Touching Maurice: A Body-based Reading of Ravel's Ondine

摘要: Even in the most self-conscious scholarship, to cite Ravel’s pudeur is run risk of re-presenting a one dimensional type, or erecting an all-too-familiar cardboard cutout composer’s dandified facade and musical artifice seen as its product. Although recent scholarship (e.g., that Lloyd Whitesell Michael Puri) has advanced discussions queerness beyond nervous speculation twentieth-century biographers, our ability give shape his person remains today limited by traditional assumptions where locate subjectivity what counts legitimate subjective knowledge. Instead raiding archives with new vigor, avoiding issue altogether, I propose different solution: reframe so-called problem order “knowing” Ravel becomes far less complicated than decoding structures deciphering hidden metaphors. Rather, argue, stands forth for us already, physical being, embodied time-and-again through performance special brand virtuosic pianism. Extending contextual work Mary Louise Roberts Gurminder Bhogal choreographic studies Daphne Leong, David Korevaar, especially Elisabeth Le Guin, connect fin-de-siecle conceptions gender ornamental body logic exemplified solo piece Ondine. score not only indexes certain style comportment, but it incorporates modern performers within ongoing story. Grounded Ondine’s culture-steeped choreography, pianist cites historical catalogue queer gesture, enlisting sources range from Roman oratory British chirology, Ovid Michelangelo, Ancient etymology popular cartoons. read employment patriarchal symbols essential hyperbolic, proto-camp aesthetic challenges (as well broader cultural) normativity. Operative Judith Butler’s concept revision, such carves out space those whom privileged terms wholeness, sincerity, substance have been least kind. Though effect on collective bodily ideals lends this study diachronic breadth experience any single person, my own relationship music betrays itself origin confessional, even carnal, grammar.