Mechanical Musing

 A few days ago, the winds of social media algorithms brought this video my way:

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It's not very often that a strongly worded YouTube title actually delivers on its promise, but I'd say this curiosity easily qualifies as "Ravel's strangest piece." Honestly, it's one of the strangest pieces by any well-known composer relative to that composer's general output. Frontispice was written at a dark time in 1918 amidst the devastation left by World War I. As the YouTube video above notes, the music is quite mechanical in the way its individual components seem to exist in their own independent spaces, tonally and rhythmically. 

Stravinsky famously referred to Ravel as a "Swiss watch-maker" due to the latter's meticulous craftsmanship, but we're mostly used to having that craftmanship deployed to create colorful, sensuous canvases. Here, everything is barren and muted, although there are two moments of intensification, first rhythmically and then dynamically in a crush of ringing harmonies at the end. The music recalls the layered ostinatos of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, but stripped down, with less lyricism. It also reminds me of the opening movement of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time in which the four instruments all seem to be floating in their own space/time worlds. 

Here's what I wrote about the Ravel in a comment thread with some musician friends (the best comment threads!):

The piece is so strange, it hardly even seems intended for performance. It's almost like part of its quirkiness is that it's short and strange and elusive AND requires unusual/impractical forces [it requires two pianos and five hands]... It actually reminds me of the kinds of things that are easy to do in a DAW (like Ableton or GarageBand) where it's trivially simple to create loops (of equal or independent lengths) which more coexist than interact - more collage than counterpoint.

And so...I soon found myself trying to do just that. In my mind, I had the idea of a mobile hanging from the ceiling where individual parts move in and around each other, but not purposefully. Like the building blocks of Terry Riley's In C, the five ostinatos I created intersect with each other in sometimes unexpected and yet almost intentional sounding ways.  Although it turns out that Pierre Boulez orchestrated Ravel's mystery box, I preferred the challenge of creating five individual parts which remain recognizable even though the black-and-white instrumental timbre doesn't change. In other words, I stuck with piano.

I mostly created the patterns one by one, using a 64-pad MIDI controller programmed in various minor pentatonic scales...just because I thought the lack of half-steps would help keep things from getting too crunchy harmonically. (Ravel was evidently not concerned about that.) For each new track, I kept the other tracks looping as I played around until settling on whatever this is. I think the end result is actually pretty satisfying. Although I'm not providing a musical score, I indicated to the left of each part which set of pitches is used. But watching the looped patterns in a DAW is more satisfying and says perhaps more about the music than a traditional score would. Enjoy!

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By the way, this is far from the first time I've "mused" by "making music" here at MMmusing. Such compositions fall into a variety of categories, though the one listed first best fits with today's post.

• Playlist of "MM musing by composing"
• MM parodies of "Happy Birthday" in composer styles
• MM Hymn Fugues
• MM fugues NOT based on hymn tunes
• Fibonacci Etude ~ Fibonacci Warm-up
• Trump Opera Scenes
• BIG list of various kinds of mash-ups
• You may also find various relevant posts by going HERE and putting "composition" in the search box.

UPDATE (10/14): Coincidentally, today while looking through some old comment threads, I came across a discussion from 2020 in which I talked about idly using Soundtrap to create ambient trance music in which multiple loops move asynchronously over a quick, steady beat. Its origin story is very casual, although I was amused to read myself saying that one of the tracks was loosely - very loosely - based on the opening theme from Brahms's Cello Sonata in E Minor. (I would not have recognized the connection, but I hear it now.) I have added this very drafty video to the first playlist bullet-pointed above. It's nothing special, but it makes me realize that's just the kind of thing I had in mind when I said the Ravel "reminds me of the kinds of things that are easy to do in a DAW."