Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Writing a book that seeks to give an exhaustive account of a major composer's oeuvre is a task fraught with difficulties, and one that might discourage even the most tenacious of scholars, especially if such a book were to be multifaceted in its approach (i.e. analysis, the relationship to performance, a study of historical precedence, etc.). To expand such a project to include four composers, even if the study were confined only to one genre, might seem overly ambitious to say the least. This, however, is what Roy Howat has attempted to do and, for the most part, he succeeds admirably. It is no exaggeration to say that The Art of French Piano Music: Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, Chabrier is destined to become one of the standard texts dealing with a repertory (especially Chabrier) which is often neglected by the scholarly mainstream. Nonetheless, in spite of the book's many outstanding qualities, there are a few issues that need to be addressed, and I will get to these in due course.
The text is divided into four main sections followed by a set of appendices. 'Part 1: The exactitude of musical "impressionismâ[euro]' has a two-pronged emphasis: that of analysis, and also the relationship between musical structure and the visual arts. 'Part 2: Musical roots and antecedents' explores the music's connections with the past, its connections with other national traditions, and its connections with Romanticism. 'Part 3: Fresh perspectives' deals with metric and hypermetric organization in Ravel and Chabrier, as well as elements of overall form. There is also a discussion of newly discovered repertoire by the four composers under discussion and their contemporaries (Gounod, Dukas, Satie et al.). 'Part 4: At the keyboard' deals with the performance of this music by the composers themselves, in addition to others who may have had direct contact with them; the problems intrinsic to the creation of an Urtext edition are also discussed.1 Based upon research of the composers as pianists, Howat also offers advice to pianists as to the best way to approach this repertoire. Finally, there are five appendices: 1) ' " Facilement, facilementâ[euro]: finding technical ease'; 2) 'Glosses on titles and musical allusions'; 3) 'Composers' surviving instruments and recordings'; 4)...