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Crossing Borders I: the historical context for Ravel's North American tour

The book in which this chapter was published, Ravel Studies, aims to draw upon interdisciplinary exchanges in order to pose new research questions about the composer's methods, performance practice and the reception of his work across the world. Specifically, the chapter aims to draw on new research directions in popular music and cultural industries research attending to sound and issues of performance in a range of historical contexts, and apply them in classical music studies. The research explores Ravel's work in terms of the nature of cultural production and reception within the classical music industries and in particular seeks to place modernist composers in the context of both their historical moment and the operation of US cultural industries.

This perspective is particularly valuable given the ongoing popularity of Ravel recordings with Durand/BMG, new recordings on Deutsche Grammophon, and the appearance of The Cambridge Companion to Ravel (CUP, 2000) which brought together key Anglohone scholars with French counterparts, as well as a growing range of academic monographs and articles attending to the composer such as those published in 19th Century Music, Twentieth-Century Music, The Journal of the American Musicological Society and Music Analysis.

Research for this piece was undertaken at the British Library and the Performing Arts Library of the New York Public Library. The research also informed seminar and conference presentations in Birmingham, London, Manchester, Nottingham and Sydney.