Artist Notes: The Mother Goose Series
Tucked away in a forgotten corner of our building, James Bulley’s installation, ‘The Mother Goose Series’ explores Ravel’s fairytale score through a series of sound boxes; each a world of its own bringing Ravel’s music to life in a whole new way.
Inspired by deep research into Ravel’s life and world during the composition of Ma mère l’Oye, the artist shares how this was all translated in the artworks and the beautifully reimagined musical score, created with Royal Northern Sinfonia.
“In 1908, the year his father died, French composer Maurice Ravel began writing Ma mère l’Oye, a piece dedicated to Mimi and Jean Godebski, two young children whose parents were friends of his and whose salon he frequented. The piece marks a crucial turning point in Ravel’s oeuvre: ‘the idea of evoking in these pieces the poetry of childhood naturally led me to simplify my style and to refine my means of expression.’ Later in life Ravel described it as one of his favourite works.
Initially composed as a five-movement piano duet, Ma mère l’Oye was completed in 1910, with its first performance at the newly founded Sociéte Musicale Indépendante in Paris. By 1911 Ravel had orchestrated the piece, and then in 1912 arranged it for ballet. Ravel had described himself in a letter to a friend in August 1898 as “the little symbolist,” and in Ma mère l’Oye we encounter a mystical dance, symbolic, abstracted — fairytales woven in the enchantment of Ravel’s imaginary landscapes.
Each of the first four movements of Ma mère l’Oye draws inspiration from well known French childhood fairytales, with the final movement ‘Le Jardin Féerique’ (Enchanted Garden) portraying Ravel’s own imaginary world, a landscape that each day he surveyed from the balcony of his house ‘Le Belvédère’ just West of Paris, surrounded by his collection of figurines and mechanical automatons.
The Mother Goose Series steps into Maurice Ravel’s world, drawing from his exquisite orchestration and harmonic ideals to distil sculptural worlds where the viewer might lose themselves in the prism of Ravel’s music. I owe a debt of gratitude to Dinis Sousa and Royal Northern Sinfonia for their wonderful playing, and to all at The Glasshouse and Mediale for their generosity in helping make these pieces come to life.”
James Bulley, London, April 2025
01 – Pavane (for Sleeping Beauty)
Pavane (for Sleeping Beauty), is housed in a cabinet of fallen Yew wood (1), a tree most associated with death and rebirth (2), its red berries both poisonous and medicinal. At the base of the piece is a found 18th century French spindle, suspended beneath a hand drawn white graphite star map drawn on ink and mounted on an oil paint background (3). Within this map the viewer can find fragmentary notation of the music they hear, the Pisces star sign of its original composer, the headed note paper of Ravel’s home, Le Belvédère. Woven with field recordings (4), the listener hears Ravel’s atmospheric orchestration moving around the night sky, surface and objects, as the story of Sleeping Beauty’s bewitchment from a spindle prick, entombed in a castle overrun by thicketed thorns unfolds (5).
1. The cabinets that you see in this series of works are all made of wood sourced from trees that have fallen in recent years in the parks of London, around where I live.
2. Ravel’s Pavane was started in late September 1908, shortly before his father died. This was a devastating time for Ravel and the rest of the pieces were completed some time after this period.
3. As a late teenager, Ravel would star gaze into the night with his friend the pianist Ricardo Viñes whilst studying at the Paris Conservatoire.
4. Ravel could imitate birdsong with extraordinary precision and was a great lover of nature.
5. The story of Sleeping Beauty was drawn from Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma mère l’Oye which also provided Ravel with the inspiration for the name for the overall work.
02 – Poucet
In the story of Petit Poucet (Little Tom Thumb), written by Charles Perrault, we follow the journey of Poucet and his brothers as they become lost in a dark forest. Abandoned by their parents in extreme poverty, Poucet at first marks his path back home with small white stones, ensuring he and his brothers might find their way back. They are however cast out again into the dark forest by their parents, but this time the breadcrumb trail that Poucet leaves is eaten by the birds, represented here by swooped pinpoint violins.
Enclosed by the knotted wood of a Beech tree, whose gnarled nuts and bark scatter beneath them, in Poucet we hear the woozy patterned wandering counterpoint of the protagonist and his brothers as they wander sadly across the dark greened surface of the dark forest, desperately trying to find their way home.
03 – Laideronnette
In 1889, the 14 year old Ravel attended the Fourth Paris International Exhibition, where a variety of music from across the world could be heard, including performances of Javanese Gamelan (6). This was a formative event for many in Paris, an opening up of worlds of tonality, artistry and craft that informed many of the most renowned impressionist artists of the coming era. For Ravel, the gamelan had a particular resonance, with its sounding bells and gongs influencing a number of his compositions.
‘Laideronnette Impératrice des Pagodes’ tells the story of a princess who is cursed by a fairy to be eternally ugly, who then leaves her home, journeying to a magic land, where she is rescued by a green serpent and finds herself surrounded by a retinue of small magical beings, the pagods and pagodines.
“She indulged her curiosity no further, but disrobed and entered the bath. All the pagods and pagodines began to sing and play on various instruments. Some had lutes made out of walnut shells; others, bass viols made out of almond shells, for it was, of course, necessary that the instruments fit the size of the performers.” (7)
In a dark Ash cabinet, its backdrop a sun-stained dusk of alizarin crimson and ink, we find the princess Laideronnette at her repose, a rose bathing in a bamboo house, surrounded and accompanied by the music of her Pagods and Pagodines, a winged seeded serpent taking flight in the night sky above.
6. In a 1931 interview, Ravel detailed that much of the inspiration for Laideronnette came from visits to the gamelan at the 1889 exhibition.
7. The original Laideronnette story can be found in Madame d’Aulnoy’s Le Serpentin Vert.
04 – Entretiens
The fourth movement of Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye, ‘Les entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête’ (Conversations of Beauty and the Beast), draws upon Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s narration of the story. Here we find Beauty, dancing and in conversation with the Beast, realising that she might have found her true love: “I am pleased with your kindness, and when I consider that, your deformity scarce appears.” “Yes, yes said the Beast, my heart is good, but still I am a monster.” (8)
Ravel’s use of counterpoint with the two themes here underlines the reconciliation between Beauty and the Beast, and we find in the notes of the arrangement for ballet that here ‘the Beast falls to his knees sobbing’ and that in the following return of the original tempo ‘Beauty, reassured plays with the Beast coquettishly.’
In January 1911, Ravel had played pieces by the composer Erik Satie in the opening concert of the second season of SMI (9), including the third Gymnopedie, and we feel its influence here. Indeed Ravel dedicated the score to Satie, inscribing it: ‘To Erik Satie, grand papa of the Entretiens [de la Belle et de la Bête] and other things, the affectionate homage of a disciple, Maurice Ravel.’
Within this oak cabinet, we then find two monocles, suspended in space by Oak Galls. A pince-nez tribute to Satie’s influence on Ravel and the composition, Satie’s playful and idiosyncratic style is embodied in a centrally rotating cribbage board, whilst the danced conversations of Beauty and the Beast bounce left to right across the white oiled surface of the interior.
8. Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, 1758. The Story of Beauty and Beast.
9. Sociéte Musicale Indépendante, a concert series in Paris representing French music and composers.
05 – Enchanted Garden
Enchanted Garden is a three-piece portrait of Maurice Ravel through the key figures in his life, set in one of my favourite materials, the twisted iron wood of the Hornbeam. Ravel was very close to his mother, who died in 1917 – she was a still point at the centre of Ravel’s world. She is represented here by the endless time of a clock mechanism, a reference also to the quote given by composer Igor Stravinsky who supposedly referred to Ravel as “that most perfect of Swiss clockmakers.”
Ravel’s father died just as he began composing Ma mère l’Oye. He was an inventor who patented a design for an automobile in 1868 – reflected here in a glass slide. Ravel himself was an extremely well dressed individual who cared deeply about his attire and presentation – here he finds form in an elegant silver matchbox.
‘Enchanted Garden’ thematically and spatially rotates around this triangulation of compass points in Ravel’s life – an internal emotional world, described in Ravel’s beautiful orchestration for Le Jardin Féerique: ‘complexe mais pas complique.’ (10)
10. Ralph Vaughan Williams studied with Ravel in France in 1907, and Ravel described his methods of orchestration to him in this way.
Photo Gallery
Creative team
Artist: James Bulley
Performed by Royal Northern Sinfonia
Music Director: Dinis Sousa
Orchestral Recording: Alexander Barnes
Orchestral Recording Mixes: Simon Hendry
Lead Artist Assistant: Jake Tyler
Artist Assistant and Install: Richard Hards
Woodwork consultant: Hugo Lamdin
Amplification Design: Max Hunter
Lighting sponsored by TM Lighting
Bibliography
Leprince de Beaumont, Jeanne-Marie. 1830. The History of Beauty and Beast. Derby [England], London: Thomas Richardson; Simpkin and Marshall.
Madame d’Aulnoy, Jack Zipes, and Natalie Frank. 2021. The Island of Happiness. Princeton University Press.
Nichols, Roger. 1987. Ravel Remembered. London: Faber.
Nichols, Roger. 2011. Ravel. New Haven [Connecticut]: Yale University Press.
Orenstein, Arbie. 2004. A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews. [New edition]. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover.
Perrault, Charles. 2009. The Complete Fairy Tales. Translated by C. J. Betts. Oxford [England]: Oxford University Press.