"We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art"
About this Quote
Maurice Ravel argues that the essence of art is not its techniques, subjects, or structures, but the lived current of feeling that animates them. Coming from a composer renowned for immaculate craftsmanship, this is a revealing emphasis. Ravel was often labeled cool or classical next to the heated rhetoric of late Romanticism, yet his precision was always in service of sensibility: a finely tuned responsiveness to nuance, color, and the fragile gradations of emotion.
Sensitiveness, in his sense, is not sentimentality. It is a sharpened ear and mind that can register a slight shift of harmony, a change in timbre, a breath in the phrasing, and allow those subtleties to carry meaning. Emotion likewise does not need to be grand to be real; it can be restrained, ironic, or bittersweet, provided it is exact. Ravel’s music repeatedly demonstrates that the more carefully the craft is controlled, the more surely feeling can speak.
Consider Le Tombeau de Couperin: outwardly a neoclassical suite, inwardly a memorial for friends lost in war. The dance forms sparkle, but what endures is an elegiac tenderness beneath the surface. Or Bolero, built on obsessive repetition and minimal harmonic change. Ravel called it an experiment, yet its inexorable crescendo of color and pulse provokes a visceral response; sensitivity to orchestral timbre becomes the carrier of emotion. In Gaspard de la nuit, fear, desire, and mockery flicker through vertiginous textures whose virtuosity exists only to render those states palpable.
Placed in the early 20th century, amid movements that prized objectivity and purity of form, Ravel’s reminder is corrective. Technique, theory, and style are the frame; the picture is the felt human experience they hold. Art is true to the extent it clarifies and enlarges our capacity to perceive and to feel. Without that sensitiveness and emotion, even the most brilliant workmanship is an empty shell.
Sensitiveness, in his sense, is not sentimentality. It is a sharpened ear and mind that can register a slight shift of harmony, a change in timbre, a breath in the phrasing, and allow those subtleties to carry meaning. Emotion likewise does not need to be grand to be real; it can be restrained, ironic, or bittersweet, provided it is exact. Ravel’s music repeatedly demonstrates that the more carefully the craft is controlled, the more surely feeling can speak.
Consider Le Tombeau de Couperin: outwardly a neoclassical suite, inwardly a memorial for friends lost in war. The dance forms sparkle, but what endures is an elegiac tenderness beneath the surface. Or Bolero, built on obsessive repetition and minimal harmonic change. Ravel called it an experiment, yet its inexorable crescendo of color and pulse provokes a visceral response; sensitivity to orchestral timbre becomes the carrier of emotion. In Gaspard de la nuit, fear, desire, and mockery flicker through vertiginous textures whose virtuosity exists only to render those states palpable.
Placed in the early 20th century, amid movements that prized objectivity and purity of form, Ravel’s reminder is corrective. Technique, theory, and style are the frame; the picture is the felt human experience they hold. Art is true to the extent it clarifies and enlarges our capacity to perceive and to feel. Without that sensitiveness and emotion, even the most brilliant workmanship is an empty shell.
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| Topic | Art |
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