At home with Ravel

Few scholars studying the music of Maurice Ravel would have played his piano or read his books, never mind sweeping out his toilet. Emily Kilpatrick, while undertaking a PhD in Musicology, did all these things, and found it a rare and wonderful opportunity to gain personal insight into the great French composer.

For Emily Kilpatrick, a shift from studying Performance in her Music Honours year to Musicology for her PhD made Ravel's music the perfect choice for the focus of her research.

"It started I guess because I'm a pianist and I play Ravel. It's some of the most satisfying music that I've ever played. It's incredibly hard, incredibly challenging, but it's so rich," Emily said.

After an intensive Honours year of doing almost nothing but performing, Emily decided she needed to "use another part of her brain" and do her PhD in Musicology. Her supervisor for both her Honours and PhD has been Professor David Lockett, Director of the Elder Conservatorium of Music.

"Musicology, for me at least, is based in history," Emily said. "It's music within an historical and social context. It certainly has an analytical component - the works themselves - but I'm much more interested in the works as a product of a time and place, and what they can tell us about that society.

"Ravel's dates are 1875-1937. It's a wonderful period of world history and particularly French history. Paris was an amazing place to be around at the turn of the century. The artistic interaction was extraordinary; anyone who was anybody was in Paris. And it's the way artists, writers, poets, painters and musicians were interacting that I find really fascinating."

As part of her PhD, Emily spent six months in France in 2004 and, during that time, spent six weeks helping prepare for the reopening of Ravel's house, now a museum, in the French village Montfort l'Amaury. Ravel had lived there from 1921 until his death in 1937.

"The special thing about Ravel's house is that it still feels like a home. I was in the house every day putting in place objects and trinkets, playing his piano, sitting on his floor reading his books, sweeping out his toilet. You start to feel like you know someone when you do these things. There are things that I know he did that I also did. It was a quite extraordinary experience and it shaped the way I think of him."

Emily's PhD thesis, recently submitted, is called `The Language of Enchantment: Childhood and Fairytale in the music of Maurice Ravel'. She focuses on three Ravel works: the opera L'Enfant et les Sortilèges (The Child and the Enchantments), the piano duet Ma Mère l'Oye (Mother Goose) and a set of songs for choir (Trois chansons, 1914-1915).

"Childhood and fairy tales are ideas that underpin a lot of Ravel's music but they are explored most directly in these three works," said Emily. "They also reach out very directly to a broader history, to literature and society in really interesting ways."

Uniquely among operas, L'Enfant et les Sortilèges has as its central character a child, who in a fit of temper trashes his room and toys which then come to life to reproach him.

"Through this opera you can trace a lot of changing ways in which society is thinking about children. The child is a modern child, sure of himself, very much the central focus of his family, something that had really emerged in French society from about 1870 onwards. On lots of levels the opera engages with early 20th century conceptions of childhood and philosophical thought," said Emily.

Emily lectures in Music History at the Elder Conservatorium. She moves to England in September and will be seeking postdoctoral research and teaching opportunities there. ■

STORY ROBYN MILLS