Last Research Adventure

With two weeks to go before our departure, I had pretty much written off any more research. I felt like I had a solid amount of material and thought that I had exhausted most of the relevant leads that had come up during the year. I thought wrong. When I was least expecting it, a research opportunity came up that I couldn't ignore, and so it was back to the archives for Louis.

Behold the headquarters of the Société d'Auteurs, Compositeurs, et Editeurs de Musique (SACEM) - basically the organization responsible for collecting royalties from the performances of works by its members. The group is over a century old, and played a role in the finances of the composers I'm studying. (Today, they still hand out royalties, but less to art music composers and more to pop stars like Carla Bruni, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Camille.) After meeting with the head of SACEM's archives and learning that most archival materials weren't on site, I didn't have much hope for gaining access to them. But lo and behold, the guy I met arranged for stuff to be sent to SACEM headquarters, and when I got the call, I briefly forgot about my last two weeks of relaxation, put down my wine glass, and went back to research.

I hoped to find some useful info on composers' income from royalties, but the documents to which I was given access had more to do with the lines of succession for each composer. Ravel's proved to be a particularly interesting case. When he died in 1937, he was fairly wealthy, thanks to the runaway success of Boléro (1928). As he had no children, his brother Edouard inherited the rights to his royalties. When Edouard passed away in 1960, he left the rights to the nurse who had cared for him during his last years. She got sued by Edouard's nephew and niece, died, and won the lawsuit (in that order). Her widow - a hairdresser from (oddly enough) the same town Ravel was born in - inherited her rights, and passed it on to his second wife, who's still living, and who shares the rights with her daughter and with a Dutch bank. Got it? Me neither.

Visiting SACEM wasn't as productive as I had hoped, but I established a good contact who may ultimately give me greater access to the financial records that could make my dissertation way more interesting. And I got to enjoy a nifty, post-war building whose location (in Neuilly, on the Seine) and design (see below) reflect the affluence of an institution that's raking in the dough - in part thanks to Ravel's Boléro.