Irony and Sound: The Music of Maurice Ravel

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Introduction
"Gentle Irony"
Simple Sound: Ravel and "Crescendo"
Opposed Sound: Ravel and Counterpoint
Displaced Sound: Ravel and Registration
Plundered Sound: Ravel and the Exotic
Sound and Sense: Ravel and Synaesthesia
"Secrets of Modernity": Irony and Style
Appendix: Ravel's 1902 Prix de Rome Fugue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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An insightful and exquisitely written reconsideration of Ravel's modernity, his teaching, and his place in twentieth-century music and culture. What is it about Boléro, Gaspard de la nuit, and Daphnis et Chloé that makes musicians and listeners alike love them so? Stephen Zank here illuminates these and other works of Maurice Ravel through several of the composer's fascinations: dynamic intensification, counterpoint, orchestration, exotic influences on Western music, and an interest in multisensorial perception. Connecting all these fascinations, Zank argues, is irony. His book offers an appreciation of Ravel's musical irony that is grounded in the vocabularies and criticism of the time and in two early attempts at writing up a "Ravel Aesthetic" by intimates of Ravel. Thomas Mann calledirony the phenomenon that is, "beyond compare, the most profound and most alluring in the world." Irony and Sound, written with insight and flair, provides a long-needed reconsideration of Ravel's modernity, his teaching, and his place in twentieth-century music and culture. Musicologist Stephen Zank has taught at University of Illinois, University of North Texas, and University of Rochester. He is the author of Maurice Ravel: A Guideto Research.

Reviews

Filled with detailed insight into the thought world of Ravel and his time, and, best of all, close reading of the music. . . . Most illuminating. . . . Can be read with profit by anyone interested in the composer's work. . . . [The chapter on synaesthesia] is certainly one of the best expositions of this complex notion. . . . This book gives a full picture of Ravel and the intellectual issues of his circle

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