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 an- other. 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 pro- vided, but also the mechanistic ways in which the rhythmic regularity and repeti- tion 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 regu- larity 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 fea- ture 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 dedi- cated 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/ trans- position/ 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.