|Free Sheet Music, Riffs, Lessons and Tools for musicians who
play, || Maurice Ravel (1875 - 1937) One of the greatest French
composers of the 20th Century, alongside Debussy, Ravel combined
skill in orchestration with meticulous technical command of
harmonic resources. He was a great admirer of Debussy’s music
and the two could be said to have influenced one another
considerably. He met Erik Satie who also had a considerable
influence on his artistic development. He eventually developed a
style of his own which the critics often described as cold
blooded and artificial. In later years he based some of his
finest works on the Oriental scales he had heard at the 1889
Paris Exhibition. Ravel led a quiet life and never held an
official post. Ravel wrote two operas, the first, described as a
comèdie-musicale, L'heure espagnole (The Spanish Clock) and the
second, with a libretto by Colette, the imaginative L'enfant et
les sortilèges (The Child and the Enchantments), in which the
naughty child is punished when furn