Journal articles on the topic 'Ravels'

Motivated by proposed entangled molecular structures known as ravels, we introduce a method for constructing such entanglements from 2-string tangles. We then show that for most (but not all) arborescent tangles this construction yields either a planar θ4 graph or contains a knot.

Abstract When Claude Debussy called Ravel an “enchanting fakir” in 1907, he anticipated a critical approach typified by Vladimir Jankélévitch's 1939 Ravel biography. In it, Jankélévitch evoked the rich language of theatrical magic, comparing Ravel to a sorcerer, conjurer, and illusionist. Contemporary critics used similar terms to describe the composer's music as early as 1909, around the same time that a parallel narrative emerged: Ravel as a master of mechanism and artifice. A contextual study of theatrical magic, which has yet to be applied to Ravel criticism, provides a substantive connection between these narratives of mechanism, enchantment, and artifice. I begin with the French illusionist Robert-Houdin (1805–71), whose enduring legacy furnishes a forgotten background for Ravel criticism. Robert-Houdin claimed that he was not a mere juggler but “an actor playing the part of a magician,” which resonates with accounts of Ravel's Baudelairean artifice in life and work. For magicians, “illusion” was interchangeable with “effect.” The word “effect” recurs in both Ravel's writings and “The Philosophy of Composition,” a theoretical-didactic essay by Edgar Allan Poe, whom Ravel cited as one of his most important artistic influences. Ravel's appreciation of Poe has a much richer grain than has been imagined, extending beyond compositional artisanship to include literary and theatrical stratagems. Robert-Houdin, who started his career as a clockmaker, featured automata at his Soiréé fantastiques—but sometimes, like von Kempelen's Turk, these automata were illusions themselves. Ravel's fascinations with enchantment and mechanism converge in the presence of these trick machines. In the opera L'Enfant et les sortilèges (1925), Ravel uses techniques known to both magicians and cognitive neuroscientists, exploiting the aural equivalent of an afterimage and manipulating the spectator's attentional frames.

AbstractLong considered to lie ‘light years’ apart, Ravel and Wagner actually have multiple points of contact. Several appear in the comments Ravel made about the German composer in his articles, interviews and correspondence. Another is a previously unrecognised allusion to Parsifal in the Passacaille of Ravel's Trio (1914), which he composed shortly after writing a review of the opera's premiere in Paris. Additional Wagnerisms can be located in Daphnis et Chloé (1909–12) and L'Enfant et les sortilèges (1920–5). More broadly, Wagner plays a central role in the ‘decadent dialectics’ of Ravel's style.

In the article, the author reveals the specifics of the artistic and aesthetic views of the outstanding French composer based on the study of the musical text of M. Ravel's chamber-instrumental composition and musicological literature. The authors substantiate the idea of the significance of literary sources for the formation of Ravel's compositional style. Using the analytical method, the author identifies the compositional, dramatic, melodic, textural and Lado-harmonic features of the Ravel string Quartet (1903). The use of the comparative analysis method allowed us to determine the similarity and difference of the approaches Of M. Ravel and C. Debussy in the interpretation of the string Quartet genre. Consideration of the string Quartet in the context Of M. Ravel's work allowed the author to clarify certain aspects of the composer's creative method, to Supplement the ideas about his aesthetic and ideological principles.

Like all of Maurice Ravel's compositions, the virtuosic violin piece Tzigane, styled rapsodie de concert by the composer, rapidly became a mainstay of the concert repertory following its premiere with piano by the Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Aranyi in April 1924 in London (her premiere of the orchestral version occurred in Paris on 30 November 1924 with Gabriel Pierné conducting the Colonne Orchestra). Yet, despite its popularity, no critic has included it among Ravel's major works. Reflections on Tzigane in the secondary musicological literature are very few indeed, which is somewhat surprising in the context of a new explosion of interest in Ravel. In his recent biography, Roger Nichols avers that ‘probably no one has ever suggested that Tzigane is great music’. Robert Orledge noted in 2000 that it ‘has never been among Ravel's most successful works’, a remark surely meant as a critique of the composition rather than a statement about its popularity with performers, which has been considerable. Alexis Roland-Manuel, a close friend of the composer, did not even discuss the piece in his biography of 1938. The violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, another close friend and consultant about the virtuoso figuration in Tzigane, confessed almost apologetically in her book on Ravel that ‘this rhapsodic piece is perhaps the only one in Ravel's oeuvre where I cannot locate – hidden in the intricacies of its tours de force – Ravel's characteristic flavour: in it, music has surrendered too much place to instrumental acrobatics’. In other words, she appears to suggest that Tzigane is a mere showpiece where Ravel's personal style has been eclipsed by fireworks, with an implicit criticism of pandering to market. The Hungarian violinist Joseph Szigeti spoke of the ‘resistance I always felt towards this brilliant and (to my mind) synthetically produced pastiche of Ravel's’. At the time of the premiere, the young Henri Sauguet told Francis Poulenc that ‘the aesthetic informing these pages is so antiquated that I am astonished anyone can still believe in it’.

Произведения Сальваторе Шаррино «De la nuit» (1971) и «Аnamorfosi» (1981) построены на материале сочинений Мориса Равеля, и нот Равеля в них значительно больше, чем нот самого Шаррино, а «Exerdzio» (1972) является своего рода авторским комментарием Шаррино к собственному опусу «De la nuit». По сути «De la nuit» - это двойной портрет Шаррино - Равеля или, правильнее сказать, Равеля, услышанного ушами Шаррино: такого Равеля, в котором Шаррино больше, чем самого Равеля (несмотря на перевес равелевских нот). «De la nuit» - это квинтэссенция «ночных» сочинений Равеля «Gaspard de la nuit» («Ночной Гаспар») и «Prelude a la nuit» («Прелюдия ночи») из цикла «Rapsodie espagnole» («Испанская рапсодия»). Ночь для Шаррино - это и способ восприятия, и эстетическая категория, и метод творчества, и способ контакта с материалом, равно как и сама материя, и одновременно порог между мирами - Шаррино и Равеля, - порождающий их инструментальное двойничество. С одной стороны, Шаррино становится оптическим прибором, преобразующим в своем сознании звучание оригинала. С другой - таким устройством предстает инструмент или группа инструментов. И в этом отношении их действие сродни действию зеркала или воды, благодаря которым предмет становится менее узнаваемым. Salvatore Sciarrino's “De la nuit” (1971) and “Anamorfosi” (1981) are based on the works of Maurice Ravel. And there is much more Ravel's music in these than Sciarrino himself. “Exercizio” (1972) is a kind of author's commentary by Sciarrino to his own opus “De la nuit.” In fact, “De la nuit” is a double portrait of Sciarrino and Ravel or, more correctly, Ravel, heard by the ears of Sciarrino. Presence of Sciarrino in this “Ravel” is much more than Ravel himself (despite the preponderance of Ravel's music). “De la nuit” is the quintessence of Ravel's “night” works “Gaspard de la nuit” and “Prelude a la nuit” from the cycle “Rapsodie espagnole.” For Sciarrino, the night is a way of perception, an aesthetic category, a method of composition, a way of contact with the material as well as matter itself, and at the same time the threshold between the worlds of Sciarrino and Ravel: that generates their instrumental doubleness. On the one hand, Sciarrino becomes an optical device that transforms the sound of the original in his mind. On the other hand, such a device appears as an instrument or a group of instruments. In this aspect, their action is akin to the action of a mirror or water surface, thanks to which the object becomes less recognizable.

ABSTRACT Maurice Ravel is one of the most important French musicians. In the last years of his life, Ravel was victim of a dementia of uncertain etiology that caused aphasia, apraxia, agraphia and amusia. The artistic brain of the author of eternal musical compositions was progressively silenced due to his neurodegenerative disease. On the 90th anniversary of Boléro, this historical note revisits Ravel's case and discusses the relationship of his dementia to his artistic production. It illustrates the intimacy that can exist between art, music, creativity, and neurology.

"Jeux d’eau, created in 1901, is Ravel’s first piano masterpiece, that of a 26-year-old composer who has just left the Conservatoire. The work surprises with the charm of writing, the playfulness of expression, the maturity of creative thinking and the complexity of elaboration. Beyond the fact that it marks a turning point in Ravel’s career, it is no exaggeration to say that it is both a milestone for piano literature in general and for the impressionist one. Our study focuses on the analysis of Ravel’s writing style and construction in the mirror of musical Impressionism, pointing out, where appropriate, the innovations that foreshadow representative compositional solutions for the avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century and beyond. Keywords: Ravel, Jeux d’eau, Impressionism, piano music, ludic, duplication "

Whether understood as the elevation of material to a higher state of aesthetic being or the redirection of the libido toward socially seemly ends, the concept of sublimation has played a central but underappreciated role in accounts of Ravel and his music over the past century. Similarly, Ravel's identity as a dandy —who, according to Baudelaire, aspires to be “sublime without interruption” —has been mentioned consistently in biographical appraisals, but never deeply investigated. Incorporating a representation of the dandy's genesis from the sublimation of desire, Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé (1909–1912) offers the analyst an excellent opportunity to examine both entities in depth while also broaching a variety of related topics: repression, queer sexuality, camp aesthetics, contemporary musical politics (dandyism versus d'Indyism), and theories of autobiography.

Abstract Maurice Ravel uses a lot of musical elements in his ballet Daphnis et Chloé that appear in Bartók's Ballet The Wooden Prince. So are the instrumentation and especially the orchestration (particularly at the beginning of these two works: the wake-up of the nature that is almost the same, and the “grotesque” moments). The themes of the different episodes that build the ballet seem to be the same in their conception, and we can add that the main themes (love in Daphnis and the prince in The Wooden Prince) are twin. Their roots are the same, so the idea that Ravel influenced Bartók looks likely. Even if there is no real proof, like e.g. a letter by Bartók about Daphnis et Chloé. A comparison of the two works seems to suggest that Ravel's work really had an influence on Bartók's Wooden Prince.

Substance abuse disorder is a major and worldwide concern that cursed countries and mankind. Psychosocial factors influences differ across the person and may contribute to the development of physical and mental disorders. The research aimed to investigate the impact of psychological factors (Self-esteem, Depression, Anxiety, and Decision-Making Confidence) and social factors (Childhood Problems, Hostility, Risk-taking, and Social Conformity) that predictors of substance use disorder in women. en cross-sectional survey design was used in this study. Drug Abuse Screaming Test (DAST) and psychosocial functioning scale were used to collect data on women (N=200). The purposive sampling technique was employed for sample selection; moreover, the snowball technique was also used as the drug-addicted women recommended the other women. Results of the study ravels that psychosocial factors were a significant predictor of substance use disorder in women. The finding of the multiple regression analysis reveals that psychosocial factors were significant predictors of substance use disorder in women [R2 =.46, F (1,142)14.26, p<.01]. In conclusion, this study highlights some psychological (Self-esteem, Anxiety, Decision-making confidence) and social factors (Childhood problems, Risk-taking, and social conformity) that are valuable predictors of substance use disorder in women. These findings may help clinicians to develop treatment and policy guidelines for the prevention of drug addiction in women.

The relevance of the article is determined by the appeal to the debatable issues of stylistic differentiation of the works by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel as the French musical culture leading representatives of the late 19th and the first third of the 20th centuries. The research reflections about the connections betwen Debussy and Ravel on the principle “for / against” have not subsided for more than a hundred years. This testifies to the special urgency of this problem and the need to search for modern approaches to understanding the artistic identity of two brilliant contemporaries.Scientific novelty. For the first time, the multidirectionality of the composing strategies by Debussy and Ravel is indicated through the the concept of style in its interdisciplinary philosophicalcategorical status and the explanationof its functions of identification and communication in the general cultural understanding (O. Ustyugova). For the first time the difference between the cultural phenomena processes integration in the era of modernism into the new artistic wholes, with unique properties, which is appropriate to define as “Debussy’s style” and “Ravel’s style”, is revealed.The purpose of the article is to reveal the multidirectionality of the composing strategies of Debussy and Ravel through an appeal to the main stylistic functions of identification and communication in general cultural understanding (O. Ustyugova); to designate the non-coincidence of channels of integration of cultural phenomena in the era of modernism into new artistic wholes, which have unique properties such as “Debussy’s style” and “Ravel’s style”.The research methodology includes the use of historical, stylistic, comparative methods.Main results and conclusions. The existing musicological literature emphasizes the influence of romanticism, post-romanticism, impressionism, symbolism, neoclassicism, Art Nouveau, moderne style on the formation of the individual style of Debussy and Ravel. Each of these directions had a certain reflection in the work of composers. However, let us try to highlight in the conceptual space of the many-sided “isms” of the cultural context of the era of modernism the hidden sources of the deployment of the creative intentions of the both brilliant contemporaries. We will choose the fundamental work of E. Ustyugova “Style and Culture: Experience of Building a General Theory of Style” (2003) as a methodological basis for this. E. Ustyugova proposes to go beyond the understanding style as a “migratory structure” (term by J. Rebane) and a convenient “classification tool” (J. Burnham) in structural and typological studies of art and move on to a comprehensive study of the essence of this phenomenon. For this, according to the researcher, it is necessary to carry out two analytical procedures. The first is based on the awareness of the experience of the mismatch between the object and the subject. The second involves considering the style in the aspect of intersubjective communication.With this view on the problem of identifying the patterns of formation and development of cultural phenomena, it is not the nominative parameters and the “herbarization” of genrelinguistic units that come to the fore, but the comprehension of the multilevel subject-object relations that formed these phenomena; “live reproduction” of the matrix of the world perception as channels of communication between the “I” and everything that appears as “not-I”.The creative paths of Debussy and Ravel represent diferent creative strategies. The “pure meaning”, unspeakable by words and free from all earthly, to which Debussy aspired, creates parallels with the texts of symbolist poets and destroy the boundaries between “I” and “not-I”. In the fundamental monographs of French researchers dedicated to the composer an idea has long been entrenched: the composer’s creative laboratory was poetry, and Debussy’s address to the poetic word throughout all his creative decades constantly expanding the semantic horizons of his “artistic realities”.Debussy’s spiritual intentions merged into a single sound-glow in the indivisible space of being. The word in all its dimensions (from literal to metaphysical) indicated the stages of the process of dissolving the personal “I” and going beyond (au-délà) the established forms of artistic expression. Therefore, various kinds of the names (or “afterwords”, as in the Preludes), epigraphs, numerous super-detailed directions remained an integral part of an integral sound structure. His musical language, destroying the connections in time between the past and the future (rejection of the system of functional gravities that should be “stretched” in musical memory), created a certain correspondence (“here and now”) with the phenomenon of being.Hence the following characteristics of the composer’s musical works: 1) the impeccable construction of the whole, which is “thought out to the smallest detail” (E. Denisov), subtle multilevel “correspondences” and symmetries; 2) total thematization of texture (K. Zenkin); 3) selfsufficient semantic expressiveness of the “pure sound forms” (K. Zenkin), which became the embodiment of “an agonizing thirst for undeniably pure” (S. Velikovsky).These properties of Debussy’s style open up the possibility to get into the spiritual dimensions filled with pure beauty, which so attracted the followers of Baudelaire. Using the typology of teh subject-object relations proposed by E. Ustyugova, Debussy’s style can be attributed throughout the paradigm of hidden subjectivity. Debussy was well aware of his “non-romantic” position.The artistic aspirations of Maurice Ravel more clearly resonate with the creative attitudes of Art Nouveau artists, who were looking for new forms of plastic expressiveness mainly in spatial forms of art. It seems that it is with this direction that a special feeling of the plasticity of the musical material and the entire musical composition as a unique phenomenon is associated, which determines the composer’s creative credo.The concept of “plasticity” indicates such a connection between coordinated phenomena, which appears through the reincarnation (transformation) of a certain material substance, when we keep in memory its output characteristics. Ballet works and the reliance on dance genres (and more broadly, various types of plasticity of gesture and movement) reveal the hidden basis of the composer’s thinking. This approach allows one to re-evaluate Ravel’s connections with the ancient heritage (it is symptomatic that the composer called his first “adult” work, devoted to the press, “Antique Minuet”) and to understand the meanings of constant antique reminiscences with which he filled his life.Like a real dandy who lets the vibrations of the world pass through himself, Ravel is sensitive to them and “cuts off” random, “ugly”, “unnecessary” ones. Hence — the special beauty of the artistic structures created by the composer. They are built not in a “filtered” ideal-beautiful dimension, but in the space of shimmering opposites (the corporeal — free from the corporeal, the familiar — the unknown). Ravel’s inherent tendency towards the graphic relief of the melodic line creates parallels with the “famous lines of Art Nouveau” (Fahr-Becker Gabriele) and is especially distinct, characterizes the composer’s later works.The non-everyday register of semantic reverberations of what is happening in the process of metamorphosis in the composer’s music (his plastic questioning about the existential nature of the source material) demanded a special listener’s responsiveness. Mistifications, hiding behind a mask, playing with the listener are Ravel’s usual communication strategies. Therefore, according to the typology of the subject-object relations proposed by E. Ustyugova, we can speak here of the paradigm of “open subjectivity”, which is characterized by the direct orientation of the subject towards himself. Hence — the principle of auto-citation characteristic of Ravel. The quintessence of its use are the composer’s later works — the opera Child and Magic, as well as the Piano Concerto in G major — the Dandy summa summarum of the composer’s previous career.The game of “correspondences” (Baudelaire) was manifested by composers in various ways and conditioned various channels of communication. Debussy makes the semantics of sound education a semantic unit, appeals to the listener with the expressiveness of the structure itself. Therefore he always emphasizes, appeals to the elite listener. Ravel, on the other hand, hides behind masks and theatrical illusions. He needs a listener who has a culture of distance (who owns wide meaning contextual fields). The contextual layers associated with musical texts express that “degree of distance” from the object of attention, which the composer himself chooses and whose parameters are constantly changing. Therefore, Ravel never turns twice in the genre, style or stylistic model he has already used.So, if the works by Debussy can be perceived “from scratch” because of their structural completeness and semantic tightness, then the works by Ravel require the listener to know the musical context and readiness to lay it out “fold by fold” (J. Deleuze) in new semantic projections.At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, French culture was looking for a means of creating a “state of resonance” (G. Bachelard) as an extraordinary impression, “awakening”, without which a person cannot take place. Debussy and Ravel moved in this direction. Therefore, only through the identification of all the “correspondences” of the era of a total change of creative guidelines and a departure from unambiguous stylistic “avatars” can one feel its essential discoveries. The study of the lines of intersection of the Debussy music and the Ravel music with various artistic phenomena of the past and the present illuminates certain reflections of the “style of the era”. However understanding the deep patterns of the creative manner of the two contemporaries requires differentiating the definitions of “Debussy’s style” and “Ravel’s style” and their further studying.

Early in his career Maurice Ravel composed two pieces that take bells as their subject: “Entre Cloches” from Sites auriculaires, composed in 1897, and “La vallée des cloches,” the final movement of the 1905 work Miroirs. Although these pieces can be contextualized within a nineteenth-century lineage of French piano pieces that depict bell peals, they also set themselves apart by virtue of their heightened attention to the particularities of bell sonorities. Relying heavily on repetitive ostinato patterns, quartal harmonies, and intense dissonances, these pieces play in the nebulous space between transcription and composition. Ravel’s experimentation with bell sonorities in his piano music can be understood in relation to a broader discourse surrounding the sound of bells in nineteenth-century France. A complex sonic object, bell resonance lent itself to different modes of listening: the harmoniousness of bell peals was a common refrain among romantic poets, Catholic clergy, and campanarian historians, but toward the end of the century it became increasingly common for physicists and popular-science publications to complain that bells were inherently discordant. In this context Ravel’s depictions of bells in “Entre cloches” and “La vallée des cloches” suggest a shift in the place of musical listening in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultures of aurality. Ravel’s musical listening entailed heightened attentiveness to the empirical qualities of non-musical sound; his pieces negotiate in new ways the boundary between musical composition and the protean sonic world outside of music. This reorientation of musical listening participates in a broader questioning by early twentieth-century modernists of the nature of music and its sonic material.

In this article I investigate how power is (re)produced on and through the body, specifically on Toronto's raving bodies during the summer of 2000. Toward the end of 1999 and throughout 2000, Toronto's rave culture came under intense surveillance by institutional and discursive authorities such as city councillors, police, parents, community health organisations, public intellectuals, and the mass media. What ensued was a temporary ban of raves in Toronto on city-owned property. In response to this ban, Toronto ravers relied on liberal approaches such as educational programmes and state lobbying as a way to protect their ‘freedom to dance’. In light of these reactions, one of my primary questions is: As rave becomes more normative, what are its own disciplinary mechanisms or techniques of control that are asserted at the site of the raving body?

Carrion plays a crucial role in the raven’s diet. In the past, domestic pig carrion was widely available in Poland. This changed with an African swine fever (ASF) outbreak and the introduction of strict procedures aimed at stopping the virus from spreading. We compared data from Central Poland (field and forest mosaic, study area of 105 km2) for two periods, i.e., before (2011–2014) and after the ASF outbreak (2015–2018). In breeding seasons, nests of ravens were found, juveniles were counted, and the time when juveniles left their nests was recorded. Diet composition data were based on pellet analysis and direct observations of feeding birds. The number of breeding pairs dropped from 12.3 to 7.5 in the second period. Breeding parameters were similar. However, birds in the second period had fewer fledglings per successful pair. Domestic pig carrion was found to be an important food item, and with its limited supply, ravens changed their diet, i.e., they fed on the carrion of dogs and cats or preyed on small vertebrates more often. Overall, our study points to a crucial role of the availability of the carrion of big farm animals (i.e., domestic pig) in maintaining the high density of breeding raven populations.

The author highlights specifics of designing Crimean Tatar housing accommodation in mountainous, piedmont and steppe areas of Crimea. The article presents the core principles and methods established over the thousands of years, i.e., the period people have resided in Crimea. The specifics of designing Crimean Tatar housing accommodation were identified, being inherent to the natural and climatic conditions of Crimea, as well as geomorphologic structure of the relief. All those specifics have been naturally reflected in the architectural and spacious planning of Crimean Tatar housing accommodation.The factual information employed for the purpose of this study was collected through in situ examinations of Crimea's historical buildings, studying the ad-hoc publications issued in 1880–1939, as kept in the library stock of BIKAMZ (Crimean historical museum preserve in Bakhchysarai), in the library stock of I. Hasprinskyi Scientific Library, sources from the museum stock in Simferopol, Bakhchysarai and private collections, architectural materials form the state owned depositories (the state archive of Crimean Oblast).No broad-scale studies have been undertaken in Crimea covering architecture of Crimean Tatar housing accommodation. Certain aspects of Crimean Tatar architecture are highlighted in the papers by: U. Bodadinskyi,B. A. Kuftin, Yu. V. Krykun, M. A. Voloshyn. The foregoing papers were published in the early XX century. They are mainly devoted to studying typology of Crimean Tatar housing accommodation.The important aspect concerns the architectural methods of forming areas built up with Crimean Tatar housing accommodation. The time proved the need in researching the Crimean Tatar housing accommodation, subject to the important features of using rationally the relief geometrical specifics, the rational geometry principles, creating certain preconditions for the architectural and planning specifics of the Crimean Tatar housing accommodation in the architectural system of Crimea.Unavailability of the overall picture covering specifics of the Crimean Tatar housing accommodation forming in Crimea, and evolution thereof relying on the scientific analysis, ravels estimation of the contemporary condition preventing establishment of the basic regularities and trends of development, preventing error-free handing the task of future development.

AbstractJust as arabesque carries a range of visual and literary associations, this ornament assumes a diverse presence in music scholarship, where it characterizes a wide repertoire and assortment of techniques. Despite its conceptual breadth, this essay shows that arabesque upheld a specific musical identity for Debussy and Ravel. This is reflected in their simulation of art nouveau’s intricate and fluid designs through melodic gestures that emphasize irregular rhythms and dissonant metres. Also in keeping with art nouveau is the tendency of these composers to privilege musical arabesque’s structural appearance and expressive capacity. These observations are explored with reference to Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, a ballet that critics admired for its arabesque qualities. An analysis of four dances will reveal how the distinct rhythmic and metric profiles of arabesque melodies portray characters and their narratives. In challenging preconceptions of ornament as marginal and meaningless, this essay shows how arabesque became endowed with structural and expressive significance at the début du siècle.

In his 1956 study of Ravel, Vladimir Jankélévitch remarked that music machines and animated objects are pervasive motifs in the composer's oeuvre. These motifs shaped Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917) and L'Enfant et les sortilèges (1925), and are significant generally in musical modernism. To trace their historical and philosophical meanings, we begin with a peculiar visual icon: Rousseau's tomb in the Panthéon (1794), which symbolizes an Enlightenment sense of tombeau as "containing the dead" yet also "animated from within." This characterization, in an imaginative leap, could also be applied to a box that reproduces music: the musical automaton. Such automata were perfected in the eighteenth century, and musical performers were compared to them, suggesting the uncanny aspects of both; a full intellectual history of this phenomenon has yet to be written. But given this history, which assumed new forms by 1900, we understand more fully the meanings borne by symptoms of mechanism in Ravel's piano suite and his opera. They are modernist reflections on human subjectivity in music, its loss in mechanical reproduction, and the futility of seeking lost objects by breaking open a tomb.

AbstractAccording to popular belief, Charles II of England (reigned 1660-1685) once heard a prophecy that if ravens left the Tower of London it would "fall," so he ordered that the wings of seven ravens in the Tower be trimmed. Until recently, this claim was not challenged even in scholarly literature. There are, however, no allusions to the Tower Ravens before the end of the nineteenth century. The ravens, today meticulously cared for by Yeoman Warders, are largely an invented tradition, designed to give an impression of continuity with the past. This article examines the few known references, both graphic and textual, to the Tower Ravens through 1906. It concludes that the ravens were originally brought in to dramatize the alleged site of executions at the Tower. Although not accorded great significance at first, legends that would eventually make the ravens mascots of Britain began outside of the Tower.

This close reading of Claude Sautet’s music-film Un coeur en hiver / A Heart in Winter (1992) also reflects on issues raised by music-films generally. Films that take music as their central subject raise special questions about the role of music in cinematic representation. Un coeur en hiver’s musically saturated narrative explores people’s abilities to know themselves and others and to express themselves adequately in emotional contexts. At the same time, the film’s techniques interrogate both the role of music in the construction of cinematic subjectivity and the potential of cinema to engage with our understandings of musical subjectivity. On one level the music self-critically serves its classic role in cinematic narrative of encouraging – even coercing – us into filling in narrative gaps otherwise left open by plot and dialogue. On another level, however, Un coeur en hiver can be read as a species of cinematic meditation on Ravel’s music: traces of Ravelian biography are scattered throughout; on-screen performances of the Piano Trio provide a musical metaphor for the narrative love triangle; and the Trio’s first movement provides a formal skeleton for the film as a whole. Drawing on recent film-music theory as well as Naomi Cummings’ account of musical subjectivity, I suggest that the film reflects specifically upon the music by exploiting its cinematic resources – dramatis personae, narrative, and mise-en-scène– to position us as auditors of Ravel; it projects a sense that Ravel’s subjective presence inhabits his trio and sonatas. To shed light on the nature of this cinematic meditation on musical authorship, I draw on John Corbett’s account of recorded music as something that both promises pleasure and threatens lack. I also revisit Edward T. Cone’s understanding of ‘the composer’s voice’, proposing a reading of Un coeur en hiver as a cinematic reflection on our fetishism of composer biography in an era marked by the loss of human presence in mechanical musical reproduction.

Ravel's comic opera L'Heure espagnole (1911) has often been criticised for a certain coldness and lack of sentiment. Such characteristics, however, might profitably be seen in light of Ravel's modernity, an art where surface is privileged over depth. Parallels between Ravel's approach and Henri Bergson's nearly contemporaneous theory of laughter developed in Le Rire – in itself an articulate explication of the surface/depth binary – provide insight into Ravel's aesthetic. This orientation unfolds in the detached adaptation of two historical models in L'Heure espagnole: secco recitative from opera buffa and leitmotivic writing from Wagnerian opera.

Abstract We investigated survivorship, movements, and sociality of Common Ravens (Corvus corax) exploiting concentrated food resources at a landfill in Greenland. From 1992–1995 we banded 383 ravens: 365 were captured at the landfill and 18 were banded in nearby nests. Thirty-nine ravens were recovered, most by shooting (87%). Mean number of days survived post-banding (494 ± 97) did not differ among age groups, but a higher proportion of juveniles was recovered. Ravens migrated west and south to the coast during winter. No difference existed among age groups in mean distance between locations of banding and recovery (151 ± 31 km). Number of ravens congregating at the landfill declined during the study, coinciding with a decrease in the local human population. Harsh winter climate, limited ice-free land, and abundant human refuse influenced raven use of the wilderness landscape by facilitating the formation of large, nomadic foraging groups.

A fundamental attribute of social intelligence is the ability to monitor third-party relationships, which has been repeatedly demonstrated in primates, and recently also in captive ravens. It is yet unknown how ravens make use of this ability when dealing with different types of social relationships simultaneously during complex real-life situations. Free-ranging non-breeder ravens live in societies characterized by high fission–fusion dynamics and structured by age, pair-bond status and kinship. Here, we show that free-ranging ravens modify communication during conflicts according to audience composition. When being attacked by dominant conspecifics, victims of aggression signal their distress via defensive calls. Victims increased call rates when their kin were in the bystander audience, but reduced call rates when the bystanders were bonding partners of their aggressors. Hence, ravens use social knowledge flexibly and probably based on their own need (i.e. alert nearby allies and avoid alerting nearby rivals).

Context To successfully inhabit urban environments, birds must cope with the presence of people and vehicles at high densities. One hypothesised component of such coping is a high level of boldness, which may be inherent in all, or a particular subset of, species’ members as the result of natural selection or achieved through phenotypic plasticity allowing rapid behavioural adjustment to human disturbance. Aims To determine how much bolder urban little ravens (Corvus mellori) are than exurban conspecifics. To determine whether urban little ravens vary in their boldness as a function of local pedestrian and vehicular traffic volume, an important issue with respect to adjusting to the urban environment that has received little attention. Methods We assessed the relative boldness of free-living urban and exurban little ravens using the Flight Initiation Distance (FID) paradigm. The boldness of urban little ravens was also tested by measuring the reaction of individuals in areas with varying traffic volumes to a potentially startling sound stimulus (PSS). Key results On average, exurban ravens approached by a researcher had FIDs nearly 6-fold longer, escaped 1.4 times more by flying and fled >10 m 3.4 times more than urban conspecifics. Urban ravens in areas with varying pedestrian and vehicular traffic volumes had similar FIDs and mostly reacted similarly to a PSS, although retreat behaviour from a human and the PSS was influenced by traffic volume. Conclusions Boldness seems to be important in facilitating urban dwelling by little ravens. Antipredator behaviour did not appear to be strongly adjusted to local variation in traffic volume within the urban environment, but the reason for this is unknown. Further research with more extensive traffic surveying could help to answer this question. Implications The results are consistent with little ravens’ urban boldness occurring through initial urban settlement by a bolder subset of individuals. The importance of boldness in coping with traffic should feature more prominently in urban boldness research.

Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century foreign literature on Alta California depicts the Hispanic population as indolent and inefficient at developing the region’s natural bounty, providing a justification for conquest. California’s early representation as an island conveyed connotations of escape and undeveloped paradise. The Black Legend reinforced the laziness trope. Spanish observers were defensive on the issues of leisure and labor, while Native American Pablo Tac described the unceasing labor of the mission Indians.