Maurice Ravel, born in 1875 in the south of France, was later attracted to Paris. From the very start, his music was marked by refinement, hyperelegance, and a certain crispness; musicians admire him for his superb workmanship and high style. As Debussy occupied the middle ground between Romanticism and modernism, Ravel carved out a place for himself between impressionism and Neoclassicism (see page 320). While his harmonies and chord progressions often remind us of Debussy, he favored clarity, precision, and instant communication, qualities he found in earlier musical forms and styles — especially, in the case of the piano concerto we study, those of Mozart.
Musical exoticism (see page 283) found a modernist voice in Ravel, and few composers have ranged as widely in imagination as he did. His music visited Spain, Madagascar, Asia, ancient Greece, and America. He even evoked Vienna, in a bitter anti-