Jessie Fillerup, Magician of Sound: Ravel and the Aesthetics of Illusion (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021), ISBN: 978-0-520379-886.

Jessie Fillerup, who currently teaches at the University of Richmond in Virginia, has published a welcome new book on Maurice Ravel, encouraging us to reconsider his music with regard to the principles of theatrical magic and illusion practised during the decades before and after his life proper (1875–1937). Building upon her previous work on illusion and Ravel, Fillerup offers an even wider, cross-disciplinary, indeed cross-cognitive, study arguing that extra-musical illusionary practices influenced Ravel in as yet unacknowledged ways, that they betray the outlines of an ‘aesthetics of musical illusion’ in which we all participate (to differing degrees) and, hence, that they point towards new ways of re-evaluating our perceptions of the music, the composer, and his legacy. It is a very fine and imaginative study, both analytical and theoretical, complicated in original ways that allude to what has been referred to at least once before, in something of a similar context, as a composer’s ‘pre-compositional’ method. Like most original thought, I think, it is a bit idiosyncratic in concept and organization but (more importantly) derives fairly and creatively from what many others have thought about the author’s chosen topics, over very long times. Thinking anew about Ravel’s music here embraces new complexity, since Fillerup introduces a broad array of research beyond music theory, history, perception, and the Humanities in general to include more recent results from psychologists, philosophers, and newer disciplines, such as disability studies, consortiums studying magic and illusion, and ‘clusters’ of shared research. More specifically, she proposes a threefold re-imagining of Ravel’s methods – ‘musical masonry’ (8), as nicely put – comprising initially 1) the composer’s public image, 2) his fascination with machines, and 3) the compositional craft itself. To link and develop these categories more fully, four others are introduced as ‘Ravelian effects’: 1) illusions of perpetual ascent, 2) transformational ascent, 3) mechanization, and 4) apparent motion and stasis. Much of this draws (newly) upon a large body of ‘theater and media history’ (6) interwoven with the chosen musical examples, figures, illustrations, and interpretations of past and present Ravel research in order to frame the background and