His mother, Marie, née Delouart, was Basque but had grown up in Madrid. His father, Pierre-Joseph Ravel, was an educated and successful engineer, inventor and manufacturer, born in Versoix near the Franco-Swiss border. Ravel was born in the Basque town of Ciboure, France, near Biarritz, 18 kilometres from the Spanish border. 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. Ravel was among the first composers to recognise the potential of recording to bring their music to a wider public. Some of his piano music, such as Gaspard de la nuit (1908), is exceptionally difficult to play, and his complex orchestral works such as Daphnis et Chloé (1912) require skilful balance in performance. Many of his works exist in two versions: first, a piano score and later an orchestration. 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. 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.Īs a slow and painstaking worker, Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, Boléro (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity, incorporating elements of baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France’s greatest living composer.īorn 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. He is often associated with impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. Joseph Maurice Ravel ( 7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor.
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