The flute solo from Maurice Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé: the meanings of the libretto text in the flutist's interpretative construction
Flute Solo Daphnis et Chloé by Ravel; Ballet and Orchestral Suite Daphnis et Chloé by Ravel; interpretive construction; musical expression; intersemiotic translation
The objective of this research was to investigate whether understanding the meanings of the text of the libretto of the ballet and Orchestral Suite No. 2 of Daphnis et Chloé by Ravel can influence flutists in the interpretative construction of the flute solo. We chose the excerpt from the flute solo of Daphnis et Chloé by Maurice Ravel (1875 – 1937) as the central object of this study, because it characterizes the dialogue between other artistic languages besides music, such as ballet and prose, in which, in the course of the score, we find the libretto that describes the Scenes. The research was based on the concepts of intersemiotic translation by Peirce (1977) and Jakobson (1987) and Haroldo de Campos (1929 - 2003). We also used references from the literature on the transverse flute that relate the context of the work to the didactics of the construction of musical expressiveness. In a multiple case study, we conducted an experiment with a sample of four flutists to observe whether understanding the meanings of the libretto text can influence the construction of the solo interpretation. The experiment involved recordings of the excerpt before and after being exposed to the libretto, a questionnaire, a semi-structured interview, and spectrographic analysis. The data collected in the interviews revealed that the selected flutists felt encouraged to create new interpretative subsidies from contact with the libretto text. The flutists revealed that they understood the meanings of the text and how they translated them into sound language by manipulating sound elements such as vibrato, dynamics, rhythmic realization, among others. In addition, the interviewees reported feeling freer to interpret the excerpt after contact with the libretto.