Ravel the Decadent: Memory, Sublimation, and Desire

Ravel the Decadent offers a bold new perspective on the music of Maurice Ravel by locating its aesthetic origins in the French Decadence and demonstrating this influence across the length of his oeuvre. The notions of memory, sublimation, and desire are invoked to delineate the Decadent profile of this music.

Michael J. Puri is an Associate Professor in the McIntire Department of Music at the University of Virginia. A graduate of Harvard, Yale, and the Music Academy in Basel, Puri uses literary and critical theory to analyze music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special attention to Ravel, Debussy, and Wagner. His articles have appeared in leading music journals and various edited collections, and his research has been supported by national societies and foundations. In 2008 he received the Alfred Einstein Award from the American Musicological Society.