Maurice Ravel is understood as a quintessential French composer. Yet, curiously, scholarship lacks consensus in defining his music and its relationship to that of his contemporaries. Contributing to the discrepancy are various writings that characterize Ravel's style as miniaturist, often described as both "classical" and reflective of his enthusiasm for East Asian art. Polymath musicologist Louis Laloy, a driving force in the French reception of l'Extreme-Orient, even described Ravel's music as japonisante and similar to Japanese landscapes. In defining the wider implications of these seemingly disparate reactions, the dissertation proposes that Ravel's musical textures exemplify French classicism's interaction with the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century trend known as japonisme in vogue from around 1870 to 1935.

Since the 1870s, japonisme has marked the reception and aesthetic impact of Japanese graphics on formal design in Paris throughout the arts and letters. In the absorption of style japonais, wood-block prints known as ukiyo-e became closely associated with miniaturism---the craft of expressing profundity or intensity of feeling within a limited space or time. Ravel is a viable and intriguing case study because his musical textures suggest a familiarity with ukiyo-e, particularly the prints and sketchbooks (Manga) of Katsushika Hokusai. As explained here, Ravel's deft evocations of classic and exotic intertwine japonisme and French classicism, an interaction not widely explored in musicology.

The introduction defines Ravel's miniaturism as a response to japonisme's complex of style changes and proposes a sight-sound analytical methodology inspired by the study of ukiyo-e graphics. Chapter 1 investigates interactions between French classicism and japonisme and interprets Ravel's textural style as japonist-classicist. Chapter 2 explains Ravel's miniaturism through the lens of Hokusai's ukiyo-e. Chapter 3 applies the implications of the previous chapters to an analytical interpretation of the first movement of the duo Sonata for Violin and Cello, a chamber piece interpreted here as a japonist-classicist symphony. Chapter 4 concludes that approaching Ravel's music through japonisme demystifies the miniaturist label. Likewise it opens a fresh research space for studying the music of Ravel and his contemporaries in terms of East-West encounters and through the perspective of composer as craftsman.