Brain disease shaped
BoléroRavel's last music
bears the mark of his deteriorating
brain.
22 January 2002
JOHN
WHITFIELD
 |
| Maurice Ravel: his later
music hints he lost more left brain function
than right. |
| © Lebrecht Music
Collection | | |
Brain disease influenced Ravel's last compositions
including his Boléro, say researchers. Orchestral
timbres came to dominate his late music at the expense
of melodic complexity because the left half of his brain
deteriorated, they suggest1.
Timbre is mainly the province of the brain's right
hemisphere.
French composer Maurice Ravel suffered from a
mysterious progressive dementia from about 1927 when he
was 52 years old. He gradually lost the ability to
speak, write and play the piano. He composed his last
work in 1932, and gave his last performance in 1933. He
died in December 1937.
Neurologists have puzzled over his illness ever
since. Many have suggested Alzheimer's disease. But
François Boller, of the Paul Broca Research Centre in
Paris, believes the symptoms began too young, and that
too much of Ravel's memory, self-awareness and social
skills were preserved for this diagnosis to be
correct.
Ravel probably suffered from two conditions, Boller
proposes. One, progressive primary aphasia, erodes the
brain's language centres. The other, corticobasal
degeneration, robs patients of movement control.
Ravel became trapped in his body, says Boller: "He
didn't lose the ability to compose music, he lost the
ability to express it."
The composer's failings, particularly his loss of
language, were predominantly in faculties dealt with by
the left half of the brain. Musical abilities are spread
throughout the brain; different areas deal with pitch,
melody, harmony and rhythm.
Un-Ravel
Boller and his colleagues believe that two of Ravel's
last pieces show the early effects of the weakening left
hemisphere, with the timbre-processing right brain
coming to the fore. The works are Boléro written
in 1928, and his 1930 piano concerto for the left
hand.
Ravel described his Boléro
as "orchestral fabric without
music". |
| audio | | |
Boléro contains only two themes, each repeated
eight times. But it has 30 superimposed lines, and 25
different combinations of sounds. Ravel himself
described it as "an orchestral fabric without
music".
Likewise the concerto for the left hand features
shorter phrases than Ravel's previous works, and
subsumes the soloist into the orchestra more than his
other piano concerto. Mathematical analyses also
indicate that this work differs from the rest of Ravel's
compositions.
"It's a captivating hypothesis, and in keeping with
what we know," says Alzheimer's researcher Giovanni
Frisoni of the National Centre for Research and Care of
Alzheimer's Disease in Brescia, Italy. But it will
probably be impossible, he warns, to ever know for sure
what drove Ravel to write the way he did.
"Boléro occupies a funny place in Ravel's
oeuvre," agrees Deborah Mawer, a music researcher at
Lancaster University, UK. But it's hard to distinguish
between his musical development and his gradually
altering mental state, she cautions. Ravel became
interested in mechanization and modern machinery at the
end of his life, which could account for the
repetitiveness of the piece. |
