Notes on Ravel's Chansons madécasses
Maurice Ravel wrote his Chansons madécasses between 1925 and 1926, on a commission by the philanthropist and pianist Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, and premiered the work in Rome on May 8, 1926 with Jane Bathori (mezzo-soprano), Louis Fleury (flute), Hans Kindler (violoncello) and Alfredo Casella (piano). The texts to all three of the songs, chosen by the composer himself, come from a 1787 collection, also entitled Chansons madécasses, by the white Créole poet Évariste de Parny (1754-1814). (1) According to Ravel, these “seemed to bring a new, dramatic element – even erotic, which stemmed from the very subject matter of Parny’s chansons.” (2)
Indeed, the Chansons are rife with eroticism. The first song, the longest of the cycle, slowly and yearningly traces a sexual encounter between its first-person narrator and the object of his desire, Nahandove, from anticipation to consummation, bliss to the return of a mournful longing to be with her again. The lush but spare mood of the song and the cycle in general emerges from the very opening, a duet between the cello and voice (Fig. 1). The interlacing lines are in sensuous embrace, but so too are they slightly off-kilter: each moves horizontally with a rhythmic and melodic independence that obfuscates a strong sense of key or time signature. As in Parny’s text, her name, set as a longing cry – always a quick thirty-second and dotted sixteenth note on the first two syllables, followed by a drawn out “-dove” of varying lengths – serves as a repeated motif that punctuates the different sections of the piece. These sections are also set off from one another by marked changes in tempo, key, instrumentation and musical material that reflect the mood of the text. The piano’s first entrance, for instance, begins a heightened, anticipatory passage as the narrator sees her approaching (Fig. 2). The tempo is più animato, and all four instruments come in progressively to build in volume and texture, playing shorter note values that mark a strong contrast to the languid opening. Meanwhile, the later, post-coital section, which has approximately the same tempo, is more relaxed, characterized by rocking hemiolas in the voice and flute (Fig. 3).
Fig 1: “Nahandove” opening cello/voice duet
Fig 2: “Nahandove” rehearsal 1, mounting anticipation
Fig 3: “Nahandove rehearsal 4, flute/voice post-coital hemiolas
The flute takes a primary role in the third piece, introducing its lush melodic motive as an unaccompanied solo (Fig. 4). The eroticism is now less overtly sexual, and the texture remains more continuously sparse than in the other two songs, but it is still clearly present in the bewitching lines of the flute and voice, in particular, which alternate between duple and triple rhythms to create a sweet, streamlined voluptuousness that paints the “gestures of pleasure” in the poetry. Another recurring effect in the piece is a measured “stepping,” the main theme which the flute and voice trade off while the cello provides a rhythmic pizzicato ostinato near the close of the song (Fig. 5). In contrast to the inconstant passion of the first piece, pleasure here is found in calm and warm simplicity.
Fig 4: “Il est doux” opening flute solo
Fig 5: “Il est doux” rehearsal 3, rhythmic pizzicati and flute/voice echoes
This is welcome respite after the visceral violence and dread of the second piece, the cycle’s most arresting. An anticolonial warning to “beware the whites,” it erupts with a piercing cry of “Aoua!” that breaks the lull of the previous song. After this initial call, the story begins to unfold with quiet unease. The vocal range is low and limited, its line speech-like. The bitonality of the section provides disharmony and anxiety, but it also paints the conflict between the Malagasy population and the colonial settlers of the island literally, juxtaposing the white keys of the flute, cello and piano’s left hand with the black ones of the voice and piano’s right hand. As the tension builds and erupts, the vocal range rises and the tempo increases to a ferocious climax. Finally, the song closes with a return to low, creaking unease for a repetition of its initial warning. The subject and execution of this keystone middle piece, which Ravel wrote first, may not be an obvious representation of the erotic, but a bodily sensuousness is assuredly present in the “warning” passages: in the slow, stalking descending lines of the flute; the oscillating pitches of the cello, voice and piano; the hypnotizing repetitiousness of all four instruments.
Fig. 6: “Aoua !” opening
Fig. 7: “Aoua !” rehearsal 1, black/white bitonality and open fifths
How much of this eroticism is tied to exocitism? The question is incontrovertible. The subject matter and setting, of course, immediately arouse suspicion of European representation of an exotic other. While the white Parny was born on a French-held island (Bourbon, now Réunion), his depiction of Madagascar was an act of his imagination, albeit one probably informed by his childhood experience in a colonial setting. Meanwhile, orientalism and exoticism are absolute hallmarks of French Modernist music and art in general. These tropes are present – as manifest source material or as more subtle components of the evolving musical language of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – in the catalogues of one composer after another.
Ravel’s output, specifically, is filled with works of different “masks,” as Adorno called them (3), meant to explore and conjuring otherness both geographical and temporal: a generalized Asia in Scheherazade, Spain in Boléro and L’heure espagnole, Ancient Greece in Daphnis et Chloé, the Baroque period in Le Tombeau de Couperin or Romanticism in Gaspard de la nuit and Valses nobles et sentimentales, to name a few. The degree to which he makes use of the “exotic,” however, ranges from overt, literal portrayal to a deconceptualized appropriation of outside influences that make their way into the composer’s language. So, while the Chinese Cup’s short aria “Keng-ça-fou, mah-jong” in L’enfant et les sortilèges is an obvious, and obviously offensive, bit of musical yellowface, the possible “allusions” to Madagascar in Chansons madécasses are more subtle.
Arguably, the musical elements I mention above can be heard as direct invocations of place: the piercing cry of “Aoua” becoming “savage” and the piece’s hollow bitonality and use of open fifths “primitive,” musical figures such as the third song’s flute solo and percussive cello ostinato heard as allusions to “traditional” instruments. And the very eroticism of the three pieces, their strong embodiment, can be understood as inherently exotic, in the way that non-white bodies are inherently more objectified and fetishized in art, and life. How much of this is intentional on Ravel’s part? How much of it stems from our assumptions as listeners of a piece we are told takes place on Madagascar? Ralph Locke describes exoticism as “the process of evoking in or through music—whether that music is ‘exotic-sounding’ or not—a place, people, or social milieu that is not entirely imaginary and that differs profoundly from the home country or culture in attitudes, customs, and morals… It is the process of evoking a place (people, social milieu) that is perceived as different from home by the people who created the exoticist cultural product and by the people who receive it.” (4)
Some exotic undertones – whether intended or not – are in this way probably inescapable. Does the music warrant this perception per se? To answer this definitely is impossible, because the melodies and rhythms are inextricably linked to a text that will always conjure up some associations with a world outside of white European culture. To attempt to divorce the music from the poetry is moot. The work does represent a departure from many of Ravel’s works, especially the streamlined textures that move definitively away from the musical Impressionism of the turn of the twentieth century. It is also worth noting, however, that vocal chamber pieces are extremely rare in Ravel’s oeuvre: his Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1913), for a much larger expanded Pierrot ensemble, is his only other. Some timbral particularities of the piece, especially, but also certain melodic and rhythmic ones, can be attributed to its unique orchestration. Meanwhile, certain hallmarks of Ravel’s style are undeniably present, including his imaginative use of instrumental color even within a more stripped down creation or his sensitive, speech-like text setting. Beyond the very real questions of cultural portrayal and borrowing, it may be best to approach an interpretation of the Chansons madécasses per the composer’s description of them as “essentially a quartet in which the voice is the principal instrument,” in which “simplicity is all important.” (5)
Quartet discussion, September 2021 (with Yoshi Weinberg and Sarah Song)
Notes:
Mawer 2000
Ravel 1938/1993: 23
Puri 2011: 63
Locke 2009: 47 (emphasis is the author’s own)
Ravel 1938/1993: 23
References
James, Richard S. 1990. “Ravel’s Chansons Madécasses: Ethnic Fantasy or Ethnic Borrowing?” The Musical Quarterly 74 (3): 360–384.
Lazzaro, Federico. 2016. “Chansons madécasses, modernisme et érotisme: Pour une écoute de Ravel au-delà de l’exotisme.” Revue musicale OICRM 3 (1): 16–55.
Locke, Ralph P. 2009. Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Mawer, Deborah, ed. 2000. The Cambridge Companion to Ravel. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Puri, Michael J. 2011.“Adorno’s Ravel.” In Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music, edited by Peter Kaminsky: 63–82. Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer.
Ravel, Maurice. 1938/1993. “Esquisse autobiographique.” La Revue musicale 19 (187). In Maurice Ravel: Lettres, écrits, entretiens, edited by Orenstein, Arbie: 17-23. Paris: Flammarion.
Ravel, Maurice. 1926. Chansons madécasses. Paris: Durand.