Why distributivity still matters
(and two details in stories about Ravel)

I'm a semanticist, but let's be honest, I don't do distributivity. I have read about it - in the Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory. I have taken a course about it - it was Lelia Glass's course at ESSLLI 2019 in Riga, probably the most interactive semantic course that I've even taken. And my co-disciple Kata Wohlmuth wrote her thesis on it. (When Lelia mentioned Kata's thesis in class, I was like "Wooow! I have the same supervisor as her!") But I never cared too much about distributivity. Why would I care about having three boys carry two pianos, anyway? What matters is that three boys participated, and two pianos ended up being moved. That's the cumulative reading.

I'm also a passionate fan of Maurice Ravel. I would go to any concert in Barcelona that played his music, and would read any material about him that I could find. That's how I noticed that the same stories are told slightly differently by different authors - sometimes due to their understanding of distributivity.

One of such stories is about his Concerto for the Left Hand, a piece commissioned by the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in the First World War. When Ravel finished writing this piece, Wittgenstein paid him a visit at his home, where Ravel explained and demostrated the new piece on his piano. (Spoiler: Wittgenstein wasn't very impressed.)

Now, a concerto is usually played on one (or a couple of) solo instrument plus an orchestra. But you can't always have an orchestra with you, so for demonstration purposes, it is very handy to have an orchestral reduction which can be played on a piano. (There is definitely more to it - a composer can first make a sketch of the concerto on a piano, and then rework it for the orchestra. Some concertos are just never meant to be played with an orchestra, such as Seitz's student concertos. Some composers just write the soloist part and the piano part and call it a concerto. For example, Raffaele Calace's 2nd mandolin concerto - but it is absolutely stunning with a string orchestra.)

Anyway, what Ravel demonstrated was a concerto with a piano part for left hand only, and an orchestral reduction meant to be played with both hands. (The score for this version can be found on imslp, and can be heard on YouTube.) And surely Ravel had just one piano and two hands. How did he demonstrate the piece, then?

The other story is about Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major. This piece has a breathtaking second movement, Adagio Assai, which you can use to try attracting people to classical music. (Somehow, after I had fallen in love with this piece, I found a recording of it in my computer which a friend sent me about ten years ago. Obviously he made a good try, but I wasn't impressed at that time.) It has a very long, slow, beautiful melody.

So, the concerto was dedicated to, and was premiered by the pianist Marguerite Long. She complained that the flowing melody was hard to play, to which Ravel replied:

Here is the end of the page.