Reality and Imagination in Gaspard de la Nuit

Cui, Yuanshuai

Reality and Imagination in Gaspard de la Nuit

Persistent URL

http://hdl.handle.net/10456/36089

Author(s)

Cui, Yuanshuai

Date Issued

April 29, 2014

Abstract

Maurice Ravel once said, “My ambition is to say with notes what a poet expresses with words”(qtd. in Eccles 1), and Aloysius Bertrand’s collection of poems, Gaspard de la Nuit, certainly captured Ravel’s musical imagination. This thesis explores the interplay of reality and imagination in Bertrand’s and Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit.” An identifiable theme in the poems as well as the music, the interplay of reality and imagination is explored in a comparative approach, with each chapter focusing on one poem and the piano piece that it inspired. Through analysis of Bertrand’s text and Ravel’s motivic, harmonic and formal structure, we can see a parallelism between Bertrand’s and Ravel’s treatments of reality and imagination. This study allows readers, audiences and musicians to view Ravel’s composition as both a recreation of Bertrand’s poem and a creation in its own right that sheds light on the original literary work.

Honors

Modern and Classical Languages, 2014

Music, 2014

First Reader(s)

Chien, Alec