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The Ballets of Maurice Ravel: Creation and Interpretation. By Deborah Mawer. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. [xvii, 314 p. ISBN 0-75463029-3. $99.95.] Music examples, illustrations, appendix, bibliography, index.
The appearance of Deborah Mawer's The Ballets of Maurice Ravel is an occasion to be celebrated for various reasons: it is a significant contribution by a leading scholar of twentieth-century French classical music to the surprisingly small body of musicological literature on Ravel; it is the first comprehensive investigation of the role of ballet within the composer's oeuvre; it confronts and helps to overcome the historical divide between scholarly discourses on music and dance, which has endured over and against the continuous mutual implication and entanglement of these two arts. As ambitious as these objectives are, this book rises to meet them through Mawer's thorough research, thoughtful analysis, and elegant prose. Consequently, this book is not only indispensable for those who study Ravel and twentieth-century classical ballet, but also edifying and accessible to a much broader readership that includes musicians, dancers, and interested audience members.
Currently a senior lecturer in music at Lancaster University, Mawer is well known for her book on form and tonality in Milhaud (Ashgate, 1997), as well as her editorship of and essay contributions to The Cambridge Companion to Ravel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). It is only to be expected, therefore, that she demonstrate in her most recent book an intimate knowledge of Ravel's music, a knack for selecting telling moments from larger musical wholes to make specific analytical points, and an ability to communicate these insights clearly and compellingly. This expertise notwithstanding, Mawer seeks to place dance on an equal footing with music in her analyses, and embraces every opportunity to incorporate other elements into her discussion, especially to the extent that they bring to light ballet's collaborative aspects.
The book divides into an introduction and eight...