La Vallée des cloches

arranged for percussion and strings by Percy Grainger (1882-1961)

The one Ravel piece we know to have been directly inspired by the composer’s experience of hearing the Javanese gamelan at the Exposition Universelle in 1889 is the delightfully exotic Laideronnette, Impératrice des Pagodes in Ma mère l’Oye. We know that because he said so. It is not impossible, on the other hand, that at least some of the several episodes that make a special feature of bell sounds elsewhere in Ravel’s music relate in one way or another to the same experience. A likely candidate is the youthful and astonishingly dissonant two-piano piece Entre cloches which, while it was probably inspired by E.A. Poe’s The Devil in the Belfry, might have been an early effort to translate the gamelan into piano terms. Certainly, its clangourous dissonances so thoroughly upset the audience of the Société Nationale in 1898 that the composer withdrew it.

Seven years later, however, he returned to the same idea in La Vallée des cloches, the last movement of the solo-piano suite Miroirs. Here bells of different sizes and different colours, each bell or set of bells with its own rhythmic or melodic identity, ring out simultaneously in an apparently haphazard ensemble of counterpoint by chance and harmony by accidental accumulations of fourths and fifths. But in this case the concept is realised with great acoustic subtlety and poetic sensitivity. Although Ravel has been quoted as saying that the piece was stimulated by the sound of bells at midday in Paris, its setting as presented in Miroirs is surely in the countryside. The title (“The Valley of the Bells”) suggests as much and the wonderfully serene middle section seems to confirm it.

For Percy Grainger, who was not only an inveterate arranger of other composers’ music but also an enthusiast for the gamelan and what he called “tuneful percussion,” it was irresistible. He had already taken Debussy’s piano piece Pagodes (from Estampes) and restored it to its very evident gamelan origins in an arrangement for percussion and now, in 1944 , he set out to perform a similar service for La Vallée des cloches.

Ignoring the purist argument that the whole point of the piece is to suggest the sound of bells through piano sonorities, Grainger begins by allotting a bell or bell-like instrument to each of the five layers of Ravel’s texture - the high G sharps echoing at irregular intervals between upper and lower octaves, the ostinato of semiquaver triplets harmonised in fourths, the descending minor third also harmonised in fourths, the dull thud of a low G natural, the intrusive E sharps in the middle layer. The added value of Grainger’s tintinnabulations here, making explicit what is implicit in the original, is exceeded in the middle section where, to the accompaniment of continuing bell sounds, the strings take up and sustain as no piano can the most ecstatic and most extended of all Ravel’s melodies.

Gerald Larner ©2004