This outstanding compilation of articles by Ravel (who was a brilliant critic) features reviews, interviews, and some 350 letters from Cocteau, Colette, de Falla, Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, and other major figures of the time.

Collection of critical and analytical scholarly essays on the music of Ravel by prominent scholars. Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music fills a unique place in Ravel studies by combining critical interpretation and analytical focus. From the premiere of his works up to the present, Ravel has been associated with masks and the related notions of artifice and imposture. This has led scholars to perceive a lack of depth in his music and, consequently, to discourage investigation of his musical language. This volume balances and interweavesthese modes of inquiry. Part 1, "Orientations and Influences," illuminates the sometimes contradictory aesthetic, biographical, and literary strands comprising Ravel's artistry and our understanding of it. Part 2, "Analytical Case Studies," engages representative works from Ravel's major genres using a variety of methodologies, focusing on structural process and his complex relation to stylistic convention. Part 3, "Interdisciplinary Studies," integratesmusical analysis and art criticism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis in creating novel methodologies. Contributors include prominent scholars of Ravel's and fin-de-siècle music: Elliott Antokoletz, Gurminder Bhogal, Sigrun B. Heinzelmann, Volker Helbing, Steven Huebner, Peter Kaminsky, Barbara Kelly, David Korevaar, Daphne Leong, Michael Puri, and Lauri Suurpää. Peter Kaminsky is Professor of Music at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

The standard Ravel biography by the world's foremost authority — brilliantly detailed and documented, filled with quotations from letters, interviews with the composer's friends, an illuminating analysis of each of his works, a study of his musical esthetics and language, a complete catalog of his works, and a discography. "Highly recommended" — Choice. Includes 48 illustrations.

A ground-breaking study of the musical and literary priorities, professional practices and creative interactions that shaped one of the most adventurous artforms of the Belle Époque.

The Reader's Guide to Music is designed to provide a useful single-volume guide to the ever-increasing number of English language book-length studies in music. Each entry consists of a bibliography of some 3-20 titles and an essay in which these titles are evaluated, by an expert in the field, in light of the history of writing and scholarship on the given topic. The more than 500 entries include not just writings on major composers in music history but also the genres in which they worked (from early chant to rock and roll) and topics important to the various disciplines of music scholarship (from aesthetics to gay/lesbian musicology).

The music of Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), beloved by musicians and audiences since its debut, has been a difficult topic for scholars. The traditional stylistic categories of impressionism, symbolism, and neoclassicism, while relevant, have offered too little purchase on this fascinating but enigmatic work. In Ravel the Decadent, author Michael Puri provides an innovative and productive solution by locating the aesthetic origins of this music in the French Decadence and demonstrating the extension of this influence across the length of his oeuvre. From an array of Decadent topics Puri selects three--memory, sublimation, and desire--and uses them to delineate the content of this music, pinpoint its overlap with contemporary cultural discourse, and link it to its biographical context, as well as to create new methods altogether for the analysis and interpretation of music. Ravel the Decadent opens by defining the main concepts, giving particular attention to memory and decadence. It then stakes out contrasting modes of memory in this music: a nostalgic mode that views the past as forever lost, and a more optimistic one that imagines its resurrection and reanimation. Acknowledging Ravel's lifelong identity as a dandy--a figure that embodies the Decadence and its aspiration toward the sublime--Puri identifies possible moments of musical self-portraiture before stepping back to theorize dandyism in European musical modernism at large. He then addresses the dialectic between desire and its sublimation in the pairing of two genres--the bacchanal and the idyl--and leverages the central trio of concepts to offer provocative readings of Ravel's two waltz sets, the Valses nobles et sentimentales and La valse. Puri concludes by invoking the same terms to identify a topic of "faun music" that promises to create new common ground between Ravel and Debussy. Rife with close readings that will satisfy the musicologist, Ravel the Decadent also suits a more general reader through its broadly humanistic key concepts, immersion in contemporary art and literature, and clarity of language.

Brings new insights to the music of well-known European composers by telling a fascinating, little-known story about French music publishing, specifically through the lens of Jacques Durand's Édition Classique. French composers, performers and musicologists acted as editors of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European 'classics', primarily for piano. Among these editors were Fauré, Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Ravel and Dukas; the objects of their enquiries included core works by Rameau, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin. Presenting six composer-editor case studies, the volume shows that the French 'accent', both musical and cultural, upon this predominantly Austro-German music was highly varied. Editorial responses range from scholarly approaches to those directed by performance or compositional agendas, and from pan-European to strongly patriotic stances. Intriguing intersections are revealed between old and new, and between French and cross-European canons. Beyond editing, the book explores the Édition's role in pedagogy and performance, including by pianists Robert Casadesus and Yvonne Loriod, and in the reassertion of contemporary French composition, especially regarding innovation around neoclassicism. It will interest a wide readership, including musicologists, performers and concert-goers, cultural historians and other humanities scholars.