Along with his friend Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel added Asian music, Jazz and traditional European folk songs to classical music to create a new style called ”Impressionism”.

 

Ravel is particularly famous for his skill at orchestration, which is the art of combining different instruments to create new “colors” of sound. In addition to writing many famous pieces of his own, including the ballets Bolero and La Valse, Ravel wrote a famous orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky’s suite Pictures at an Exhibition, which is largely responsible for making Mussorgsky famous as a composer.

 

Ravel was very interested in American Jazz and Popular music. A famous story goes that he met the American composer and songwriter George Gershwin, who said that he’d love to take composition lessons from Ravel, because he admired his music. Ravel replied “Why would you want to be a second-rate Ravel, when you could be a first-rate Gershwin?”.