Ravel Studies

Description

Demonstrating the vibrant nature of current research on Maurice Ravel, one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century French music, a team of distinguished international scholars provides new interdisciplinary perspectives and insights. Through historical, critical, and analytical means, the volume reveals the symbiotic relationships between Ravel's music and aesthetic, cultural, literary, gender, performance-based, and medical studies. While the chapters progress from French aesthetic-literary association, including Colette and Proust, to more extended disciplinary couplings, with American history, jazz, dance, and neurology, the organization is relatively free to enable other thematic links to emerge. The volume presents a refreshing variety of scholarly approaches to Ravel and his music, set within broad contexts and current musicological debates. In a Ravelian spirit, it is intended that the essays will serve collectively as a model for expanding the agendas of other composer-based studies.

Deborah Mawer is Reader in Music within the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University. Her books include The Ballets of Maurice Ravel: Creation and Interpretation (2006), Darius Milhaud: Modality and Structure in Music of the 1920s (1997), and The Cambridge Companion to Ravel (2000). Her articles and reviews on varied topics have appeared in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Twentieth-Century Music, Music and Letters, Opera Quarterly, Music Theory Online, and the British Journal of Music Education, as well as in essay collections on French music.

'Ravel Studies is an outstanding addition to the Ravel literature and offers aficionados of French music, students, musicologists and sophisticated music lovers a series of concise, yet in-depth and thoughtful essays about the music, life and times of this great master. Libraries with collections in these subject areas will also want to purchase the book. Highly recommended.' Music Media Monthly 'Subjecting popular music to academic techniques is dangerous territory but Deborah Mawer, with her intensive knowledge of the field, provides convincing analyses of the two jazz-inspired piano concertos and the violin and piano Sonata in 'Ravel's theory and practice of jazz', which well explains the composer's belief in its value for classical composers as embodying the modernist age, as well as relating to larger questions of national identity.' Musical Times 'As with the earlier Cambridge Companion [to Ravel], Mawer proves a discriminating editor, this time of a collection focused on targeted aspects of Ravel's achievement. With topics ranging from Ravel's connections to musical and literary icons through his complex relationship with American popular jazz and the tragic circumstances of his final years, there is something in these nine dense essays to appeal to most Ravel devotees ... A fitting sequel to its predecessor and a welcome addition to the general literature on modern music, Ravel Studies keenly demonstrates that the composer's slender output - just under sixty major works - includes works of trenchant beauty and undeniable technical prowess that still merit close examination.' Notes