Conference Agenda

At AMS/SMT 2025, we seek to mark the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Maurice Ravel with a multigenerational gathering of musicologists and music theorists who will engage critically with Ravel reception, investigate the materials and structures of his music, and practice interdisciplinary approaches that situate the composer within a larger world of ideas, personalities, and cultural movements.

This 90-minute joint-session roundtable will have two co-chairs (Bhogal and Puri), five panelists (Beavers, Blättler, Fillerup, Shiflett, and Vajjhala), and one respondent (Huebner), all of whom are experts in the field. The co-chairs will begin by reviewing the remarkable advances that Ravel studies has made since 2000, while also pointing out cultural “sightings” that offer special insight into the significance of the composer and his music today.

Each of the five panelists will then give a seven- to ten-minute presentation. They will explore the main theme—“enduring insights and new initiatives”—from four perspectives: visual-corporeal aesthetics, textual interpretation and cross-disciplinary critique, compositional technique, and style/biography correlations. Jessie Fillerup and Rachana Vajjhala will investigate the more fantastical dimensions of Ravel’s work by showing its intersection with film, choreography, and the spectacular, fin-de-siècle technologies of magic. Campbell Shiflett will revisit the seminal writings of Roland-Manuel to reveal how the latter’s arguments for the modernity of Ravel’s music are entangled with more hidden claims about its Romanticism. Damian Blättler also returns to Roland-Manuel, in particular his striking statement that Ravel’s music often seems to be a “projection of melody into the harmonic plan.” He tests out this claim with an analysis of “Le Cygne” from Histoires naturelles that draws on recent theoretical work on non-diatonic scales by Hannaford, Tymoczko, and Yust. Jennifer Beavers rounds off the panel by addressing a contentious but persistent question in Ravel studies: whether the composer’s late style bears any traces of his neurological disease. Beavers suggests that it does, pointing to an enhanced emphasis on timbre that may indicate a shift in his creative faculties.

Following a response by Steven Huebner, the remaining thirty minutes will feature open discussion between the panelists and the audience.