Ravel, Bolero, Brain Damage on NPR

Subject: RE: Ravel, Bolero, Brain Damage on NPR
From: M.Ted
Date: 05 Feb 02 - 04:30 PM

At least Ravel gets credited for PE--a lot of the classical orchestral music has been reworked to accomodate the modern orchestra with little acknowledgment of the orchestrator--of course, sometimes the orchestrator is not the genius that the composer was--I recently heard a baroque piece where the basso continuo part had been assigned to the horn section(it is generally assigned to the cellos) it wasn't pretty to hear--

Subject: RE: Ravel, Bolero, Brain Damage on NPR
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 05 Feb 02 - 01:29 PM

The French pronunciation is the one to strive for on timbre. And M.Ted is correct about the Bolero form--Ravel didn't invent it, but for folks who aren't familiar with the many forms involved in classical music, it comes across as a unique piece. Like a passacaligia being a traditional form but one that Bach's Passacaligia and Fugue has made seem all his own. Both are repetitive, acting in a way as theme and variations, very subtle, probably very difficult to write.

Ravel was brilliant. He took a piano version of Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and orchestrated it. Rimski-Korsakov's Shéhérazade is another he orchestrated.

SRS

Subject: RE: Ravel, Bolero, Brain Damage on NPR
From: lamarca
Date: 05 Feb 02 - 01:15 PM

Actually, there are many orchestrations of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, which he wrote as a series of piano sketches. Ravel's is the best known, and is most often played. It was famous for being one of the first orchestral pieces to use a new instrument of the era, the saxophone, as a solo instrument in the section Il Vecchio Castello, (The Ancient Castle). This was the version I grew up hearing, specifically Fritz Reiner's recording with the Chicago Symphony. I got really weirded out in college when a friend put another recording on, and it was ALL WRONG! Turned out that it was Leopold Stokowski conducting his own orchestration of the same piano original, using completely different instruments and arrangements. It's funny how a particular arrangement or even specific recording of a musical piece that you hear first becomes the "right" version somehow in your brain.

In program notes for a concert featuring the Ravel arrangement, I found the following passage:

Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition remained relatively obscure until 1923, when Ravel completed an orchestration of the suite for Serge Koussevitsky. Ravel's scoring was not the first attempt to transform Pictures into an orchestral piece, nor was it the last--there have been at least a dozen arrangements of Pictures, beginning with an orchestration by Mikhail Tushmalov in 1891, and orchestral versions by Sir Henry Wood, Ravel, Leonidas Leonardi, Leopold Stokowski, Lucien Caillet, Walter Goehr, and Sergei Gorchakov. There have also been scorings for other groupings of instruments, including Elgar Howarth's brass ensemble version, a guitar version by Yamashita, Tomita's electronic scoring, and even a fancifully-staged version by the rock band Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. Ravel's masterful orchestration is better known than any other, including Mussorgsky's own piano suite!

We recently got a CD re-release of the piano piece being played by the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, and it's wonderful in the original scoring, too!

Subject: RE: Ravel, Bolero, Brain Damage on NPR
From: kendall
Date: 05 Feb 02 - 12:59 PM

I took a classical music course in college, and, the professor insisted the proper pronunciation is: Tame burr

Subject: RE: Ravel, Bolero, Brain Damage on NPR
From: DougR
Date: 05 Feb 02 - 12:48 PM

Interesting, TedM, I did not know Ravel did the arrangement for "Pictures."

DougR

Subject: RE: Ravel, Bolero, Brain Damage on NPR
From: Dicho (Frank Staplin)
Date: 05 Feb 02 - 12:41 PM

MTed, I agree, The Bolero is a masterpiece. The gradual involvement of the whole orchestra and the building intensity and emotion throughout the piece has not been equaled.
You also mention the El Greco nonsense. The erroneous comments apply mostly to his portraits of saints and seldom may be said of his other works. Like many artists, he exaggerated for effect. A "more likely" story is that he painted the saints that way because they would be displayed rather high on walls, but I believe that he was simply striving for a total effect and one that put the saint beyond the common earthly plane.
A genius will innovate; if we don't understand his purpose, we tend to make up just-so stories.

Subject: RE: Ravel, Bolero, Brain Damage on NPR
From: Mrrzy
Date: 05 Feb 02 - 12:12 PM

Hmmm - all they say is Left-Hemisphere. Anybody got any details?

Subject: RE: Ravel, Bolero, Brain Damage on NPR
From: Mrrzy
Date: 05 Feb 02 - 12:09 PM

I think the TAMber pronunciation is an attempt to pronounce it in French, which is also how it's spelled, and to distinguish it from timBER. But if I say TIMbre will I be understood?

YES thanks kat it was The Moderns.

And I'll check out the details on the encyclopedia site, thanks. I figured it was a stroke, but that covers a multitude of sins...

Subject: RE: Ravel, Bolero, Brain Damage on NPR
From: Dave Bryant
Date: 05 Feb 02 - 11:33 AM

I always pronounce "timbre" more as "tarmbrer". I can never remember how to write proper phonetics.

Subject: RE: Ravel, Bolero, Brain Damage on NPR
From: M.Ted
Date: 05 Feb 02 - 11:10 AM

I tried to go to the site, your link took me to archived programs of Motley Fool, did my own search, and as of 10am EST, the audio was not available, so I don't know what they said--

My intitial reaction would be to guess that these people are doing that same "Bosch images came from mental illness", "El Greco was near-sighted" school of artistic interpretation--

"Bolero" is great because Ravel was a great craftsman and a knowledgeable music scholar--not some garretted, mad composer driven by trauma induced obsession--

The repeating structure of the piece was not created by Ravel.The Bolero was a popular dance form, he simply used it's circular repeating rhythmic pattern--the continuous repetition of a melody(cantus firmus) is a device that was commonly used to provide a structure for compositions through the Baroque period-- and his gifted inspiration(in addition to the creation of the melody) was to combine these two things-- Ravel, who was, in addition to being a composer, an incredible arranger(It was he who created the amazing orchestration for Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition") and this, far from being a minimalist "trance" composition, is a showcase for the art of orchestration(there are no repetitions in the voicings!)

The story is that one day Ravel heard a fruitmonger whistling a popular song, and said, "I want to write a song that the fruitmongers will whistle"(or something like that)--of course, with Bolero, he succeeded--but instead of simply dumping classical music and writing for the music hall, he did it by creating a revolutionary orchestral composition--his genius was in finding away to do it that was accessible on every level--

Subject: RE: Ravel, Bolero, Brain Damage on NPR
From: katlaughing
Date: 05 Feb 02 - 10:00 AM

maybe this list of credits for Wallace Shawn would help identify the movie?

Subject: RE: Ravel, Bolero, Brain Damage on NPR
From: katlaughing
Date: 05 Feb 02 - 09:57 AM

According to the Encyclopedia of Educational Technology, he had a stroke.

Subject: RE: Ravel, Bolero, Brain Damage on NPR
From: Mrrzy
Date: 05 Feb 02 - 09:37 AM

Here's to the story on NPR.

Subject: Ravel, Bolero, Brain Damage on NPR
From: Mrrzy
Date: 05 Feb 02 - 09:08 AM

I remember a very strange movie (not the name, of course) where Wallace Shawn says "I just ran into Maurice Ravel in the men's room. He didn't recognize me." which was very funny if you knew that Ravel had brain damage later in life. This morning there was a very interesting segment that was still unfortunately in full swing as I left the car for work, about Ravel's brain damage and whether it influenced the composing of Bolero, where there are several passages repeated with the only difference being the actual instruments, or (in the sound) the timbre (ancillary question: TIM-BER or TAM-BER?). This is a right-hemisphere process, apparently, the grokking of timbre. Anyway, it was fascinating, anybody hear it? And next questions: does anybody know what was actually WRONG with Ravel? And what WAS the name of that movie?