Specialties

Music theory and analysis, musical meaning and interpretation, 19th- and 20th-century classical music, critical theory, intellectual history, memory studies.

Education

Ph.D. and M.Phil in music theory, Yale University; Lehr- and Konzertdiplom in piano performance, Music Academy of Basel (Switzerland); B.A. in Music and Germanic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University.

Biography

Michael J. Puri is a researcher whose work focuses on European classical music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially the music of Ravel, Debussy, Wagner, and Liszt. He received a B.A. in music and German from Harvard University, undergraduate and graduate degrees in classical piano performance from the Music Academy of Basel (Switzerland), and an MPhil and PhD in music theory from Yale University. 

Puri is the author of Ravel the Decadent: Memory, Sublimation, and Desire (Oxford, 2011), and co-editor, with Jason Geary and Seth Monahan, of Musical Meaning & Interpretation: Perspectives, Reflections, Critique (Oxford, 2025). His scholarly essays have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music Theory Online, 19th-Century Music, Music Analysis, and Cambridge Opera Journal, among other venues. He has also published chapters in many edited volumes, including Ravel Studies, Unmasking Ravel, Musik-Konzepte and Music, Sound and Global Modernism. He was the 2017–19 Review Editor for the Journal of the American Musicological Society and, in honor of Ravel’s 150th birthday in 2025, was invited to present a multi-session course on the composer’s life and work for Roundtable, the educational platform of the 92nd Street Y in New York. He is currently finishing a second monograph, Sympathetic Resonances, which seeks to challenge the long-standing opposition between German Romanticism and early French Modernism by highlighting moments of sonic, cultural, and historical coincidence between the two.

For undergraduate music majors, he has taught the entire theory sequence, as well as seminars on nineteenth-century music, program music, and French music at the fin de siècle. For undergraduate non-majors, he taught one course on the interarts and another on the various forms of imitation in music (“Covers, Karaoke, and AI”). PhD seminar topics have included humor, music-text relations, memory studies, French music, and Wagner (The Ring, Lohengrin, and Parsifal).

Many organizations have provided financial support for his research, including the American Philosophical Society, the Javits Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the American Musicological Society, and the Society for Music Theory. In 2008 he received the Alfred Einstein Award from the American Musicological Society, which recognizes the best article written by an early-career scholar in the previous year. During the 2013–14 academic year, he held the Delta Delta Delta Fellowship at the National Humanities Center. In the Department of Music at UVA, he has served as Interim Chair, Director of Graduate Studies, and Director of Undergraduate Studies.