Upon hearing Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin in 1918 Jean Roger-Ducasse was disturbed by the incongruity between each movement's music and its dedication to a fallen soldier. Similarly, historians have noted the ‘strangeness’ of Frontispiece and La Valse, which Ravel wrote after his war service and his mother's death in 1917. When taken together, these instances of ‘strange’ music – written during an especially emotionally trying period of Ravel's life – lead to questions concerning relationships between Ravel's music and traumatic expression. Although Carolyn Abbate and Michael Puri have suggested that these pieces can be understood as expressions of loss, no one has yet attempted to address how they might illuminate Ravel's trauma within the context of conceptions of trauma in interwar France.

In this article I suggest that Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, Frontispice and La Valse are musical performances of his traumatic responses to the war and his mother's death. I place primary and archival sources such as letters and diaries of Ravel and his peers in dialogue with early twentieth-century French sources in psychology and medicine to determine how Ravel understood trauma. Utilizing Abraham and Torok's theorizations of traumatic grief, I read Ravel's compositions as bearing ‘magic words’ – indirect articulations of trauma that manifest when individuals cannot openly voice their trauma. By studying these pieces in the context of modernist musical mourning traditions in World War I-era France, I suggest that Ravel's post-war compositions demonstrate his resistance to nationalistic norms requiring the suppression of trauma for the war effort.

By the turn of the nineteenth century composers such as Daniel Steibelt and Muzio Clementi were writing keyboard pieces with tambourine (and, occasionally, triangle) parts that were clearly intended for private salon performances by girls and young women. These works were introduced to public and private European salons during the early nineteenth century. Steibelt performed such pieces, typically waltzes, bacchanals, rondos and divertissements whilst on tour with his English wife Catherine, daughter of the London-based music publisher and patent tambourine manufacturer Joseph Dale. She became a renowned tambourine virtuoso, even attracting the attention of the Bohemian musician and writer Václav Jan Tomášek, who described the great sensation caused by Catherine's performances.

I analyse different types of works that were written for the tambourine around the year 1800. Examples of short waltzes (which were usually published in sets of 6 or 12) are plentiful – they were by far the most common pieces written for piano and tambourine – and in them the historical link between the tambourine and dance is most obvious. I argue that these waltzes may have served as a bridging point between dance-like, energetic, social activities and passive, recreational drawing-room music. Further support for this idea can be found in a Grand Sonata for pianoforte, tambourine, flute, violin and basso by Joseph Dale. The tambourine part contains numerous choreographic instructions as well as a wide variety of playing techniques such as thumb rolls, bass notes and harmonics, the likes of which did not become common practice in the orchestral or chamber repertory until the twentieth century. Dale's intention was clearly to provide an opportunity for women musicians to express themselves in ways that were contrary to contemporary expectations of female social etiquette.

This article studies two late works by Schumann: the Lied ‘Meine Rose’, Op. 90 No. 2 (1850), and the Fantasiestück, Op. 73 No. 1, for clarinet and piano (1849). It analyses the works in the light of nineteenth-century developments in approaches to the treatment of tonality. Both ‘Meine Rose’ and the Fantasiestück are miniatures and can thus be linked with music-making in private salons. The choice of the two works is based on musical as well as aesthetic factors. Musically, they both avoid confirming their main tonic in a firm manner, a feature that the article links with aesthetics of the time. Most importantly, the music's inability to secure a firm tonal centre can be associated with early nineteenth-century aesthetics of longing: in the same way that unsuccessful attempts to secure the tonic underlie the two Schumann works, so contemporaneous aesthetics saw human existence as being governed by unfulfilled longing. The paper argues that in ‘Meine Rose’ the Romantic ideology can be connected to transcendental qualities associated with nature, while the Fantasiestück can be associated more generally with infinity and longing. In both works, it is precisely Schumann's special treatment of the tonic, drastically departing from Classical conventions, that justifies connecting the works with these aesthetic issues.

When Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) became a ‘regular’ at the Parisian salon of opera legend Pauline Viardot in 1871, he encountered businessmen and politicians in addition to aristocrats and socialites, plus artists and authors as well as amateur musicians and professional peers. Encouraged by Madame Viardot and inspired by her ‘artistic salon’, Fauré produced sophisticated works with stylistic duality: music that appealed to and satisfied both intuitive and analytic listeners.

This essay examines three of Fauré's compositions that feature stylistic duality, each dedicated to a member of the Viardot family. These include two early mélodies, ‘Chanson du pêcheur (Lamento)’ (1872) and ‘Au bord de l'eau’ (1875), plus the Romance pour violon (1877). It demonstrates that these pieces, which sought to engage a diverse audience and involve each member in an individualized and interactive aesthetic experience, reveal considerable sophistication below their immediately attractive surfaces. This article also avers that abandonment of misconceptions and prejudices is essential to full appreciation of Gabriel Fauré's refined and innovative art.

The National Library of Spain (Biblioteca Nacional de España, BNE) is the head of the Spanish library system. It holds all books published in Spain, and also several collections of different types, including the Music and Audiovisuals Department's sound recordings and sheet music. Its Department of Bibliographic Control of Periodicals catalogues both newspapers and magazines. In addition, the BNE offers a number of online services including the Hispanic Digital Library (Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, BDH) and the Digital Newspaper Library (Hemeroteca Digital, HemD). The BDH, was created in 2008 and currently provides free and open access to more than 220,000 digitized documents, including recordings and scores.1 In contrast, HemD, which is part of the BDH, focuses on the public dissemination of the digital collection of Spanish historical presses.2 It currently offers around 2,500 titles and more than 70,000,000 pages.3 Newspapers and magazines are available in PDF format and searches are facilitated by OCR (Optical Character Recognition).