praised Dalcroze’s rhythmic gymnastics; many also made compositional and performance choices that aligned with the aesthetics and aims of his eurythmic method. I should be clear that—as demonstrated by the medical interpretations of Dalcroze’s method by doctors Weber-Bauler and Forel noted earlier—there are many ways in which Dalcroze’s aesthetics and aims might be interpreted. One of the ways in which Dalcroze’s method resonated with the music composed and performed by his interwar contemporaries was through these pieces’ tendencies to incorporate repetitive, rhythmically regular,

111 Germaine Tailleferre, “Mémoires à la emporte-pièce,” ed. Frédéric Robert, Revue international de musique française 19 (February 1986): 6–82; 22–23: “Notre existence installée dans la guerre commençait à passer lourdement avec les nouvelles angoissantes que nous redoutions, l’inquiétude quotidienne que nous ressentions pour mon frère et mon beau-frère toujours au front. La grosse Bertha commençait son bombardement régulier sur Paris. . . . Et pourtant rien n’avait changer dans la triste monotonie de mon existence; la seule distraction que je m’étais imposé consistait à faire de la gymnastique rythmique selon la méthode de Jaques-Dalcroze, en compagnie de la violoniste Hélène Jourdan-Morhange et de la fille de Jacques Rouché. Léon-Paul Fargue, qui était leur ami, assistait à nos cours, caché derrière des tentures et nous avions droit à toute sa géniale folie dialectique; sa présence nous rassurait et nous faisait supporter l’horreur et l’ennui de cette existence.” 112 Jean Cocteau to Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, 1923, published in Bulletin de l’Institut Jaques- Dalcroze (1924): 59: “En pleine période, vague, confuse, flottante, impressionniste, vous avez sauvé le mouvement du corps. Vous avez su maintenir une ligne droite entre un ordre ancien et l’ordre nouveau. Par l’entremise de notre pauvre Thévenaz, vous m’avez, en 1913, aidé à comprendre l’urgence d’un rythme et d’une architecture profonde. Je vous envoie ma vive gratitude.” 170 Resonant Recoveries although also often challenging, perpetual-motion-oriented music that required performers to use their bodies in demanding, machinistic ways, while placing listeners in repetitive, machinistic, and—at least at times—meditative spaces. Moreover, it would seem that few of these musicians saw Dalcroze’s eurythmics as a definite “cure” to grief, trauma, and war-related nervous disorders, but rather as a physiological salve that also provided them with creative, meaningful, and importantly discreet ways of performing the lasting, repetitive, and difficult nature of their suffering. The wide range of applications of rhythmic regularity and repetition in style dépouillé compositions of the late 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s demonstrates the important role that personal experiences and needs played in how composers and performers engaged with Dalcroze’s principles. Taking Dalcroze’s influence into consideration, what were the relationships between interwar musicians’ attention to rhythmic practice and its benefits and the music that composers wrote, that performers chose to play or sing, and for which audiences expressed a preference? In the remainder of this chapter, I ex- plore these questions first with attention to thestyle dépouillé repertoire produced and performed in Paris during and after the war, and second through a consideration of the ways embodied engagement with the repetition and rhythmic regularity of musique dépouillée may have helped Parisians to console themselves in the wake of traumatic wartime experiences. I close this chapter by returning to the example of Ravel’s postwar music for a closer look at the style dépouillé compositions that he wrote for grieving friends. By considering these repertoires through the lens of both trauma studies and fin-de- siècle concerns with rhythmic movement’s benefits for emotional well-being, I argue that composers and performers understood the bodily rhythmic experience of music making as a crucial site for performing and coping with grief and trauma.

Interwar musique dépouillée, Trauma, and Consolation

An examination of style dépouillé compositions written and performed in France in the wake of World War I reveals that many of these can be understood as responses to pain, loss, and trauma. Although many moto perpetuo compositions do not have clear thematic or textual connections to the war, this should not deter us from considering these pieces in relation to grief and trauma. Recall, for instance, René Dumesnil’s statement, which I cited in the conclusion of chapter 1, that many musicians chose to process their emotions in pieces that were not explicitly linked to the war.113 By and large, musique dépouillée tends to appear

113 René Dumesnil, La Musique en France entre les deux guerres, 1919–1939 (Paris: Éditions du Milieu du Monde, 1946), 24. Soothing Movements 171 more in instrumental pieces than in texted or vocal compositions, and especially in instrumental compositions that are clearly neoclassically oriented, such as toccatas and fugues. These compositional choices also align with composers’ tendencies to write solo keyboard or chamber music, in part due to the shortage of performers both on the front lines and on the home front during and just after the war.114 Nevertheless, it is significant that a large number of pieces in the rhythmically regular dépouillé style were written by or for musicians who served in the war, lost friends and family members in or outside of combat, or were consistently worried about losing loved ones at the front. Ravel—the composer of the Sonata for Violin and ’Cello, but also of repetitive, ostinato-driven pieces such as Le Tombeau de Couperin, Boléro, La Valse, and his Sonata for Violin and Piano—served as a truck driver at the front from spring 1915 to spring 1917, and also lost his mother in January 1917. Numerous musicians who served in World War I, such as Joseph Boulnois, Philippe Gaubert, François Gervais, Reynaldo Hahn, Jacques Ibert, Jean Roger-Ducasse, Alexis Roland-Manuel, and Albert Roussel, composed rhythmically regular compositions during or just after the war. And Debussy, who also wrote several perpetual-motion- oriented pieces during the war, was slowly and painfully dying of cancer, while also concerned about his stepson, Raoul Bardac, who had enlisted in the French army at the beginning of the conflict. In 1915, Debussy and his wife Emma had begun to spend time with the virtuoso pianist Marguerite Long, whose husband, the musicolo- gist Joseph de Marliave, had been killed in combat in the fall of 1914. Similarly, all of the young composers associated with Les Six—who were some of the most frequent proponents of the style dépouillé—either served in the war, or had loved ones at the front. Arthur Honegger served in the Swiss military, while Louis Durey, Georges Auric, and Francis Poulenc served in the French army for anywhere between five and twenty-five months. Tailleferre and Milhaud both had loved ones who served in the war: Tailleferre’s brother enlisted in 1914 and arrived home alive in 1918, and Milhaud’s closest friend since childhood, the poet Léo Latil, was killed in combat in September 1915. Jean Cocteau, one of the most frequent supporters of and collaborators with these young composers, also served in the French military from 1914 to 1918. Although these composers’ other musical mentor, Erik Satie, did not enlist in the French military, he had numerous friends and acquaintances whose lives he would have known were in near-constant danger, including Raoul Bardac, Jean Cocteau, Jean Dreyfus, Jean Hugo, Louis Lemonnier, Alexis Roland-Manuel, Florent Schmitt, and Alfred

114 Hermann Danuser is one of several people who have discussed the tendency for interwar music—especially of a neoclassical nature—to be instrumental music. See Danuser, “Rewriting the Past: Classicisms of the Inter-War Period,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, eds. Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 260–283. 172 Resonant Recoveries

Roussel. Moreover, Erik Satie had complicated relationships—close friendships that had since turned somewhat sour—with people who were on the front lines or dying on the home front.115 The reasons for the composition and popularity of pieces in thestyle dépouillé vary widely. In the case of pieces like Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917), Toccatas by Tcherepnin (1922), Casella (1904), Manziarly (1936), and Honegger (1916), and Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (1913), Pulcinella (1921), and Octet (1923), rhythmic regularity or irregularity can be attributed to an interest in using rhythm as a means of neoclassically recapturing the sound and feeling of music of the pre-nineteenth- century past. Compositions such as Honegger’s Pacific 231 (1923), George Antheil’s Ballet mécanique (1924) and Airplane Sonata (1922), and numerous of the pieces written to be performed by Marguerite Long at the 1937 Paris Exposition Universelle des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie moderne, used rhythmic regularity and repetition in order to capture something of the mechanical nature of modern inventions. Then there are pieces such as Jean Roger-Ducasse’s Étude en sol dièse mineur (1915) and Étude en sixtes (1917), as well as Debussy’s “Pour les ‘cinq doigts’ ” and “Pour les tierces” in his Douze études (1915), in which musical repetition and rhythmic regularity offered a means of training pianists to approach various performance issues. Furthermore, there are pieces such as Ibert’s Reflets dans l’eau (1917), Durey’s “Carillons” from Pièces pour piano (publ. 1921), and Tailleferre’s “Cache-cache mitoula” from Jeux de plein air (1917), for which rhythmic ostinati served representative purposes. However, numerous pieces composed during and after World War I seem to have the bodily effects of musical rhythm as theirraison d’être. Reynaldo Hahn’s Pour bercer un convalescent from 1915 is a key example, and one that is clearly connected to the war through Hahn’s dedication of the piece to Henri Bardac, “Sergent in the 306th Infantry, seriously wounded at the Battle of Aisne”116 (see Musical Example 3.1). The composer Fréderic Mompou—a Catalan composer who spent twenty years in Paris and was closely aligned with musical modernist circles there—similarly employed rhythmic and melodic ostinati to entrance listeners into meditative states in pieces such as Cants mágics and Charmes, both written around 1920. The latter piece includes movements designed, in Mompou’s words, “to put suffering to sleep” and “for healers,” thus demonstrating the composer’s understanding not only of music’s healing properties, but

115 I address Cocteau’s and Satie’s wartime experiences and the traumas these incurred in detail in chapter 5 of this book. For more on Cocteau, see Francis Steegmuller, Cocteau: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 1970), 119–216; and James S. Williams, Jean Cocteau (London: Reaktion, 2008), 55–66. For more information on Erik Satie, see Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 65–67, 205–206, 224–226. 116 Reynaldo Hahn, Pour bercer un convalescent (Paris: Heugel, 1915): “Sergent au 306e d’Infanterie, grièvement blessé à la bataille de l’Aisne.” Soothing Movements 173

Musical Example 3.1 Reynaldo Hahn, Pour bercer un convalescent, mm. 1–6.

also, more specifically, of a close relationship between musical perpetual motion and bodily states of peace and well-being. Repetitive and rhythmically regular pieces in the style dépouillé such as Erik Satie’s Musiques d’ameublement and his “Méditation” from Avant-dernières pensées seem similarly geared toward manipulating the moods and emotions of listeners to beneficial ends. Satie’s ostensible goal with Musiques d’ameublement, as articulated in a draft advertisement for the piece that he wrote for Cocteau, was to create a kind of music “made for satisfying ‘useful’ needs” that “fills the same role as light, heat, and comfort in all its forms.”117 Satie’s emphasis on the usefulness of Musiques d’ameublement for emotion and sensation management

117 See Erik Satie, Écrits, ed. Ornella Volta (Paris: Editions Champ Libre, 1977), 190: “Nous, nous voulons établir une musique faite pour satisfaire les besoins ‘utiles.’ [ . . . ] elle remplit le même rôle que la lumière, la chaleur & le confort sous toutes ses formes.” Emphasis in the original. 174 Resonant Recoveries

Musical Example 3.2 Erik Satie, Musiques d’ameublement, “Carrelage Phonique.”

aligns not only with the cultural importance of underlining music’s utility and creating useful music in Third Republic France, as convincingly demonstrated by Jann Pasler, but also with the utilitarian aesthetics of interwar architects Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (otherwise known as Le Corbusier), as pointed out by Gurminder Bhogal.118 Later in Satie’s draft advertisement, which, as Caroline Potter has suggested, may have been created somewhat in jest, Satie wrote, “Those who haven’t heard ‘Musique d’Ameublement’ don’t know happiness,” and suggested as well that “Musique d’Ameublement” was essential to a good night’s sleep.119 As Potter and others have pointed out, musique d’ameublement as a concept, and especially as one informing a repetitive, ostinato-laden musical style, was of interest to Satie beginning around 1917, when he first began to compose pieces that would eventually come to be published under this title (see Musical Example 3.2). Potter has shown that Satie composed additional pieces of musique d’ameublement for Max Jacobs’s play, Ruffian toujours, truand jamais in the 1920s, and has suggested as well that music that functioned more or less as “furniture music”—that is, like background

118 See Pasler, Composing the Citizen, especially 53–93; and Bhogal, Details of Consequence, 309–322. 119 Satie, Écrits, 190: “Celui qui n’a pas entendu la ‘Musique d’Ameublement’ ignore le bonheur.” For more on Potter’s take on this advertisement, see Erik Satie, 145. Soothing Movements 175 music—is present in numerous of Satie’s pieces written between 1917 and 1925, including Socrate, Mercure, and Relâche.120 Although it is difficult to say precisely why Satie was enamored of musique d’ameublement, what seems clear from his musical experiments in this vein is that he was interested in creating music that suggested or created moods and states of mind or being. Creating pleasant moods and living in the moment may have been especially important consolatory techniques for Satie and other musicians in immediately postwar France, and it should not be discounted that this was something Satie may have had in mind as he developed and composed his musique d’ameublement. After all, Satie would often describe the war years as some of the most difficult in his life, especially considering his growing financial troubles during this time.121 Various songs written in the late teens and early 1920s have texts that exhibit clear connections between repetitive music and a protagonist’s inability to move past a particularly difficult event or relationship. Nadia Boulanger’s songLe Couteau, published in 1922, is a musical setting of a poem by her former lover Camille Mauclair about a knife remaining planted in the heart of the song’s protagonist.122 Boulanger communicates the endless repetition of pain that the love of this woman has caused through a rhythmically strict ostinato figure in the left hand that persists throughout the song, becoming more dissonant and complicated as the song progresses, perhaps as a way of sonically indicating the ways in which the protagonist’s pain increases over time. In the song’s final measures (beginning with m. 27), the ostinato from the song’s beginning appears again, played heavily and forcefully as the protagonist reveals her desire for the knife to remain in her heart—she doesn’t want to forget the person who has put it there (see Musical Example 3.3). In this context, the ostinato figure might be understood to sonically convey the never-ending pain—but also the complex and paradoxical desire to hold on to this pain—that is often a feature of perennial mourning in this period, something which, as I have shown elsewhere and will discuss in detail in chapter 4, was not only common in interwar France, but also

120 See Potter, Erik Satie, 138–176. 121 Erik Satie, Correspondance presque complète, ed. Ornella Volta (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 207; see also Satie’s letter to Valentine Gross, February 22, 1915, in ibid., 274; and Satie’s letter to Paul Dukas, August 18, 1915, in ibid., 284. See also Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (London: Calder & Boyars, 1975), 70. I discuss Satie’s financial and emotional situation in more detail inchapter 5. Although Potter and David Trippett have suggested that Francis Picabia’s, René Clair’s, and Erik Satie’s col- laboration in Relâche and the film that occurs between its two acts—entitled Entr’acte—emerged from Picabia’s and Satie’s interests in instantanéisme, the focus on the present moment in these pieces might also be understood as a response to loss and difficulty: living in the present moment might—if properly practiced—lead one to avoid the past as well as worrying about the future. See Potter, Erik Satie, 228–235; and Trippett, “Composing Time,” 559–577. 122 For more information on Nadia Boulanger’s love affair with Camille Mauclair, see Alexandra Laederich and Rémy Stricker, “Les Trois vies de Nadia Boulanger: Extraits inédits de la valise protégée,” Revue de la BNF 46, no. 1 (2014): 77–83. 176 Resonant Recoveries

Musical Example 3.3 Nadia Boulanger, Le Couteau, mm. 25–34.

was a central feature of Nadia Boulanger’s aesthetics of grief, particularly after her sister’s death in 1918.123 The Six chants of Marcelle de Manziarly, a student and close friend of Nadia Boulanger, feature similar repetitive musical features in the interest of con- veying the persistence of pain in coping with loss or the absence of a loved one. Manziarly composed these songs in 1921 and 1922, after the death of her father in early 1921, and just before and during the absence created by the departure of her

123 Rogers, “Grieving Through Music in Interwar France: Maurice Ravel and His Social Circle, 1914–1934” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2014); Rogers, “Mourning at the Piano.” Soothing Movements 177 mother with Manziarly’s close friend and possible lover Jiddu Krishnamurti—a prominent figure in the theosophical movement in the twentieth century—for India.124 These songs reflect textually and musically the sorrow Manziarly felt in being separated from so many people dear to her within the span of a year. In the first song ofSix chants, Manziarly conveys the narrator’s melancholic desire for “eternal and deep night,” a reference to sorrow that returns in the fourth and fifth songs. The pain of Manziarly’s solitude is especially palpable in the third song, in which the narrator describes the emptiness of her heart in being “left on the road alone,” and in the fourth, where she describes “screaming her pain” to the world around her. In the final song ofSix chants, Manziarly suggests the fruitlessness of attempting to escape sorrow in the piano’s return once again to the dismal ostinato passages that are a hallmark of this cycle (see Musical Example 3.4). Although not a song per se, Satie’s Socrate, written for solo voice and piano/ orchestra, demonstrates a similar connection between repetition and grief. Satie began composing this striking piece in the then-popular style dépouillée around the time that he was working on Parade.125 The text—an adaptation of Victor Cousin’s translation of the dialogues between Plato and Socrates— recounts various episodes of Socrates’s life from the perspective of three different narrators: Alcibiade, Phèdre, and Phédon. The third of the three movements of Socrate narrates the death of Socrates in detail, with Phédon focusing on the slow process of Socrates’s passing and his own emotions in relation to his friend’s death. This might have made Satie think about the death of his own once dear friend, Debussy, with whom he had been estranged at the time of his death in March 1918. Samuel Dorf has convincingly argued that Satie’s Socrate is imbued with violence, and in ways that “invite us to view violence as an important element of musical neoclassicism—as the necessary generator of its dépouillement.” 126 Although Dorf does not identify the precise reason why Satie may have been interested in representing violence in Socrate—leaving open the possibility that Satie’s own anger or helplessness in the wake of friends’ deaths might have acted as the affective foundation of the piece’s violence—I agree with his assessment, especially given the ways in which style dépouillé operated as a means of expressing and coping with trauma during the interwar period. Although all of Socrate’s movements feature some amount of Satie’s characteristic emphasis on ostinato, this final movement features sixteen ostinato cells

124 Nadia Boulanger to Marcelle de Manziarly, February 11, 1921, BnF, Mus., NLA 289. Manziarly’s father’s death date is confirmed by her annotation of this letter, as well as by Mary Lutyens, Krishnamurti: The Years of Awakening (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975), 127–132. 125 Hermann Danuser considers Satie’s interwar music to epitomize musique dépouillée. See Danuser, “Rewriting the Past,” 262. 126 Samuel N. Dorf, “Erik Satie’s Socrate (1918), Myths of Marsyas, and un style dépouillé,” Current Musicology 98 (Fall 2014): 95–119. Musical Example 3.4 Marcelle de Manziarly, Six chants, mvmt. 6: “La Cime,” mm. 1–12. Soothing Movements 179

(usually of approximately four to eight measures) out of which Satie creates the musico-dramatic backdrop for Socrates’s death and his friends’ grief. Each of these ostinato cells has a different musical and affective profile, and several- re cede and return at various points throughout the movement. Many cells quickly come to be recognizable to the listener, even upon a first listen of the piece, thus giving listeners the sense that they are in a slow-moving, melancholy world in which affects swirl around them, coming and going, shifting and changing. The “Mort du Socrate” opens with a stark but lovely—perhaps even loving?—four- measure-long ostinato cell that features a series of triads over a four-quarter- note motif: E-F -G-A (see Musical Example 3.5). This cell returns in various guises ♯ and is usually recognizable—despite various modulations—by virtue of its striking series of rising step-wise triads in a plodding quarter-note pulse. In the

Musical Example 3.5 Erik Satie, Socrate, mvmt. 3: “Mort du Socrate,” mm. 1–7. 180 Resonant Recoveries course of the movement it becomes clear that this cell is, for Phèdon, associated with the sound of Socrates’s voice, since, after its initial appearance at the start of the movement, it appears each time that Socrates speaks: first at mm. 96–101, when he asks Phèdon if he’s going to cut his hair; then at mm. 155–160 and mm. 170–187, when Socrates talks about the kindness of the guard who has come not only to give him instructions for taking the poison that will kill him, but also to say goodbye to him. The motif appears once again in mm. 256–276, when Socrates begins to convulse from the poison that he has ingested, and utters his final words. In “Mort du Socrate,” then, ostinato in general appears as a musical device of grief and remembrance, while specific ostinati come to be associated with particular aspects of Socrates, or with the feelings that his friends had for him.127 The preceding examples suggest that there was indeed a connection for some composers and performers who had been affected by the war and its traumas between the popularity of the new so-called musique dépouillée and the sounds, feelings, sensory experiences, and worries experienced in war-torn France between 1914 and 1918. In the remainder of this chapter, I suggest some of the particular ways in which music making in the French interwar style dépouillé functioned as a corporeal technology of consolation. I want to clarify that I am by no means suggesting that every modernist piece of music written between 1914 and 1940 that exhibits substantial amounts of moto perpetuo music was written for the purpose of helping people to process or cope with trauma. In addition to some of the reasons I have already given at the beginning of this section for composing mechanically oriented pieces, I should also note that the large number of pieces in this period that include repetitive, rhythmically regular music might be explained by composers realizing a trend and wanting to follow it. In what follows, I suggest a few reasons for this trend that I find to be especially plausible, given the wartime and postwar context of this trend, as well as the wealth of discourse on relationships between rhythm, bodily movement, and well-being that had been growing in popularity in and beyond France since the mid-nineteenth century.

127 The initial public performances received mixed—although more negative than positive— reviews from the bulk of the audience. Although many of Satie’s friends appreciated the composition from its first performances in private/semi- public performances at the Princesse de Polignac’s salon and Adrienne Monnier’s bookstore, audience members and critics at its premiere public performances at Société Nationale concerts in February and June 1920, including Jean Marnold, found it rather underwhelming. See Michael de Cossart, The Food of Love: Princesse Edmond de Polignac (1865–1943) and Her Salon (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), 137–138. I wonder, however, if some of the backlash against the piece may have had something to do with the way in which it addresses grief, at moments somewhat poignantly and tenderly. Soothing Movements 181

The Embodied Significance of Rhythm and Repetition for Consolation and Recovery

When considering why many French composers may have chosen to write perpetual-motion-oriented music, it is important to take into account that the cacophony of war transformed the soundscape of rural and urban France. This meant that many French musicians—whether on the battlefield or on the home front—were inundated with noises and sounds that, as I pointed out in chapter 2, were irregular, and often terrifying, especially since for many they signaled de- struction and death. For those on the front lines, keeping their ears open in order to better discern the trajectory and type of bomb being launched was a necessary survival tactic. However, this kind of auditory work could be emotion- ally, mentally, and physically exhausting, as many soldiers attested.128 And for those not actively participating in the war, the sounds of war often surrounded them even still, especially for those living in towns, villages, and cities along the Western Front, though also for people living in Paris. In the last two years of the war, German fighter planes attempted to fly undetected at night in the clouds just above Paris, and in the spring of 1918, the long-range cannon named “Big Bertha” consistently threatened Paris’s residents and succeeded in killing numerous of them, for instance in the bombing of the Saint Gervais cathedral on Good Friday in 1918.129 Even when Paris and other cities were not directly under attack, musicians sometimes reported hearing the distant sounds of war.130 Whether these sounds were real or imagined makes little difference; either way, such hearings attest to the weight and worry the sounds carried for those on the home front.

128 See reports by musician-soldiers such as Maurice Maréchal and Lucien Durosoir in Deux musiciens dans la Grande Guerre, ed. Luc Durosoir (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008), as well as throughout the second chapter of this book. This is also something that scholars such as Gascia Ouzanian and Roland Wittje have addressed in their work on the hearing technologies and tactics that the French military developed during World War I. Roland Wittje, The Age of Electroacoustics: Transforming Science and Sound (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016); Gascia Ouzounian, “Powers of Hearing: Acoustic Defense during the First World War,” unpublished paper given at Sensing the Sonic: Histories of Hearing Differently, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, June 15, 2018. Ouzounian in particular stresses that soldiers could only perform this type of intensive listening for short amounts of time without exhaustion. 129 Many French musicians have mentioned “Big Bertha” and the raid on Paris in the spring of 1918 in their letters, articles, and memoirs. See Emma Debussy, letters to André Caplet dated March 20 and 31, 1918, BnF, Mus., Fonds André Caplet, letters 167 & 169; Tailleferre, “Les Mémoires de G. Tailleferre,” 6–82; Jean Roger-Ducasse to André Lambinet, March 29, 1918, in Lettres à son ami André Lambinet, ed. Jacques Depaulis (Sprimont, Belgium: Mardaga, 2001), 118–19; and Julien Tiersot, “Souvenirs des cinq années,” Ménestrel, (January 16, 1920), 24–25. Arthur Pougin talks at length about the German fighter planes during the 1917 and 1918 concert/theater seasons in his article, “Le Théâtre et la musique pendant la guerre,”Ménestrel , (September 17, 1920), 359–361. 130 André Gedalge is quoted as saying, “Night and day, for the last year, I hear the battle rumbling on the horizon.” See “Théâtres: La Musique pendant la guerre,”Le Temps, October 19, 1915. 182 Resonant Recoveries

With this in mind, the moto perpetuo of musique dépouillée might be understood as having offered an important and sought-after sonic alternative to the sounds of war. After all, music of this sort fills up the sonic space—if not ver- tically, then horizontally—and draws in the listener, giving them a consistent and repetitive sonic wash that was more resistant than other musical styles to allowing war-related sounds to rupture it. Moreover, in a sound world that was as unpredictable and cacophonous as that offered by the artillery and machines of World War I, it is possible that, much like the regularity of the sonic vibrations discussed in the previous chapter, the regular, repetitive rhythms of much modernist music of this period provided a sonic alternative to the noise of war and the emotional stress and strain it brought with it. Rachel Moore talks about the desire to “return to normal” that many musicians felt during and after World War I, and how these attempts at normalcy manifested in the reopening of theaters, which had been closed since the beginning of the war. 131 However, composing, performing, and listening to music in the dépouillé, repetitive style may have also helped musicians to regain some sense of “normalcy” through a depend- able, predictable musical style in an otherwise confusing, discombobulating, and disorienting sound world. It is possible that this accounts in part for why the expressionism of contemporary Austro-German composers like Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg was not as popular among French musicians: perhaps they chose to write, perform, and listen to music that made their sonic environ- ments more soothing—offering a way to repair the sonic environment that had persisted since the onset of the war in August 1914.132 This understanding of repetitive music’s function in offering an alternative and soothing soundscape to the sounds of war is suggested by several musicians, writers, and artists who lived through the war and wrote about their relationships to music during this time. André Gide, for instance, wrote in his diary on September 16, 1914—just a couple of weeks after noting the “strange noise” he could hear from his country house—of someone getting back into “reading, into playing Bach, and even, preferably, he would play fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier, in which the rhythm invites happiness, and from which he still forbids himself only reluctantly.”133 For musician-soldiers like Reynaldo

131 Rachel Moore, Performing Propaganda: Musical Life and Culture in Paris during the First World War (London: Boydell Press, 2018), 24–32. 132 Of course, it may also be that French composers did not have much access to contemporary Austro-German music, given the ban on this music during the war. For instance, despite much interest in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire since its premiere in Germany in 1913, the piece was not performed in Paris until 1921. I should also note that many French composers praised their Austro- German contemporaries. Albert Roussel wrote an essay in 1928 in which he praised Hindemith’s compositions, and spoke of his great appreciation for Berg’s Wozzeck. 133 André Gide, Journal, 1889–1939 (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 488: “X se reprend à lire, à jouer du Bach et même, de préférence, il jouerait celles des fugues du Clavecin bien tempéré dont le rythme invite à l’allégresse, et qu’il ne s’interdit encore qu’à contre-cœur.” Soothing Movements 183

Hahn, making music provided access to sound that, with a regular pulse and pleasant, singable melodies, was vastly different from the sounds he encoun- tered otherwise. Hahn intimated as much in the preface for his suite for two pianos, Le Ruban denoué, writing that he composed this set of elegant Chopin- esque waltzes “for myself and a few friends . . . in the middle of the woods, in a cabin shaken by the cannon . . . in a place where the perpetual clacking of bullets silenced the birds.”134 Hahn further confirmed the connection between music and bodily-emotional consolation in a three-movement piano piece for four hands that he dedicated to a wounded friend in 1915. As already discussed, Pour bercer un convalescent, like Le Ruban denoué, features music reminiscent of the Belle Époque that is pleasing, easy to listen to, and rhythmically regular (see Musical Example 3.1).135 Pieces in the repetitive, rhythmically regular brand of style dépouillé held— and, I would argue, still hold—the possibility of creating bodily states beneficial for people who were/are living with the persistent aftereffects of trauma. Compositions in this musical style may have helped musicians to cope with what psychologist Judith Herman has called hyperarousal.136 One of the most common aftereffects of traumatic events, hyperarousal entails the persistence of unconscious physiological responses to the initial traumatic incident. For many people, living with trauma has meant remaining stuck in the flight-or- flight response— with a raised pulse, an inability to breathe, or inexplicable emotions—for weeks, months, or even years after a traumatic experience. Such physiological responses can also be triggered by encounters with places, objects, sounds, sights, and smells that might remind a person—even unconsciously—of the traumatic event, and these were common among survivors of commotion during and after World War I.137 Herman has also asserted that feeling safe and secure is a crucial part of recovering from trauma: this sense of safety lets someone know that feelings of security can exist, which is especially important for people for whom a traumatic event has altered their understanding of the world, and made the world into a

134 See the preface to Hahn’s Le Ruban dénoué. 135 For more information on Hahn’s musical “poetics of consolation” see Stéphan Etcharry, “Reynaldo Hahn, compositeur en guerre: Pour une poétique de l’apaisement,” in La Grande Guerre en musique: Vie et création musicales en France pendant la Première Guerre Mondiale, eds. Florence Doé de Maindreville and Stéphan Etcharry (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2014), 153–182. 136 Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 33–50. 137 For more discussion of the aftereffects of shell shock (the British diagnosis) and commotion (the French diagnosis), see Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Peter Leese, Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Tracey Loughran, Shell-Shock and Medical Culture in First World War Britain (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Louis Crocq, Les Traumatismes psychiques de guerre (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1999); Crocq, Les Blessés psychiques de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2014). 184 Resonant Recoveries perpetually terrifying place.138 In terms of music, Tia DeNora has contended that rhythmically regular music, which imitates the rhythmic heartbeat and pulsing of blood of the womb, offers a significant means of achieving homeostasis for infants in neonatal care units.139 Thus with Herman’s and DeNora’s understandings of recovering from trauma and music in mind, the consistent pulse of musique dépouillée can be understood as holding the potential to affect listeners’, performers’, and composers’ bodies in stabilizing ways. The repetition and predictability of many of these pieces—for instance, Poulenc’s Trois mouvements perpétuels, Louis Durey’s Deux pièces pour piano à quatre mains, or Frédéric Mompou’s “Pour endormir la souffrance” from Charmes—have tended to engender feelings of safety and security for listeners and performers. Poulenc even referred to the first movement of his Mouvements perpétuels as “very soothing,” and it was well loved not only by Poulenc and his piano teacher, Ricardo Viñes, but also by others who lived through the war, such as André Gide and Albert Roussel.140 Many rhythmically regular pieces in the style dépouillé helped musicians who had experienced trauma to re-establish security and trust. Poulenc described Mouvements perpétuels as “ultra-facile,” at least by virtuoso standards, and much of this is due to repeating ostinato figures, which, as I have already noted, are frequent features of many pieces in this style. This kind of repetition, evident, for example, in Stravinsky’s Three Easy Pieces and Five Easy Pieces, may have offered musicians a sense of musical safety, allowing them to be grounded in familiar musical figures throughout practice or performance. For others, more difficult pieces in thestyle dépouillé, such as Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, Roger-Ducasse’s Études, and Honegger’s Sept pièces brèves, may have helped musicians to build a sense of trust through the extensive practice these pieces required. Many interwar French neoclassical compositions are notoriously difficult, and yet, practicing these pieces over and over again would have provided musicians with opportunities to become familiar with this music, and to find solace and security in their ability to perform it. This feeling of safety and security is also especially important for social reintegration after trauma. In this way, chamber pieces in the style dépouillé such as Ravel’s Duo and Sonata for Violin and Piano, Satie’s Musiques d’ameublement, and Milhaud’s String Quartet No. 5 might have also helped performers to learn to trust someone else

138 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 133–174. 139 Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 77–89. 140 Francis Poulenc to Edouard Souberbielle, January 11, [1919], Correspondance, 1910–1963 , ed. Myriam Chimènes (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 83: “très berceur.” Albert Roussel to Francis Poulenc, September 27, 1919, in ibid., 100. André Gide to Francis Poulenc, August 25, 1939, in ibid., 478. Soothing Movements 185 again within the predictability and security of a particular composition in the style dépouillé.141 The rhythmic regularity and repetition ofmusique dépouillée provided composers, performers, and listeners with opportunities for bodily entrainment that would have been understood as helpful in repairing people’s nervous systems, and in providing them with comfort and consolation. This was, in fact, one of the main points reiterated in contemporary discourse on rhythm and health: restoring rhythmic regularity to the body, according to Dalcroze, Weber-Bauler, Forel, and others, could assist people with nervous disorders.142 Listening to music in the style dépouillé may have helped to soothe the bodies of audience members, including other musicians, who may have been able to imagine what playing these pieces would require in terms of bodily movement.143 Playing or singing this music required performers to enact extreme precision in the bodily movements that they used to play these ostinato-oriented, rhythmically regular compositions. As the example from the opening of this chapter suggests, playing Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and ’Cello obliged Jourdan-Morhange and Maréchal to play their individual parts with great rhythmic precision and clarity, thus allowing them to get into the groove that performing this piece both permits and requires. Furthermore, Ravel, Debussy, and Roger-Ducasse all composed music in the style dépouillé during and after World War I designed for the virtuoso pianist Marguerite Long, whose husband was killed in the war. As I have

141 For more on relationships between mourning, trust, and music making in interwar France, see Jillian Rogers, “Ties That Bind: Music, Mourning, and the Development of Intimacy and Alternative Kinship Networks in World War I-Era France,” in Music and War: From the French Revolution to World War I, ed. Etienne Jardin (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2016), 415–443. 142 To give just a handful of examples of an extremely widespread phenomenon: this is a central theme in the majority of Dalcroze’s texts, including (but not limited to) Rhythm, Music, and Education, trans. Harold F. Rubinstein (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921), vi–viii, 8–9, 51–54, 86, 118–120; “La Technique intérieure du rythme,” La Revue musicale 7, no. 1 (November 1, 1925): 25– 36; 28–34; “Introduction,” Méthode Jaques-Dalcroze, 1er Partie, La Gymnastique rythmique, vol. 1 (Paris: Sandoz, Jobin & Cie Éditeurs, 1906), xi–xiii. Jean d’Udine also addressed this in a speech and demonstration he gave at the Institut Général Psychologique in Paris, published as “La Coordination des mouvements et la culture de la volonté par la Gymnastique Rythmique de Jaques Dalcroze,” Bulletin de l’Institut Général Psychologique (1911): 1–11. Raoul de Grasserie underlines at the very opening of De l’élément psychique dans le rythme et de ses rapports avec l’élément phonique (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1892), 1–8, the importance of proportions, balance, and égalité in the rhythms utilized in poetry. In fact, rhythm has often been a means by which to portray disability, as in the “alla zoppa” rhythm, which, as Joseph Straus notes in Extraordinary Measures, is described in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as “a rhythm in which the second quaver in a bar of 2/4 time is accentuated.” Straus says, “This rhythmic figure is apparently designed to imitate the walk of someone with a halting, asymmetrical gait. Alla zoppa is one of the topics named and discussed in Ratner (1980, 85), where it is described as a ‘short-long,’ ‘limping’ figure.’ ” See Straus, Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 45, n.1. 143 Andrew Mead and Arnie Cox have addressed this tendency of listeners to identify with performers in embodied ways in Mead, “Bodily Hearing: Physiological Metaphors and Musical Understanding,” Journal of Music Theory 43, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 1–19; and Cox, Music and Embodied Cognition: Listening, Moving, Feeling, and Thinking (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016). 186 Resonant Recoveries explained elsewhere, Long’s preferred playing style—le jeu perlé—was particularly well-suited to music written in the style dépouillé, and thus we might imagine that these composers had this in mind when they wrote music specifically for Long to perform.144 Regardless of musicians’ preferred performance styles, composers writing musique dépouillée were likely also interested in the physical and psychological comfort and security that pieces like this may have brought to performers, listeners, and even to themselves in the act of composing, which often occurred at the piano. Numerous interwar performers wrote to composers about how much they found solace in their repetitive, ostinato-driven music. The harpsichordist and early music aficionado Wanda Landowska wrote to Poulenc in the fall of 1930 that the Concerto champêtre that he had written for her “makes me totally care- free and happy!”145 This statement takes on particular significance given the emotional difficulties Landowska had faced in recent years: her husband and manager had been killed in Germany in 1918, her mother had died in 1925, and she was struggling with menopause at the time of Concerto champêtre’s composition.146 Throughout this period, Landowska’s preferences for neoclassical, moto perpetuo music became clear: in addition to the highly repetitive, Baroque-styled Concert champêtre, Landowska also frequently performed a similarly modernist neoclassical piece written for her—Manuel de Falla’s Harpsichord Concerto. Similar to Landowska, numerous other musicians in mourning in the 1930s found Poulenc’s music soothing. After telling Poulenc how much he had been struggling to cope with his Aunt Liénard’s death, and that his “nerves have often suffered,” Manuel de Falla told Poulenc that his music “brings me precious relief.” He continued, “And how much I love your Concerto with its beautiful frank- ness of expression and this lively sympathy (in the highest sense of the word) that makes of your music an admirable exception.”147 Nadia Boulanger similarly wrote to Poulenc about a month after her mother’s death in 1936 to tell him how much his piano music comforted her:

I just spent some sad holidays here, since I cannot get myself back to life without Maman, who was the light of my life, no, who was my life. But you have brought

144 See Rogers, “Mourning at the Piano.” 145 After the premiere of theConcert champêtre, Landowska says that she adores it, and then asks: “Et savez-vous pourquoi je l’adore?” and responds with, “C’est parce que qu’il me rend totalement insouciante et gaie!” See Landowska to Poulenc, [beginning of October 1930], in Poulenc, Correspondance, 328. 146 For more information on her difficulties with menopause at the time, see Poulenc to Landowska, letter dated July 31, [1931] in Poulenc, Correspondance, 845–846. 147 Manuel de Falla to Francis Poulenc, [November 1935], in Poulenc, Correspondance, 407– 408: “mes nerfs ont trop souffert”; “votre musique m’apporte un précieux soulagement. Et combien j’aime votre Concerto avec sa belle franchise d’expression et cette vivante sympathie (au plus haut sens du mot) qui font de votre musique d’un d’admirable exception.” Soothing Movements 187

[to me] some very good hours in my solitude, and I want to let you know this, like this, very simply, but very seriously. I didn’t know your piano music—I didn’t know it was so important—and you are here entirely, so truly a musician.148

Although Boulanger does not say which piece he has sent her that has brought her comfort, much of Poulenc’s keyboard music from the 1920s and early 1930s—from the Mouvements perpétuels (1918) and Aubade (1929) to the Concert champêtre (1928) and the Concerto for Two Pianos (1932)—features the ostinato-oriented style dépouillé so popular in this period. Compositions in the ostinato-oriented style dépouillé also permitted performers important opportunities for distraction in the form of meditative bodily engagement. Many of the pieces written in this musical style are both musically challenging and physically demanding. Performing pieces such as Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, Marcelle de Manziarly’s Sonata for Violin and Piano (especially the third movement), and the scherzo movement of Koechlin’s Sonata for Viola and Piano accurately and up to tempo would have required many hours of practice in order to get the music under one’s fingers. In this sense, these pieces would have provided many a performer with a “workout” of sorts, while also allowing them to shift their focus to their bodies in the act of music making, and away, perhaps, from their fear, sorrow, or, in the case of Marie Jaëll and likely many others, their obsessive thoughts. Contemporary trauma scholars such as Bessel van der Kolk and Peter Levine have emphasized the importance of bodily exercise and engagement—especially of a meditative, rhythmically regular kind—as an important tool for processing traumatic experiences. Van der Kolk, for instance, has found that war veterans who do yoga often succeed in integrating otherwise painful and disruptive traumatic memories, leading them to experience fewer flashbacks and other often difficult-to- manage symptoms of post-traumatic stress.149 Some music therapists have come to similar conclusions

148 Nadia Boulanger to Francis Poulenc, April 19, 1936, in Poulenc, Correspondance, 413: “Je viens de passer ici de très tristes vacances, car je ne puis me faire à la vie sans Maman qui était la lumière de la vie, non, qui était la vie. Mais vous avez apporté de très bonnes heures dans ma solitude, et je veux vous le dire, comme cela, tout simplement, mais très sérieusement. Je connaissais mal votre musique de piano—je ne la savais pas si importante—et vous y êtes tout entier, si vraiment musicien.” Emphasis in the original. 149 Bessel van der Kolk, “How Trauma Lodges in the Body: Yoga, EMDR, and Treating Trauma,” in- terview with Krista Tippett, On Being, originally aired July 11, 2013, transcript available at http://www. onbeing.org/program/restoring-the-body-bessel-van-der-kolk-on-treating- trauma-with-yoga- emdr-and-healing-0#main_content; Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 263–276. A number of people have also noted the ways in which rhythmically regular exercise activities such as running and cycling have assisted people in coping with PTSD. See, for example, Rebecca Thorpe, “Running Helps Me Cope with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” The Guardian, August 26, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-running-blog/2014/aug/26/mountain-running- post-traumatic-stress-disorder-mental-health, accessed May 27, 2020; and Christine Fennessy, “Running Reduces PTSD Symptoms,” Runner’s World (June 26, 2015): https://www.runnersworld. 188 Resonant Recoveries regarding the use of rhythm-oriented practices—most notably drumming—for patients suffering from PTSD.150 It is also possible that for some performers of musique dépouillée, the repetitive and meditative nature of these pieces provided access to an eventual physical comfort or spiritual consolation, despite, or perhaps even because of, the difficulty that arose in playing them. Music in the repetitive style dépouillé also held the potential to facilitate emotional transformation. At the time, commotion, neurasthenia, and other nervous disorders that stemmed from the war were understood to result from disordered, unregulated nervous systems. And, as I have demonstrated throughout this chapter, many physiologists and psychologists active in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries advocated regular movement as a way to reconstitute nervous systems and improve mood. Dalcroze, d’Udine, Weber- Bauler, and Forel, among others, added to these theories in developing and advocating a kind of regular movement—gymnastique rythmique—that was rhythmically and musically oriented. By extension, rhythmic movement at the piano, the violin, the flute, or any other instrument, could help to reharmonize damaged and disordered nervous systems. In this way, music making had the potential to become a kind of rhythmic gymnastics through the regular movements of the performers that these compositions require. As a result, like many proponents of gymnastic exercises at the fin de siècle pointed out, the movement of performers’ bodies may have stimulated them to feel pleasure, happiness, and joy. Even if these feelings only last a short time, the knowledge of one’s ability to change one’s current state of emotions, to regain the agency to control one’s emotions often lost in and through traumatic experiences, can be crucial in recovery from trauma.151 Even in situations where out-and- out recovery from trauma may not have been desirable or possible—for instance, in cases of perennial mourning, which I discuss in chapter 4 and elsewhere—these moments of movement-generated musical joy might have offered temporary reprieves from the pain of grief and trauma.152 Many compositions in the style dépouillé require alternation between moto perpetuo passages and non-moto perpetuo passages, or between moto

com/news/a20809717/running-reduces-ptsd-symptoms/. Both of these articles cite a study conducted by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, the results of which can be found in Mark B. Powers et al., “Exercise Augmentation of Exposure Therapy for PTSD: Rationale and Pilot Efficacy Data,”Cognitive Behaviour Therapy 44, no. 4 (2015): 314–327; and Mark B. Powers et al., “Exercise for Mood and Anxiety Disorders: The State-of-the-Science,” Cognitive Behaviour Therapy 44, no. 4 (2015): 237–239.

150 Moshe Bensimon, Dorit Amir, and Yuval Wolf, “Drumming Through Trauma: Music Therapy with Post-Traumatic Soldiers,” The Arts in Psychotherapy 35 (2008): 34–48. 151 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 165–167; 186–187; 196–202. 152 Rogers, “Mourning at the Piano.” Soothing Movements 189 perpetuo passages that utilize different note values or rhythmic patterns. Stravinsky’s Les Noces and Octet offer examples of writing of this type, as does Honegger’s “Violent” movement of Sept pièces brèves, Satie’s “Sur une lanterne” in Descriptions automatiques, and the “Final” movement of Tailleferre’s String Quartet. Numerous of Dalcroze’s articles focused on rhythmic changes of this kind: he understood his eurythmic exercises as enabling musicians to fine- tune their reflexes, coordination, and internal metronome, while helping them to better execute sudden changes that might occur in musical passages, or in sight-reading situations.153 As I noted earlier in this chapter, one of Dalcroze’s champions, the psychologist Oscar Forel, emphasized the importance of multifaceted rhythmic engagement as central to physical and social re-education. 154 Thus Dalcroze’s training of the reflexes through pieces and exercises aimed at preparing musicians for whatever might come their way provided important tools in helping trauma survivors to feel prepared for difficult life events or situations that might arise in the future. Musicians and their physician colleagues constructed performance of mixed-meter musique dépouillée, or pieces that showcased different patterns of rhythmic engagement, as offering means of helping those who may have felt that they had “disordered” nervous systems as the result of the war.155 Similarly, the fact that numerous neoclassical pieces of the musique dépouillée tradition exhibit dissonance-oriented melodic and harmonic features suggests that experiencing rhythmic consistency and musical tension simultaneously may have been an important aspect of post-traumatic aesthetics in World War I–era France. As numerous commentators on early twentieth-century musical neoclassicism have noted, many composers who wrote music in this style foregrounded tonal instability and dissonance in their music, even frequently employing polytonality and other musical means of destabilizing listener comfort.156 Many of the examples I have provided of musique dépouillée so far in this

153 Jaques-Dalcroze, “La Rythmique, la plastique animée et la danse,” 650–659; 653; Jaques- Dalcroze, Rhythm, Music, and Education, 127–131. In contrast to mostly monorhythmic pieces like Jaques-Dalcroze’s Marches Rythmiques (Complément à la méthode de gymnastique rythmique), 1er vol., 84 Marches (Lausanne: Jobin & Cie, 1906), pieces like Jaques-Dalcroze’s 20 Caprices & Rhythmic Studies, Set 1, Nos. 1–10 (London: Augener, 1920) offer examples of Dalcroze’s interest in the beneficial nature of mixed-meter pieces for eurythmics. 154 Forel, “Le Rythme,” 98–100. 155 Jaques-Dalcroze talks about how the war resulted in “overexcited” and otherwise “disordered” nervous systems in the preface to Méthode de Jaques-Dalcroze: La Rythmique, enseignement pour le développement de l’instinct rythmique et métrique, du sens de l’harmonie plastique et de l’équilibre des mouvements, et pour la régularisation des habitudes motrices (Lausanne: Jobin, 1916-1917), 10. 156 Messing, Neoclassicism in Music, 106–117; Martha M. Hyde, “Neoclassic and Anachronistic Impulses in Twentieth-Century Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 18, no. 2 (Autumn 1996): 200–235; Danuser, “Rewriting the Past,” 266–269, 275–283; Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Arts in France, 1885–1918 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), 130–132, 269. Shattuck has also usefully pointed out that this tension between evoking the past and acknowledging a modernist present appears not only in musical neoclassicism after World War I, but also in the poetry of the famous 190 Resonant Recoveries chapter showcase this combination, including Boulanger’s Le Couteau, Poulenc’s Concert champêtre, Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and ’Cello, Stravinsky’s Trois pièces faciles, and Tailleferre’s “Cache-cache mitoula” from Jeux de plein air, to name just a few. As in the case of mixed-meter style dépouillé compositions, music that placed harmonic and melodic tension within rhythmically stable contexts may have assisted musicians with experiencing and working through difficult feelings within the more broadly safe, comfortable, and predictable medium offered by a regular pulse and tempo. Pieces in the style dépouillé likely also functioned as an important expressive modality for performing grief and trauma. As discussed at length in chapter 1, a general social moratorium on the direct communication of personal grief and trauma in many public and private forums existed in interwar France that would have prevented many people from telling others about the persistence of difficult emotions arising from trauma or the death of a loved one. In this context, music in the repetitive, often extremely difficult-to-perform style dépouillé may have permitted performers with opportunities to perform the difficulty and pain of their emotional experiences.157 Although this does not provide them with a means of narrativizing their experiences with verbal language—which Judith Herman, Sigmund Freud, and numerous other psychologists and psychoana- lytic theorists have argued is a central aspect of integrating traumatic memories in the psyche and recovering from trauma—performing these pieces would still have offered musicians a means of expressing something about their emotional hardships through this challenging repertoire.158 In particular, the ostinato-style repetition that is at the heart of so many of these pieces may also be understood as a musical representation of the insistent and often unending return of particular thoughts, affects, emotions, or corporeal sensations that have often been

Dadaist/Surrealist Apollinaire, whose work and relationship with musical modernism I will discuss in greater detail in chapter 5. See Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 242–244, 269.

157 Maria Cizmic makes a similar argument about the relationship between trauma, pain, and piano performance (albeit in relation to a rather different musical style) in her chapter on Galina Ustvolskaya’s Piano Sonata No. 6 and hermeneutic of Pain,” in Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 67–95. Amy Lyford has also discussed how certain surrealists in interwar France underlined relationships between war trauma, prostheses, and machines in their artistic productions. See Lyford, Surrealist Masculinities, 59–63. 158 Herman, Trauma and Recovery; see her chapters on “A Healing Relationship” (133–154), “Safety” (155–174), and “Remembrance and Mourning” (175–195). See also Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies in Hysteria, trans. Nicola Luckhurst, with an intro. by Rachel Bowlby (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 10 (for example). More recent trauma specialists, such as Bessel Van der Kolk, have pointed out that narrativization of traumatic experience is not as central as was once thought; Van der Kolk, for instance, underlines that EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) Therapy, which has proven very effective in assuaging the pain associated with traumatic memory, does not require clients to disclose anything about their traumatic experiences to the therapist. See Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 248–262. Soothing Movements 191 identified as part and parcel of grief and trauma.159 Nadia Boulanger suggests a significant link between ostinato and grief in her apology to Stravinsky in 1948 for not being able to write to him. After expressing how “very sad” she was after the “cruel disappointment” that resulted from him having to cancel a tour that would have allowed them to see one another after several years apart, she wrote about her grief: “I do nothing but produce variations on a single theme, [an] ostinato, and you would find me boredom personified.”160 In many instances, the composers of moto perpetuo compositions were also performers who may have benefited from the movements that playing or singing musique dépouillée required. George Antheil, Georges Auric, Claude Debussy, Francis Poulenc, Erik Satie, Germaine Tailleferre, and many other French modernist composers of the interwar period were accomplished pianists who often took part in the public performances of their moto perpetuo compositions. Moreover, many composers would have written these pieces at the piano, regardless of the instrumentation of a given piece; this includes not only the consum- mate pianists just mentioned, but also less skillful pianists such as Louis Durey, Philippe Gaubert, and Ravel.161 Many of the composers who participated in the war, such as Ravel, Roussel, Auric, Durey, Ibert, Gaubert, Roland-Manuel, and Roger-Ducasse, may have found composing the rhythmically regular, challenging, and repetitive music of the style dépouillé at the piano to be an especially significant tool for processing, working through, and expressing the trauma of their wartime experiences. Even if they were not aware of the vast amount of discourse that had been emerging on relationships between movement, emotion, and well-being, these composers may have simply realized how thinking through, composing, and playing these pieces made them feel. As beneficial as musique dépouillée may have been for those attempting to process the traumas of war, the discourse that informed it was not without fault. Much

159 Although it may seem contradictory to suggest that the rhythmic regularity that some musicians found soothing in this period may have also served as a modality for expressing and performing the difficulty of traumatic experience and/or traumatic memory, I do not believe that these two ways of understanding repetitive music are mutually exclusive. Understanding the functions of rhythmic regularity and repetition in the wake of trauma as polyvalent makes sense given that music works in many different ways for different people, and because trauma affects everyone differently, making their needs after trauma likewise varied. In addition, in many instances performing or expressing one’s post-traumatic symptoms can sometimes—although not always—result in a certain amount of consolation, as numerous trauma studies scholars have indicated. See, for example, David Aberbach, Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature, and Psychoanalysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 2–5, 20–23; and Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 160 Nadia Boulanger to Igor Stravinsky, dated March 23, 1948, in Nadia Boulanger and Igor Stravinsky, Boulanger and the Stravinskys, ed. Kimberly A. Francis (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2018), 156. 161 See Frédéric Robert, Louis Durey: L’Aîné des Six (Paris: Les Éditeurs français réunis, 1968), 131–133. 192 Resonant Recoveries of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourse on psychological and emotional well-being and its relationship to physical activities was grounded in attempts to fix what were considered psychological and physiological disabilities. Often these attempts were not in the interest of helping individuals to lead better lives, but rather in erasing difference and disability from society, sometimes in the greater scheme of creating a stronger national fighting force.162 And, of course, this discourse also places the burden of individuals’ well-being not on society, but rather on individuals, many of whom were either deemed “disordered” according to strict, masculinist notions of normalcy, or whose illnesses and injuries were ignored by a state that refused to acknowledge or properly address the psychological consequences of war. Nevertheless, musique dépouillée, as well as the corporeal engagement it required, demonstrates French musicians taking their own mental and emotional well-being into their own hands. They created “mechanical” music that made of themselves, of performers, and of listeners not machines, but rather humans working through and expressing emotional states of being that were only rarely socially and publicly acknowledged. In this way, the musicians who created musique dépouillée in the wake of World War I provided a rhythmic sensibility and stability for themselves and others that was otherwise difficult to achieve.

Grieving through Groove: Ravel’s Gift for Hélène Jourdan-Morhange

Ravel’s interwar music offers what I would consider a particularly poignant example of a composer’s awareness of how certain pieces would have made performers feel. Traumatized himself from his war experience and his mother’s death, Ravel chose to compose numerous pieces in a mechanical, ostinato-laden style dépouillé after 1917. In his correspondence with close friends after 1917, Ravel communicated his grief, describing symptoms often associated with trauma, such as nightmares and exhaustion.163 Ravel’s turn to style dépouillé

162 For instance, gymnastics offered popular forms of propagandistic, nationalistic displays in Nazi Germany and Communist Eastern Europe. See Carole Kew, “From Weimar Movement Choir to Nazi Community Dance: The Rise and Fall of Rudolf Laban’s ‘Festkultur,’” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 17, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 73–96; and Petr Roubal, “Politics of Gymnastics: Mass Gymnastic Displays under Communism in Central and Eastern Europe,” Body and Society 9, no. 2 (2003): 1–25. 163 For continuing indicators of Ravel’s post-1917 grief and trauma, see Ravel to Lucien Garban, June 20, 1917, in “La Correspondance de Maurice Ravel à Lucien Garban,” Cahiers Maurice Ravel 7 (2000): 19–68; 66; Maurice Ravel to Hélène Kahn-Casella, January 15, 1920, in “Soixante-deux lettres de Maurice Ravel à Hélène et Alfredo Casella,” ed. Jean Roy, Cahiers Maurice Ravel 1 (1985): 59– 111; 79; Ravel to Ida Godebska, December 27, 1919, in A Ravel Reader, 195; Ravel to Manuel de Falla, September 19, 1919, in A Ravel Reader, 193; Ravel to Hélène Kahn-Casella, January 19, 1919, in “Soixante-deux lettres,” 76. Soothing Movements 193 compositions at this time may have been the result of his being a sensitive and sympathetic friend, something that Jourdan-Morhange, among others, emphasized was an important aspect of his personality, especially in the interwar years.164 Interestingly, many of the pieces that Ravel composed after the war are contextually linked with grief and trauma, often through dedications or preferred performers who had lost loved ones, such as Marguerite Long, Misia Sert, and Hélène Jourdan-Morhange. 165 But it is also likely that Ravel was searching for a way to engage with music that enabled him to cope with and process his feelings during these years, especially given the extent to which the culture in which he lived silenced traumatic responses. Ravel’s awareness of the therapeutic potential of daily musical practice in the style dépouillé is evident especially in the postwar compositions that he wrote for grieving friends like Jourdan-Morhange and Long. As early as 1920, Ravel had begun to speak to Jourdan-Morhange about writing a violin concerto for his grieving friend. We can only speculate that his plans for a violin concerto morphed into plans for a sonata for violin and piano, which Ravel completed and dedicated to Jourdan-Morhange in 1927. Like the Duo, Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Piano embodies a linear dépouillée aesthetic, requiring repeated and rhythmically regular movements from its performers. After a more lyrical first movement, the second and third movements of this three-movement work offer strong examples of Ravel’s postwar machinistic impulses. The second movement, entitled “Blues,” opens with the violin creating a steady quarter- note pulse in G-major pizzicato chords at a moderate tempo. Although the piano’s entrance at m. 7 with an A-flat and E-flat initiates a harmonic instability that continues throughout the movement, the regular quarter-note pulse begun by the violin at the movement’s opening provides a rhythmic consistency that listener and performer can rely on for all but a handful of measures throughout the movement. Jourdan-Morhange relayed that Ravel wished that these chords should be performed with “an implacable rhythm (as implacable as in Boléro) .” 166 The constancy of this rhythmic pulse provides an unwavering background that permits the violinist to express her sorrow at the always fleeting nature of the past in chromatic and blue-note- ridden portamento

164 For more on Jourdan-Morhange’s understanding of Ravel as a good friend, see Jourdan- Morhange, “Le Grande Musicien Maurice Ravel est mort,” La République, December 29, 1937; and Jourdan-Morhange, “Ravel à Montfort l’Amaury,” in Ravel par quelques-uns de ses familiers (Paris: Éditions du Tambourinaire, 1939), 163–169. 165 Pieces that adhere less to the repetitive, ostinato-oriented dépouillé style that had become popular since the war—such as, for instance, his Tzigane (1924) and the Concerto pour la main gauche (1930)—were written specifically for performers who adhered to a particular performance style that did not gel all that well with the dépouillé aesthetic. 166 Jourdan-Morhange, “Ravel à Montfort l’Amaury,” 193: “un rythme implacable (aussi implacable que dans Boléro) .” 194 Resonant Recoveries

Musical Example 3.6 Maurice Ravel, Sonata for Violin and Piano, mvmt. 2: “Blues,” mm. 11–19.

weeping figures of the expressive melody marked “nostalgico” (see Musical Example 3.6).167 The final movement of the Sonata for Violin and Piano—when understood within the context of Jourdan-Morhange’s grief and her friendship with Ravel— supports the idea that rhythmic consistency was a helpful tool for coping with grief and trauma. This movement presents a flight-of-the-bumble-bee-esque tour de force aptly titled “Perpetuum Mobile.” It begins like an engine trying to start, but once it gets going, it flies: the violin plays constant allegro sixteenth notes from the fifteenth measure until the Sonata’s conclusion 180 measures— and thus more than 2,000 notes—later. Throughout the movement figural

167 According to Jourdan-Morhange, it is only in the context of this rhythmic consistency of the accompaniment that this kind of expression can take place. See ibid. Soothing Movements 195 repetition abounds, with extensive passages that resemble arpeggio and scalar technical exercises for the violin; here, we might imagine that Ravel took some of his cues from Jourdan-Morhange’s knowledge of violin exercises in addition to Paganini’s Caprices, which Jourdan-Morhange claimed Ravel had her play for him as he was composing this Sonata as well as the solo violin piece Tzigane.168 Pushing his violinist’s arms and fingers to their limits, Ravel does not permit the tempo—which he demanded be “as fast as possible”169—to lag for even a second in this protracted instance of what Jourdan-Morhange called Ravel’s “demonic violin technique.”170 In the midst of all of this kinesthetically demanding and incessant rhythmic movement, however, sixteen measures before the finale’s conclusion, Ravel suggests that musical movement can help us not only to recall presences from our pasts, but also to move stridently into the future. Here he has the pianist play an altered quotation of the first movement’s theme (see Musical Example 3.7a) while the violinist continues with her pulsating sixteenth notes (see Musical Example 3.7b). Ravel thus prompts his violinist friend to perform and work through her grief as the pianist—her “incomparable friend” Ravel— gently reminds her of the importance of not forgetting what—and perhaps more importantly who—has come before. The pulse-oriented rhythmic regularity that characterizes the sonatas that Ravel composed for Hélène Jourdan-Morhange is unmatched in Ravel’s other vehicles for violinistic solo and chamber performance. Ravel’s pre-war instrumental chamber compositions, the Quartet (1905) and the Trio (1914), for instance, feature lengthy instances of sixteenth-note passagework but, unlike the sonatas, these compositions feature frequent shifts in tempo, gesture, and affect; lush textures; frequent melodic doubling; and rubato-oriented expressive instructions more typical of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Romantic, symbolist, and Impressionist musical aesthetics. Similarly, Ravel’s Tzigane, which he wrote as a virtuoso showpiece for the Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Aranyi in 1924, is a rhapsodic piece containing multiple lengthy passages of sixteenth notes that rival the Violin Sonata’s intensity in terms of repetitive technical passagework. In Tzigane, however, Ravel asks the violinist to speed up, slow down,

Musical Example 3.7a Ravel, Sonata for Violin and Piano, mvmt. 1, mm. 1–6: first theme in piano.

168 Ibid., 180–181. 169 Ibid., 193: “Le Finale, disait Ravel, peut être pris aussi vite que possible.” 170 Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, “Musique de chambre,” 17: “la démonicité technique du violon.” 196 Resonant Recoveries

Musical Example 3.7b Ravel, Sonata for Violin and Piano, mvmt. 3, mm. 77–84: return of first movement’s first theme in the piano part.

radically shift tempo, or pause with a frequency that prevents the violinist from embodying a rhythmic groove for more than a few moments at a time. In fact, Ravel’s Quartet, as well as Tzigane, are rather fluid and rhapsodic pieces, written either before the war or for someone who had not been touched quite so horrifi- cally by the war as had his friend Hélène. Unfortunately, Jourdan-Morhange never had the opportunity to play Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Piano publicly. She had begun to experience cramps in her arms that would bring her career as a violinist to a halt in the mid-1920s. In composing these musical gifts—the streamlined, sparse, and mechanical Soothing Movements 197

Duo for Violin and ’Cello and Sonata for Violin and Piano—for his grieving friend Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel underlined how groove, rhythmic regularity, and strict moto perpetuo musical performance were connected to their understanding—shared by many of their peers as well—of music’s ability to function as a corporeal technology of consolation in the years after the war. For Jourdan-Morhange, as well, Ravel’s gift of these sonatas and their manuscripts offered her opportunities not only to mourn through repetitive, rhythmic movement, but also to recall vividly the presence of her dear friend Ravel. The manuscript score that she so lovingly bound into a scrapbook, she tells us, serves as an “extremely moving” reminder of their friendship.171 She recalls Ravel’s thought, as well as his body and its movements, as she plays from his manuscript: “It is extremely moving to contemplate the musical writing of an artist that one venerates: the accent drawn by a nervous hand holds so much for us, the beautiful curve of a more voluptuous slur. I have always had the impression of being more faithful to a musician’s thought in playing from his manuscript.”172 Always the incomparable friend, Ravel gave Hélène Jourdan-Morhange musical gifts intended, perhaps, not only to help them mourn their losses in the teens and 1920s, but also to provide her with a musical source of mourning and remembrance after his own death in 1937. The chapter that follows explores in more detail how, for interwar French musicians, musical manuscripts, performances, and activities enacted memory in visceral, embodied ways that permitted continued and active engagement with lost loved ones.

171 Maurice Ravel and Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, Sonata for Violin and Piano, Manuscript Autograph, Robert Owen Lehman Collection, The Pierpont Morgan Museum and Library, R252. S698; and Ravel and Jourdan-Morhange, Sonata for Violin and Violoncello (movements 2–4), Manuscript Autograph, Robert Owen Lehman Collection, The Pierpont Morgan Museum and Library, R252.S698. 172 Jourdan-Morhange, Ravel et nous, 194: “De plus, il me fit l’hommage du manuscrit. . . . Il est extrêmement émouvant de contempler l’écriture musicale d’un artiste que l’on vénère; l’accent tracé d’une main nerveuse nous devient essentiel, la jolie courbe d’un lié plus voluptueuse. J’ai toujours eu l’impression d’être plus fidèle à la pensée du musicien en jouant d’après son manuscrit.”