Joseph Maurice Ravel French: [ʒɔzɛf mɔʁis ʁavɛl]; 7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937 was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer.
Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity and incorporating elements of baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, Boléro , in which repetition takes the place of development. He made some orchestral arrangements of other composers' music, of which his 1922 version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is the best known.
A slow and painstaking worker, Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. Among his works to enter the repertoire are pieces for piano, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas and eight song cycles; he wrote no symphonies or church music. Many of his works exist in two versions: first, a piano score and later an orchestration. Some of his piano music, such as Gaspard de la nuit , is exceptionally difficult to play, and his complex orchestral works such as Daphnis et Chloé require skilful balance in performance.
Ravel was among the first composers to recognise the potential of recording to bring their music to a wider public. From the 1920s, despite limited technique as a pianist or conductor, he took part in recordings of several of his works; others were made under his supervision.
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“But do these people never come up with the idea that I might be artificial by nature?”
"Mais est-ce qu'il ne vient jamais à l'idée de ces gens-là que je peux être 'artificiel' par nature?"
Answering M. D. Calvocoressi on a question insinuating that many people thought Ravel's music rather "artificial" than "natural".
quoted in Calvocoressi's Musicians gallery, London, Faber, 1933
Ravel to pianist Jean Marnold about Le Gibet from Gaspard de la Nuit
Maurice Ravel and unattributed. "Finding Tunes in Factories", Evening Standard, London, 24 February 1932.
Also printed in: Orenstein, Arbie, ed. (1990). A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews, p.490-91. New York: Columbia University Press.
