Professor Emily Kilpatrick

Emily Kilpatrick is a historian of French music, culture and literature across the long nineteenth century.

Emily is particularly interested in the creative dialogues between performance and documentary research, in women’s musical practices, and in diversifying historiographies. Ranging across song, opera and piano literature as well as poetry, her publications have dealt with performance and staging issues, musical analysis, historic recordings, the critical editing process, text-music interchanges, and documentary and cultural history.

Emily’s current projects include an exploration of the role of women in shaping historical narratives of musical thought in the Belle Époque.

She is the author of three monographs on French music. The Operas of Maurice Ravel (2015) was recognised in the TLS as ‘an invaluable contribution’, in BBC Music Magazine as ‘A lucid and deeply researched picture’, and in Notes as ‘a distinguished addition to the literature on modern opera’. French Art Song: History of a New Music, 1870–1914 (2022) received a five-star review in BBC Music Magazine (April 2023), with the reflection ‘To attempt a book that balances musical analysis with historical narrative and philosophical speculation is a tricky task, and Emily Kilpatrick deserves the highest praise for bringing it off so triumphantly.’ Her most recent monograph, Maurice Ravel (Reaktion, 2025), was described in CD Choice as ‘one of the most valuable and insightful books on Ravel ever written’. It also received a five-star review from BBC Music Magazine (‘Engaging and perceptive . . . as likeable as, you sense, the composer himself was’), and was named as one of the FT’s ‘Best Books of 2025’. 

Emily is co-editor, with Keyboard Research Fellow Roy Howat, of the first complete critical edition of the songs and vocalises of Gabriel Fauré (Peters Edition/Faber). Initially funded by an Academy-based AHRC Project Grant (The songs of Gabriel Fauré: New critical edition), the project was developed through an interactive programme of documentary research, performance and public engagement and has proved a major contribution to the discipline of critical editing. The first volume was awarded a ‘Best Edition’ prize at the 2015 Frankfurt Musikmesse, while the 45 Vocalises represent the most significant new body of Fauré’s music to appear in print since his death. Emily made the first recording of Fauré’s song cycle La Bonne Chanson after the new edition with tenor Tony Boutté (Peters Sounds, 2015); she has also recorded Fauré’s piano duets, with Roy Howat (ABC Classics, 2009). 

Australian born, Emily previously held lectureships at the Royal Northern College of Music, and the Elder Conservatorium of Music (University of Adelaide). She has given recital performances, radio broadcasts, masterclasses and seminars across the UK and internationally. At the Royal Academy of Music, she teaches across the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, and is tutor for postgraduate string students. In 2022 she was appointed an Associate Professor of the University of London.

Selected Publications

Books

Maurice Ravel. London: Reaktion, 2025 

French Art Song: History of a New Music, 1870–1914. Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2022. 

The Operas of Maurice Ravel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Chapters and Articles

Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux, Gabriel Fauré and the Shaping of History, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, in press (2026) 

Ravel and his contemporaries, inThe Cambridge Companion to French Art Song, ed. Stephen Rumph. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026. 

Maurice Ravel and the Poetics of Originality, Music & Letters 106/1 (February 2025), pp. 97–119. https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcae096 

L’art d’évoquer les minutes heureuses: Song and memory in the Année terrible, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 50/3–4 (2022), 170–85. 

Ravel’s Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé: A Philosophy of Composition, Music & Letters 101/3 (2020), 512–43. 

Grainger and the “New Iconoclasts”: Forays in Modernist French Music, in Grainger the Modernist, ed. Suzanne Robinson and Kay Dreyfus. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015. 

Gabriel Fauré’s Middle-Period Songs, Editorial Quandaries and the Chimera of the 'Original Key', Journal of the Royal Musical Association 139/2 (Autumn 2014), 303–37 (with Roy Howat). 

The Carbonne Copy: Tracing the première of L’Heure espagnole, Revue de musicologie, 95/1 (2009), 97–135.

Critical Editions

Gabriel Fauré, Complete Songs (4 vols) and 45 Vocalises. London: Edition Peters, 2013–22 (with Roy Howat).