Jeux d'eau (Ravel)

Jeux d’eau (pronounced [ʒø do]) is a piece for solo piano by Maurice Ravel. The title is often translated as "Fountains", "Playing Water" or literally "Water Games" (see Jeux d'eau, water features in gardens). At the time of writing Jeux d'eau, Ravel was a student of Gabriel Fauré, to whom the piece is dedicated. Pianist Ricardo Viñes was the first to publicly perform the work in 1902, although it had been privately performed for Les Apaches previously.

The piece was inspired by Franz Liszt's piece Les jeux d'eau à la Villa d'Este (from the 3ème année of his Années de pèlerinage),[1] and Ravel explained its origins in this way:

Jeux d'eau, appearing in 1901, is at the origin of the pianistic novelties which one would notice in my work. This piece, inspired by the noise of water and by the musical sounds which make one hear the sprays of water, the cascades, and the brooks, is based on two motives in the manner of the movement of a sonata—without, however, subjecting itself to the classical tonal plan.

Written on the manuscript by Ravel, and often included on published editions, is the text "Dieu fluvial riant de l'eau qui le chatouille..." a quote from Henri de Régnier's Cité des eaux,[2] which in English editions is sometimes translated to "River god laughing as the water tickles him ...". The tonality of the piece is E major.

The piece uses non-standard keys included on larger Bösendorfer models, often written into scores using a substituted low A (the lowest key on the standard keyboard) near measure 57, which should be a half-step lower at G♯.[3]

The work was first published by Eugène Demets.

Notes and references
  1. Arbie Orenstein: Ravel. Man and Musician (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1975), ISBN 0-231-03902-6, p. 154.
  2. Gerald Larner: Maurice Ravel (London: Phaidon, 1996), p. 68, ISBN 0-7148-3270-7.
  3. https://www.pianoexperts.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/What-makes-a-Bosendorfer-a-Bosendorfer.pdf
gollark: So basically, the "god must exist because the universe is complex" thing ignores the fact that it... isn't really... and that gods would be pretty complex too, and does not answer any questions usefully because it just pushes off the question of why things exist to why *god* exists.
gollark: To randomly interject very late, I don't agree with your reasoning here. As far as physicists can tell, while pretty complex and hard for humans to understand, relative to some other things the universe runs on simple rules - you can probably describe the way it works in maybe a book's worth of material assuming quite a lot of mathematical background. Which is less than you might need for, say, a particularly complex modern computer system. You know what else is quite complex? Gods. They are generally portrayed as acting fairly similarly to humans (humans like modelling other things as basically-humans and writing human-centric stories), and even apart from that are clearly meant to be intelligent agents of some kind. Both of those are complicated - the human genome is something like 6GB, a good deal of which probably codes for brain things. As for other intelligent things, despite having tons of data once trained, modern machine learning things are admittedly not very complex to *describe*, but nobody knows what an architecture for general intelligence would look like.
gollark: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/348702212110680064/896356765267025940/FB_IMG_1633757163544.jpg
gollark: https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf
gollark: Frankly, go emit muon neutrinos.
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