**A "Naked Violin" and a "Mechanical Rabbit": Exploring Playing Relationships in Ravel's Sonata for Violin and Cello (1922)**

**Neil Heyde**

#### **1. Introduction**

As much of the world was locked down during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, musicians began to explore new ways of making music "together". Although unable to play in the same spaces, unable to listen and interact in real time without latency, and without sufficient audio presence or fidelity to permit the kind of sonic interweaving that is the very basis of chamber music, a panoply of new approaches emerged. As this chapter was on my desk as the pandemic hit, I was struck by the notion that Ravel might have found himself very much at home in a world where freedoms of interaction that we usually take for granted are removed. In this chapter, we will see how Ravel's restriction of possibilities enables a special kind of performance "play".

Among the earliest of the collaborative lockdown videos was a shortened version of Ravel's Boléro (1929) made by musicians of the Orchestre National de France and posted on YouTube on 29 March 2020 (Orchestre National de France 2020).<sup>1</sup> The choice of *Boléro* is not mere happenstance, and many other videos of it appeared in the following weeks.<sup>2</sup> The repetition of the 16-bar theme presents an ideal platform for introducing specific players/instruments, both one by one and in groups; the clever "design" of the adjunction of instrumental colour across the piece means that enough remains intact for it to work effectively, even when truncated and without the players being able properly to listen to one another.

One could argue that what is missing in these lockdown *Boléros* is the very thing that Ravel's design facilitates: in a live performance, the players pay special attention to the *handing over* of the musical impetus from one section to the next. (The sharing of musical impetus is an important focus in Maria Krivenski's chapter, which explores technology-mediated music making in this volume.) This handing over of material requires the kind of listening and responding that we might expect in chamber music

<sup>1</sup> The whole video is under five minutes long (including the introductions from the players). The arrangement is by Didier Benetti, solo timpanist of the orchestra and also a composer.

<sup>2</sup> The constant percussion ostinato serves as an inbuilt "substitute" for the clicktrack that is usually used in multitracked performances, such as those on YouTube.

and is what most holds my attention when listening to a live performance. However, the evidence of the lockdown films indicates that Ravel has succeeded in creating a "game" for musicians in which the "rules" are so clearly established that there is sufficient inherent pleasure to be gained from participating in it, or observing it, even if certain critical aspects of its potential are left unrealised. Ravel's own sense of the "game" or "gamble" taken in *Boléro* can be gauged from his response to conductor Paul Paray's questioning of whether he would "like a go" during a visit to the casino in Monte Carlo: "I wrote *Boléro* and won. I'll stick there" (Nichols 2011, p. 302).

For Ravel, musical games seem to have been fundamentally important, as set out by Vladimir Jankélévitch in his influential and provocative monograph on the composer. At the beginning of a section entitled "Challenge", Jankélévitch writes that

Ravel's audacity expresses itself in two ways—firstly in a liking for difficulties overcome and an obstinate search for effort, and secondly in the spirit of artifice. Roland-Manuel, who penetrated more deeply than anyone else into the secrets of Ravel's art spoke of the "aesthetics of imposture". It seems preferable to say "aesthetics of challenge", for a challenge implies a *tour de force* and an iron will. This side of the challenge is both Cornelian and Stoic. Having found that beautiful things are difficult, Ravel then played at creating artificially the exceptional, thankless and paradoxical conditions which re-establish the hardness that is beauty; since he did not experience the romantic conflict between vocation and destiny, he invented, for he had no natural difficulty in expressing himself, artificial obstacles which caused him a second type of clumsiness; he fabricated for his own use gratuitous prohibitions and arbitrary orders, voluntarily impoverished his own language and tried all types of limitations, distortion and stridency in order to prove with certainty how much an artist's effort can achieve . . . . Every composition by Ravel represents . . . a certain problem to be solved, a game in which the player voluntarily makes the rules of the game more complicated. (Jankélévitch 1959, pp. 68–69)

What kinds of games has Ravel created in the Sonata for Violin and Cello (hereafter "the Duo"), and how do we as players interact with them? One of the drivers for writing this chapter was discovering violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange's *Ravel et nous*, in which she offers not only a first-hand account of Ravel as a person, but also detailed recollections of their work together on several pieces composed during the 1920s, including the Duo and the Sonata for Violin and Piano (1927) (Jourdan-Morhange 1945).<sup>3</sup> Unlike most 20th-century texts on music published in journals or newspapers, her book focuses closely on personal experiences in ways that feel sharply prescient to a writer in the 21st century, given the recent swerve to first-person narratives in artistic research and a broader scholarly interest in self-reflexivity and auto-ethnography.<sup>4</sup>

In this chapter, I aim to use some of her observations as jumping-off points for exploring ways in which Ravel's Duo provides a window for revealing how listening and interaction can take shape in chamber music performance. A core idea is that some of the "restrictions" typical of Ravel's conceptual and notational precision are in fact centrally important to enabling play. In absolute terms, there may be fewer freedoms for the performer in this repertoire than in much other chamber music but, as we shall see, the restrictions enable a special kind of focus on highly refined inflections of timbre and intonation, thus heightening physical and listening awareness in the moment. For me, it is this access to a heightened sensibility that constitutes the greatest pleasure in playing Ravel's music. These heights are not easily attained, and scale of recognizing and addressing the challenge is part of the pleasure of any fleeting success in grappling with it.

Jourdan-Morhange opens her chapter discussing her work with Ravel on his chamber music with the following extended "cautionary note", containing an observation by the music critic Émile Vuillermoz that sets Ravel against Debussy in a way that, by 1945, would have become something of a commonplace:

Having had the inestimable privilege to work in every detail on the *Sonata*, the *Duo* and the *Trio* with Ravel, I would like to pay tribute to his memory by indicating as faithfully as possible the wishes and preferences he expressed during the daily work on these pieces. Artists who have not been able to rehearse with the master will be grateful to me, I think, for pointing out the small errors which, from virtuoso to virtuoso, slip into performances; they risk losing the author's intentions, in addition to their integrity, [and] the velvetiness of their original freshness.

I know that each performer must make a personal contribution to the interpretation of a masterpiece, but Ravel's music is a great exception.

<sup>3</sup> The Sonata for Violin and Piano is dedicated to Jourdan-Morhange, but she was not able to premiere it, as she had the Duo, owing to early-onset arthritis.

<sup>4</sup> The growing importance of first-person narratives was captured in a conference attended by a large international audience in 2018, titled "Beyond 'mesearch': autoethnography, self-reflexivity, and personal experience as academic research in music studies" (Institute of Musical Research, Senate House, London).

As Vuillermoz has aptly written: "There are many ways of performing [*d'éxecuter*] Debussy, but there is only one way of playing [*de jouer*] Ravel."<sup>5</sup>

Ravel's focus is so perfect that the slightest "nudge" of the needle disturbs the entire mechanism of the watch. In general, Ravel found that the indications written on the score were not read scrupulously enough.

—Is there a highlight? he asked, ironically, of "the bow" which lingered complacently on a voluptuous note.<sup>6</sup> (Jourdan-Morhange 1945, pp. 179–80)

The word choices in Vuillermoz's observation are interesting and important: "executing" (performing) vs. "playing". At first glance, perhaps these choices are also surprising to a contemporary reader: the "execution" he proposes for Debussy recalls for us Stravinsky's infamous use of the word in the last of his "Poetics" lectures in a way that is much more closely allied with what we might expect for Ravel (Stravinsky 1947b). Roy Howat, for example, contrasts Debussy's frequent profusions of instructions (as, for example, at the start of the prelude "*Des pas sur la neige*")<sup>7</sup> with Ravel's much more laconic approach, citing the most intense and hushed moment of "*Le gibet*" (bar 28) from *Gaspard de la nuit*, for which Ravel indicates *"sans expression*" (Howat 2009, p. 209). Howat also observes that many of Ravel's colleagues quoted his pleas to "play my music, not interpret it" (ibid., p. 210). Although all responses to musical scores necessarily require interactions that are effectively "interpretative", it seems clear that Ravel's expectations, or hopes, of musicians in this regard were quite distinctive. Whereas Debussy is often *explicatory*, aiming perhaps to engage us in aspects of the design process, Ravel tends towards the presentation of musical "facts" without explication, aiming perhaps more towards a process of *discovery* through

<sup>5</sup> Jourdan-Morhange notes that this quote is taken from *La Revue musicale*, 1925.

<sup>6</sup> Translations of all the passages quoted from Jourdan-Morhange's book in this chapter are mine. "Ayant eu l'inestimable privilège de travailler dans leurs moindres détails la *Sonate*, le *Duo* et le *Trio* avec Ravel, je voudrais rendre hommage à sa mémoire en indiquant le plus fidèlement possible les volontés et les préférences qu'il exprima pendant le travail quotidien de ces morceaux. Les artistes qui n'ont pu répéter avec le maître me sauront gré, je pense, de leur signaler les petites erreurs qui, de virtuoses en virtuoses, se glissent dans les interprétations; elles risquent de faire perdre aux intentions de l'auteur, outre leur intégrité, le velouté de leur fraîcheur première.

Je sais que chaque exécutant doit apporter sa contribution personnelle à l'interprétation d'un chef-d'œuvre, mais la musique de Ravel est une grande exception. Comme l'a si justement écrit Vuillermoz: «Il y a plusieurs façons d'exécuter Debussy; il n'y en a qu'une de jouer du Ravel».

La mise au point chez Ravel est si parfaite que le moindre «coup de pouce» à l'aiguille dérange tout le mécanisme de la montre. De façon générale, Ravel trouvait qu'on ne lisait pas assez scrupuleusement les indications écrites sur la partition.

<sup>—</sup>Y a-t-il un point d'orgue? demandait-il, ironique, à «l'archet» qui s'attardait avec complaisance sur la note voluptueuse.»

<sup>7</sup> The heading *Triste et lent* is followed by the following text accompanying the left-hand ostinato: "(*Ce rythme doit avoir la valeur sonore d'un fond de paysage triste et glacé*)". As Howat notes, "even the parentheses are a nuance in themselves, conveying an added aura of intimacy" (Howat 2009, p. 209).

"simply doing" what it says. Although it is possible that the audible "outcomes" of some of their instructions might have a lot in common, the process is critically different.

In a 21st-century context, it is possibly easier to see how Debussy is encouraging a kind of "co-creativity"—triggering the imagination of performers as they listen to and shape the music—than it is for Ravel. However, if I propose that Vuillermoz's "one way of playing Ravel" might be able to produce more than a single kind of musical outcome, and that Ravel's restriction of possibility establishes a kind of mindset for the *playing* of his games rather than strictly controlling the results, we may begin to draw out what is special about his games, why performers love playing them, and why Jourdan-Morhange might have thought it would be useful to share some of her experiences for other musicians. As Jankélévitch suggests above, the "game" does not belong only to the composer.
