How to Beat the Clock

Some Ravel Fanboying

Once I sent a program note draft to my manager, saying check this out!, and a few days later she wrote back to say it was cringe. She hated my description of a sonata as “an essay in the nature of time” … I’m paraphrasing. It’s possible I wrote “The work with all its restless drive and momentary specificity at last evanesces, to reveal its stubborn philosophical essence: an essay in the nature of time.” Kidding! I don’t think I would write that sentence, and if I ever do write anything like it, I invite you to visit me backstage at a concert and slap me around. Or hit me with a pie. (Preferably banana cream.) That would be more fun and we could eat it after.

She said my thesis was a copout. “Anything,” she wrote with unusual fierceness, “could be called an essay in the nature of time. Come on. You can do better.” Ouch! I smarted from that for a good while.

She might have been right about this particular bit of prose. But I am not so sure that anything and everything is an essay on time. I mean—yes and no? The vast majority of music attempts to beguile us away from our awareness of time, or to disguise its relentless passage so well that we are temporarily deluded into thinking it is a friend. Or to convert the currency of time into spiritual (and other miscellaneous) goods.

—

I have been obsessing on time and change—you might be able to tell!—and in that mood rereading beloved books. To my surprise and sadness, Lolita left me slightly cold. The Golden Bowl, hilariously, now almost seemed too obvious. The first twenty pages of Doktor Faustus, however, were exactly as boring as I remembered. Time, if anything, had only clarified their tedium. A little ways in, though, I got an unusual wash of pleasure. I’m a skeptic of deja vu but I perfectly recalled the moment snuggled on a velvet couch when I first read these lines, and paused in wonder:

Clearwings were there depicted which had no scales on their wings, so that they seemed delicately glassy and only shot through with a net of dark veins. One such butterfly, in transparent nudity, loving the duskiness of heavy leafage, was called Hetaera esmeralda. Hetaera had on her wings only a dark spot of violet and rose; one could see nothing else of her, and when she flew she was like a petal blown by the wind. Then there was the leaf butterfly, whose wings on top are a triple chord of colour, while underneath with insane exactitude they resemble a leaf, not only in shape and veining but in the minute reproduction of small imperfections, imitation drops of water, little warts and fungus growths and more of the like. When this clever creature alights among the leaves and folds its wings, it disappears by adaptation so entirely that the hungriest enemy cannot make it out.

The weird sensual joys of this!—even carrying through the words warts and fungus, somehow. Was oneupmanship involved? Was Mann trying to outdo Nabokov in his home turf of butterflies?

And “when she flew she was like a petal blown by the wind,” good lord, that was as close to a hands-free orgasm as you can get in the annals of literature, and somehow also the most perfect possible description of the piece rattling around my head…

… the opening of the Ravel Violin Sonata.

—

Sometimes I give Ravel a bit of grief. (I especially despise La Valse, mainstay of modern piano auditions.) My case against Maurice is that he gets hypnotized by the beauty of his sounds and the elegance of his constructions. He dazzles himself into forgetting his meaning. Of course, many people disagree. They hear true terror and demonic energy in Scarbo; I think in many cases Debussy does it better, digging deeper, and I prefer (to take one example) the less seductive, rawer terror of …what the west wind saw.

The Violin Sonata is a big exception, to my mind, and it was a comfort just this last week to play it again, with a violinist whose talents I hope will soon be discovered. Its miraculous qualities felt unchanged.

Everything comes out of that first piano solo, maddeningly difficult in concert—you cannot really pedal it. You have to play it (almost) as cleanly and purely as a Bach fugue subject, but with no pedantry. No, actually, everything about it suggests the untaught and the unteachable, including its arc, how it starts and falls and gracefully turns around in the middle of the keyboard and slowly begins to sail up …

This theme has aspects of a simple country dance, but also the modal notes of an imagined ancient Greece. You can feel the nymphs and satyrs, their light bare feet.

The spirit of the dance lies in the little fillips of rhythm here and there, a little skip, a quicker step. But also the little pauses! Everything is continuous—except, except, except three lingering notes. Each time, stopping on that same F-sharp. The F-sharp, which in our key “should” be the leading tone, has (in this context) no leading quality at all.

Mann’s butterfly is the best metaphor, because above all this theme is aerodynamic; it will not be tied down. It has both iridescence and transparency. Delicious colors, but not a wash of blurry canvas—everything is clear. You can feel in the quicker notes the sudden and irregular motion of the butterfly, the fluttering wings, the way it hovers over one spot for a little while, seems to want to leave, returns, and then at last, in the final few notes before the violin enters, heads off to a more exotic flower: an unexpected B-flat.

‘—

When the violin enters, Ravel begins one of his many clever gambits. He takes bits of the piano theme and intersperses them with ironic, seemingly unrelated interruptions

He keeps at this a few times, hovering in place, hearing the two disparate musical objects (one utterly sincere, the other seeming to mock) over an overriding dissonance, waiting, until the theme can burst out again, in full rapture, with the violin giving the piano the continuous rippling accompaniment it didn’t have in the opening. Then the violin lets loose!—soaring, and how.

Typical, blossoming Ravel pleasures. But the deeper action comes after the rapture has faded. The fast notes ebb away. We are left again with the piano, musing mostly alone:

… in effect, a bit of blues or nascent jazz. Another unexpected musical object, and hard to reconcile with the French or Greek or whatever you want to call the main theme. It does not belong. Not-belonging-ness is precisely what Ravel wants. We have switched styles, and centuries—you might even say millennia. Along with this style change, you sense a gear change. We shift into a slower rate of perception—even though the tempo remains the same.

This “jazzy” idea starts, and then seems to waltz or hum itself away, as you can see (look at that open-ended slur, heading off into the misty distance.) A unpromising gesture, you’d think, to start a new theme and get lost. But it cunningly sets the stage for several escalating acts of getting lost.

The violin repeats this blue-note theme and waltzes away into yet another (essential, form-defining) piano solo:

This, of course, evokes a chiming clock. The dissonances, the slightly askew octaves, offer modernist truth about the sound of a bell. Yes, there are many clock passages in music, but (I’d argue) few more eloquent. I think it’s safe now to ignore my manager’s objections. This piece really is about time!, and Ravel wants you to know it—he makes it painfully obvious. What comes with this clock, also, is a sense of sorrow and emptiness. Emptiness partly because the violin is silent and partly because the harmonies are eerie and partly because the passage has no forward motion, no impetus at all. The lush, rushing pleasures of the previous music seem far behind. We feel held in a kind of musical parenthesis. We are (if you will) with the clock, but outside of time.

When the violin finally reenters, after this time-spell is cast, we get a long and remarkable and curious discussion, filled with pathos. The violin plays what could well be a supple late-19^th century French theme. The piano plays exclusively open fifths—as if it’s stuck in the 1200s, playing organum or some other ancient style or chant…

The two voices meet here and there, sometimes for partial consonance, other times painful dissonance (note the accent):

Both together and not—two styles suggesting different eras, and moving at different speeds, trying to have a conversation. Meanwhile the music is static and spare, and getting ever more so. Time (you might say) is whittling down the musical texture, leaving less and less. Time the great eroder. You do suspect Ravel borrowed some of the genius of this moment from Satie: this invocation of the ancient world, the melancholy of being caught between eras, the sense of being immobilized.

At last, though the violin reaches up, we reach a nadir. We find our emptiest point:

Amazing. As a disorganized person, I am occasionally annoyed by how well Ravel plans everything; this is not one of those occasions. Perhaps because so little is here, and so much. This high F-sharp is the same note we kept lingering on in the opening theme, the one the butterfly kept hovering around. How is it possible? The note that seemed like such an expression of life, leaping out of a dance, now an expression of a near-death stillness. The miracle is the thread Ravel unerringly draws between these, over a long stretch of musical thought, between extremes, between motion and stasis, obviously, and between the bliss of the opening and this frozen darkness. You have to admire it as a piece of craft but also as an emotional truth.

He then manifests the link, to make us meditate on it:

… in a way, we have to absorb this fact or thought, like a moral, before we can move on.

—

The piece does move on. The development is full of fragments, scattering unease; there is a complicated climax; some foreboding; at last a new theme is born that merges with the main theme in glorious recapitulation.

This new theme is an ode to continuity, to fullness. It spins itself out, without rests, without breath: a continuity to end all continuity, you might say. Time is endless, it seems? For delicious pages and pages we follow its line, up and up and up, on from curve to curve, around one harmony and through another, but at last, after all the ecstatic spinning, like a swimmer who has gotten themselves into the middle of a lake, and starts tiring (an experience I know well), the music again begins to ebb:

You can see there in the violin—again—the F-sharps. Notes begin to vanish. The texture thins. The music threatens to become austere and frozen, as before. The sense of clockwork looms again, too.

Two magical solutions dispel the clock and wrap up this essay on time. First, a chord-twist in the piano (last measure, above) argues the F-sharp might be a leading tone, at last. The violin slowly takes the hint, takes the bait. It resolves up and forward … Bliss!

The violin lingers in the pleasure of this resolution, holding on to it, holding the G for effectively forever. The piano has to finish another way. It too gets stuck on that same F#, but takes it on a different path—

Look at the middle voice! The piano resolves down, F#-E-D, in a cadence that sounds uncannily medieval, like Dufay, or maybe Josquin—at the end of what could be a three-voice imitative motet. What the hell time period are we in?

Note the spareness of the ending. We don’t need a lot of notes to get rapture. (I wish Ravel had absorbed this lesson more often.) The two cadences simply resound in our mind. Even if you don’t appreciate the music history allusions, even if you aren’t a super-geek-nerd like me, I think you feel something special here. They are loving and fulfilled, these resolutions, but reach back to embrace the loneliest moment of the piece. The earlier darkness, and its sense of time stopping, is somehow folded into a vision of light.

My manager might think this last paragraph is cheesy, but I’m fine with that.