Maurice Ravel. His Creative Activity Characteristics and His Life Outline

Main Article Content

Leonid L. Sabaneev

Abstract

The editors continue the tradition of publishing scientific materials by L.L. Sabaneev, established in journal previous issues, which have become a bibliographic rarity and practically inaccessible to the domestic reader. A lot of material, stored in Leonid Leonidovich’ Parisian archive, as we have already written [1, pp. 36–37], were given by his daughter V.L. Sabaneeva-Lanskaya to Professor T.Yu. Maslovskaya with permission to publish and introduced into the musicological literature sphere. Considerable interest is due to the study by L. Sabaneev, devoted to the M. Ravel’s creative work [8] (1924) and formed in its own way an arch to the author’s work about Debussy in 1922, which was also republished on the pages of our journal [6–8].
Sabaneev reveals the roots of Ravelʼs style in the music by Couperin, Rameau, as well as Russian school composers (Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky). In its turn, comparing with Debussy allows us to reveal the common and different in the worldview, content, genre system of two composers’ works, melodic-rhythmic, textural organization of musical material, harmonic language and form interpretation. Sabaneev discovers the connection between Ravel’s music and ancient poetics and emphasizes the role of the timbre side (“the unusual compositions exotic”). The musicologist names the sophistication of color (“sound enchantment, magic”) as the main style concept; he traces this peculiarity at the level of all means of expression, but at the same time notes the “luxury monotony.” A clearly drawn line of style evolution, combined with biographical facts, creates a capacious, holistic portrait of the artist from the 1900s to the 1920s. The published text retains the stylistic peculiarities of the original one, but spelling and punctuation are given in accordance with the modern Russian language rules.


Keywords: French music, Ravel, sound contemplation, sophistication, colorism, orientalism, Hellenism, rhythm, melody, timbre.

Article Details

How to Cite
Sabaneev Л. Л. (2024). Maurice Ravel. His Creative Activity Characteristics and His Life Outline. Music Scholarship / Problemy Muzykal’noj Nauki, 54(1), 7–27. https://doi.org/10.17674/2782-3601.2024.1.007-027
Section
From the History of Domestic Thought about Music
Author Biography

Leonid L. Sabaneev

Leonid L. Sabaneev (1881–1968) was a Russian musicologist, composer and music critic. He is the author of works on the General History of Music, the History of Russian Music, researches on Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Alexander Scriabin, Russian composers of the early XX century. He was also one of the State Institute of Musical Sciences founders, a full member of the Music Section of the Academy of Artistic Sciences and President of the Contemporary Music Association in Moscow, Professor at the Russian Rachmaninov Conservatory in Paris.