Emily Kilpatrick

Emily is co-editor, with Keyboard Research Fellow Roy Howa, 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). 

She is the author of three monographs on French music; the most recent, a biography of Ravel, is forthcoming for Reaktion Press (Critical Lives). 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.’ In Musicology Australia, Stephen Rumph described it as ‘a major addition’ to the literature and ‘a rich, multifaceted study of the mélodie in its “golden age”’.

Her current projects include an exploration of the role of women in shaping historical narratives of musical thought in the Belle Époque. This research was developed partly through the ‘Music Futures’ programme with University College London; its outputs have already included a collaboration to produce new singable translations of song cycles by Lili Boulanger and Claire Delbos, together with new works by Academy composers on the poetry of Renée de Brimont and Cécile Sauvage.

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. In 2022 she was appointed an Associate Professor of the University of London.

Selected Publications

BOOKS

Maurice Ravel. London: Reaktion (biography in press, 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

Ravel and his contemporaries, in The Cambridge Companion to French Art Song, ed. Stephen Rumph. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (in press).

'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).