Gurminder Bhogal
Catherine Mills Davis Professor of Music
Scholarly interests focus on the music of French composers including Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Delage; the practice of ornament in French music and the visual arts during the early twentieth century; music and aesthetics; music and orientalism/exoticism/colonialism-decolonialism; Sikh devotional music (Sikh Kirtan); and Sikh art.
My research falls into two areas. The first deals with early twentieth-century French music and culture with a focus on relationships between music and the visual arts. These connections have been explored most recently in Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Other publications that examine the practice and aesthetics of ornament in music composition and visual art of early twentieth-century Paris include Details of Consequence: Ornament, Music, and Art in Paris (AMS Studies in Music) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); “Orchestral Tissue, Subordinate Arabesques, and Turning Inward in Maurice Ravel's Boléro,” Music Theory Online 26/2, 2020; and “Ephemeral Arabesque Timbres and the Exotic Feminine,” in Arabesque Without End: Across Music and the Arts, ed. Anne Leonard (New York: Routledge, 2021). Other publications are forthcoming on Debussy’s piano music; Debussy’s music in video games; and grotesquerie and the oriental subject in The Rite of Spring.
My second research area is on Sikh devotional music. I won the Pauline Alderman Award for Outstanding Scholarship on Women in Music (2017) for my article, “Listening to Female Voices in Sikh Kirtan,” Sikh Formations Religion, Culture, Theory 13/1-2 (2017): 48-77. I am currently completing a monograph about Sikh Kirtan for a University press. A recent article about the halo in Sikh art and its connections to divine sound can be read here: "Anahad Naad and Pictorial Resonance: The Halo and Sonic Vibration in Sikh Art," Sikh Research Journal, Spring 2023. This recent article explores the history of the harmonium in Punjab with a focus on Sikh kirtan: "Tracking the Harmonium from Christian Missionary Hymns to Sikh Kirtan," Yale Journal of Music and Religion 8/2 (2022).
From March 2019 to June 2022, I served as Review Editor for the Journal of the American Musicological Society. I am currently series editor for the American Musicological Society's Studies in Music Series.
I teach a variety of courses in music history, theory, and analysis, some of which have received funding from the Mellon Foundation. Core courses for the music major and minor that I teach include The Symphony in the World (MUS 201); Looking Backwards, Reaching Forwards: Modernism and Music (MUS 202); Expressing Race and Gender through New Music (MUS 202); Opera: Its History, Music, and Drama (MUS 230). My electives focus on a range of topics: The Femme and Her Song; Being Modern in Paris; Virtuosity, Suspicion, Transcendence; Finding France in French Piano Music; Nothingness in Music, Poetry, and Art; Music and Sound in Video Games; Paris Chic: French Music and the Arts; Sacred Sounds of South Asia.
Education
- B.M., Royal College of Music
- M.M., King's College London
- Ph.D., University of Chicago