Maurice Ravel

Maurice Ravel’s compositions highlight the peak of French grace, elegance, and refinement. His style incorporates aspects and trends of the times, including Impressionism (a French style of art and music that first emerged in art form in the late 1860s), exoticism, neo-Classicism, as well as jazz and blues.

Maurice was born in the Basque village of Ciboure, France in 1875. His father, Pierre-Joseph, was a Swiss civil engineer and inventor, while his mother, Marie, was Basque - this would be a great influence on Ravel as a composer later on in his life. He started piano lessons at age seven and held formal musical education and training at the Paris Conservatoire starting from 14. At the same time, he visited the Paris World Exposition of 1889, where he was influenced by diverse music from around the world that would one day have an impact on his compositional style. After writing his first piano piece (Menuet antique - first work he ever composed) when he was 20, he was accepted into an advanced composition class with the highly esteemed Gabriel Fauré, where he earned a reputation as an enfant terrible which led him to be expelled from the Conservatoire. He joined a group of like-minded progressive artists nicknamed “Les apaches,” which translates to “The Hooligans” - known for their reputations as outcasts or non-conformists, and included  Ricardo Viñes (virtuoso pianist) and Erik Satie (composer), among many others. However, he gained quite the popularity as a composer and started exploring other genres after his expulsion. Much like others, the First World War had left a lasting impact on him: he was enlisted as a military transport driver in the French Army at this time. After the war, he visited the United States for the time, where he met George Gershwin: the influence of jazz and blues resulted in compositions like Piano Concerto in G Major. After suffering a brain injury (due to a taxi accident) for five years and undergoing brain surgery to fix it, he died in 1937 in a Parisian hospital.

Ravel’s music is marked by his use of colorful orchestration, incisive rhythms, and astonishing virtuosity. As was the trend during his time, his music consisted of an expanded tonal and harmonic language that included non-traditional scales, parallel chord streams, unresolved seventh and ninth chords, and polychords. He was influenced by French harpsichord tradition, as seen in Le tombeau de Couperin. His rich orchestral writing was thanks in turn to Debussy and Russian composers such as Stravinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. He had a natural tendency to turn toward Spanish music because of his mother’s Basque heritage, as seen in works such as L’heure espagnole, the orchestral work Rapsodie espagnole and the ballet Boléro. Ravel composed in virtually every genre except symphony and sacred music. He also set the poetry of French Symbolists in his art songs (which were called mélodies). He also had a gentle, humorous, even naive charm in his works, as seen in his opera L’enfant et les sortilèges.

To sum up, Maurice Ravel is one of the composers most associated with the French style of the 20th century. His musical style is well-rounded and represents the trends of his time, reflecting not only French Impressionism but a wide variety of styles and genres.