Eight Movements 

by Ben Miller 

Preface 

Valses Nobles Et Sentimentales is a work for piano by French composer Maurice Ravel, written in 1911 and premiered in 1913. The work is in eight movements, and comprises a series of ‘noble’ and ‘sentimental’ waltzes. It signaled the beginning of a shift away from romanticism and impressionism in French music, towards a more abstracted and dissonant Modern style. 

I: Prologue: Modèrè 
An exuberant, clashing, quick-witted introduction. 

Parisian lights dim on velvet-seated, velvet-skinned Bugatti-driving Frenchmen, it’s the age of ragtime, of Mucha and nouveau, of distant-thundered war-drums echoing, still-dampened, from the east. Tuxedoed, the pianist plays new music by a composer left unnamed on dim-lit programs, the organizers decided lets make the critics guess. As the piece opens with its cluster-chord inverted open to a jazz-influenced thirteenth all at once velvety skin bristles wildly on audience faces, mustache-topped lips revoke previous smiles, withdraw them into pinched lemonsucking looks. They think it must be German music, not Ravel, not our Ravel; but then before they can think any further it surprises them by ending before it begins. 

II: Assez Lent 
A slow, strange, and sadly funny melody, that repeats. 

It’s over, she thinks, as she turns the light on above her seat. 

A mournful waltz plays on her iPod as she shoves her bag in the space overhead, pulls off her fleece, sits sharply down on the train. 

She’s heading back home after two months at music school at Yale, she’s heading back to Jersey. Away from Adam, who left her for Alex, who’s a guy, because he went gay after dating her, which is basically the worst insult ever. 

Only home for a weekend, though – as this thought comes to her head, she pulls her lips sideways over her teeth into a semblance of a smile. Her mother, not a musician, is lonely in the house alone. While she got her undergraduate degree she’d lived at home to keep her mother company after her father left. Now, she’s away, and there are no more children to keep her mother occupied. 

She was an only. It was a miracle that she happened at all. Her father had been a pianist, always happy with his work, less happy with his life. He’d had a career – played with some of the bigger symphonies, recorded the Ravel and Poulenc concerti with Philadelphia, which was a big deal. 

And then he ran off with a man named Alex, a violist. Leaving his wife sad, annoyed, lonely; and her daughter to clean up the mess. 

III: Modèrè 
A short and quick sentimental dance. 

The old woman decides to get the flowers herself. As she walks slowly but steadily to her car on the April morning in question she contemplates her cousin, Florence, in the nursing home, to whom she’s bringing them. 

Florence had always been the smart one, when women weren’t supposed to be. The old woman marvels at what she sees now: opportunities, futures, whole lives able to be lived, independently. 

Her cousin in the nursing home had always been a spinster, but a happy one. She’d had music, still did, for there was a piano in the nursing home and Florence would entertain the others with dance hall songs from their youth, and, once in a while, with a bit of Ravel. 

IV: Assez Animè 
A mischievous collection of runs up and down the keys. 

Her husband and children having left the house for the day, she takes the Mrs. off the beginning of her last name and reinserts her first name where it belongs. Before fetching the milk and produce she needs at the store, the woman, newly christened, can afford a few minutes of gossip.

She picks up the phone, dials, and hears this in reply to her ‘hello’: Clarissa, darling? Did you hear what Mary’s oldest daughter did? She needed money for alcohol so she allowed someone to pay her to watch her and her boyfriend, that Russian one, have sex! Have you ever heard anything like it? Isn’t it awful? 

Satisfied, she responds with her own bit of gossip, says her goodbyes, hangs up the phone, laughs. It’s the beginning of a long day. 

V: Presque Lent 
A slower, but still happy-in-mood, section. Languid. 

She wakes up, as she hoped to, in his arms. They are both students, they are both freshmen, they are both from San Francisco, they had to fly across the country to meet each other. She is a painter, he is a composer, they both headed for in New York, for the same school, for the same college, the same art department, and, in fact, for the same dorm; for meeting by chance through a friend of a friend, for flirting, for seeing each other across the room at a party, for kissing, for exchanging numbers, for having dinner the next night, and going home from dinner, and then for waking up the next morning in the same bed, in the same mood, with the same smile, and the same love. 

VI: Assez Vif 
Happy, quick, light. 

He plays: for she said yes, yes to him, to him alone, alone to yes, him to alone, yes to alone to him to alone to forever to yes, to waltz to him together to yes to forever, to him she said yes. 

VII: Moins Vif 
Begins very slowly, and then rises to an exuberant, loud, intense crescendo. 

Waiting for someone you love is a test of your love for them. Nervously, the woman waits by the fountain in Washington Square Park, scanning the legions of long-haired, faded-dress-wearing women for hers, for the one that is hers, the one that she loves and that loves her back. 

Is it that one? There, the blonde, who flips her hair and looks at the roll-out piano band wistfully. No, she’s heading to the other side of the fountain. Not the one, never will be. 

They are meeting for dinner, the reservations are in a half-hour or so, and she’s late, but there she is! isn’t that her? in the pink? and the woman’s heart begins to beat faster, and the sky seems to clear, and the yellow haze spit down from the angry-seeming streetlamps near her becomes a golden halo, and all is clear for a moment, and then the woman blinks and realizes that no, the one she waits for doesn’t have hair quite that long, or quite that curly; shit, shit, shit. 

Maybe today is the day she won’t come, the woman thinks. Irrationality is a part of love in this way. They have been together for a month, they have made plans, why wouldn’t she come, but there she is! isn’t that her? in the pink? and the woman’s heart begins to beat faster, and the sky seems to clear, and the yellow haze spit down from the angry-seeming streetlamps near her becomes a golden halo, and all is clear for a moment. 

VIII: Epilogue: Lent 
Languid, moody, music; amongst ambiguous chords, echoes of what preceded. 

In his apartment overlooking the Jersey-lit skyline, the callused-hand pianist approaches his glossed-black instrument, sets a small coaster down on its top, takes a slow sip of Campari, sits on the bench, places the glass on the coaster again; reflected in it, the Jersey-lit skyline. 

What music comes to his hands? Slow chords, Debussy-like, liquid spirals recessed in otherworldly portals, wood-spirit echoes; dragged lightly out of ancient-seeming, unnatural-seeming wood; years of music played fast and forte compressed into the surface of the piano – this, the light-fingered touch of the pianist strokes out with the intensity of a painter’s brush. 

The pianist perceives that the gloss of the piano is built up of years of enameled music that have settled on its surface. He plays a run, then a high, ancient waltz. Anna, his wife, waits in the bedroom for him. He waits in the music for her. Occasionally (as the years go on, more and more occasionally), he finds her in the bedroom. She has never once come to the music, she has never once found him. All he wants is to be met halfway. 

He fantasizes: they could live their lives, enact their marriage rites, in the hallway between the living room (music room really, with the piano taking up half of it, she always says) and the bedroom, which, with its sham pillows and duster, is indisputably her territory. 

He remembers, fingers drawing out low, hushed tones of Ravel; when he first met her, staring at her across the Berkeley quad – they’d been there in the sixties, when they were poor and young and beautiful and things were young and beautiful and flexible and everything seemed to glint with the fresh just-cleaned glow of sunlit joy. And now, the ambiguous night challenges him. It says what are you, his fingers reply with a rising chain of sixths fading into tinges of the waltz that he’d always played for her to cheer her up in bad moods. 

The pink-light-topped hotel over the river into Jersey seems to point into his core. He’s in a dreamland now, and as he sits at the piano contemplating the dulcet-toned ruins of his life (but at least I can play and have always been able to he thinks), he returns to the beginning of his reverie, and, as always, sounds echoing back one hundred years, ends just before he begins. The music is pregnant with possibility. 

Ben Miller is a freshman in the College of Arts and Science, hoping to major in International Relations, Creative Writing, and/or Journalism. Originally from the Boston area, he has been writing since he can remember and is consistently inspired by the work of Grace Paley, Truman Capote, Italo Calvino, Joyce Carol Oates, and Michael Cunningham; and by the work and inspired teaching of Jonathan Safran Foer.