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Ravel the Decadent
Memory, Sublimation, and Desire
Michael J. Puri
272 pages
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235x156mm
978-0-19-973537-2
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Hardback
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19 April 2012
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We are awaiting more stock of this item from another OUP branch. Orders for out-of-stock items are supplied and charged as soon as the item becomes available.
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- The first book to thoroughly examine the relationship between French Decadence and music
- The first book in musicology to theorize memory in great depth, and thus to make a major contribution to memory studies in the humanities
- The first book to sketch out a theory of musical dandyism, whether in Ravel or any other repertoire, and uses it to flesh out new autobiographical possibilities in music
- Offers a sustained engagement between music and the work of such critical thinkers as Proust, Baudelaire, Freud, Bergson, Jankélévitch, and Nietzsche
The music of Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), beloved by musicians and audiences since its debut, has always proven itself a difficult topic for scholars. The traditional stylistic categories of impressionism, symbolism, and neoclassicism, while relevant, have offered too little purchase on his fascinating but enigmatic work. Ravel the Decadent provides an innovative and productive solution by locating the aesthetic origins of this music in the French Decadence and demonstrating the extension of this influence across the length of his oeuvre. While there are many Decadent
topics, this book selects three—memory, sublimation, and desire—and uses them not only to delineate the content of this music, pinpoint its overlap with contemporary cultural discourse, and link it to its biographical context, but also to create new methods altogether for the analysis and interpretation of music.
Ravel the Decadent opens by defining the main concepts, giving particular attention to memory and decadence. It then stakes out contrasting modes of memory in this music: a nostalgic mode that views the past as forever lost, and a more optimistic mode that imagines its resurrection and reanimation. It acknowledges Ravel's lifelong identity as a dandy—a figure that embodies the Decadence and its aspiration toward the sublime—and identifies possible
moments of musical self-portraiture before stepping back to theorize dandyism in European musical modernism at large. It then addresses the dialectic between desire and its sublimation in the pairing of two genres—the bacchanal and the idyll—and leverages the central trio of concepts to offer provocative readings of the two waltz sets, the Valses nobles et sentimentales and La valse. It concludes by invoking the same terms to identify a topic of "faun music" that promises to create new common ground between Ravel and Debussy. Rife with close readings that will satisfy the musicologist, the book also suits a more general reader through its broadly humanistic key concepts, immersion in contemporary art and literature, and clear, direct
language.Readership: · Scholars of French Classical Music, as well as Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Music
· Music Historians in general
· Music Analysts and Theorists
· Scholars of European Modernism
· Scholars of French Literature
· Scholars of Memory Studies
· Literary and Psychoanalytic Theorists in the Humanities
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Michael J. Puri, Associate Professor, University of Virginia Michael J. Puri is an Associate Professor in the McIntire Department of Music at the University of Virginia. A graduate of Harvard, Yale, and the Music Academy in Basel. Puri is a broadly trained humanist and pianist who uses literary and critical theory to analyze music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special attention to Ravel, Debussy, Wagner, and Liszt. His articles have appeared in leading music journals and various edited collections, and his research has been supported by many national societies and foundations. In 2008 he received the Alfred Einstein Award from the American Musicological Society.
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"Beautifully produced and inexpensive, this is a most valuable addition to Ravel scholarship" - Classical Music Magazine
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Memory, Decadence, and Music
Chapter 1: Thematic Cyclicism and the Ravelian Finale
Chapter 2: Reanimation and the Primal Scene
Chapter 3: Dandy, Interrupted
Chapter 4: Idylls and Bacchanals
Chapter 5: Epilogism in the Valses nobles et sentimentales
Chapter 6: Dynamism in La valse
Conclusion: In the Footsteps of the Faun
Introduction Notes
Chapter 1 Notes
Chapter 2 Notes
Chapter 3 Notes
Chapter 4 Notes
Chapter 5 Notes
Chapter 6 Notes
Conclusion Notes
Bibliography
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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