Maurice Ravel
The only love affair I have ever had was with music.Collection: Love
Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.Collection: Music
We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art.Collection: Art
My intention here is to make it clear that not a single cell of my composition, here in regard to The Raven, is found by chance or intuition, that the composition moved towards perfection with the precision and inevitability of a mathematical equation.Collection: Chance
For Debussy the musician and the man I have had profound admiration, but by nature I'm different from him. I think I have always personally followed a direction opposed to that of the symbolism of Debussy.
I am not one of the great composers. All the great have produced enormously. There is everything in their work - the best and the worst, but there is always quantity. But I have written relatively little.
Remember that I wrote a pavane for a dead princess, and not a dead pavane for a princess!
I did my work slowly, drop by drop. I tore it out of me by pieces.
I begin by considering an effect.
You might lose your spontaneity and, instead of composing first-rate Gershwin, end up with second rate Ravel.
We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of artCollection: Art
I do not ask for my music to be interpreted, but only for it to be played.Collection: Asks
Why become a second-rate Ravel when you're already a first-rate Gershwin?Collection: Ravel
Does it not occur to people that I might be artificial by nature?Collection: People
To George Gershwin, on refusinghim as a pupil: You would only lose the spontaneous quality of your melody, and end by writing bad Ravel.Collection: Writing
In fact, the influence of Schoenberg may be overwhelming on his followers, but the significance of his art is to be identified with influences of a more subtle kind - not the system, but the aesthetic, of his art. I am quite conscious of the fact that my Chansons madécasses are in no way Schoenbergian, but I do not know whether I ever should have been able to write them had Schoenberg never written.Collection: Art
If he'd been making shell-cases during the war it might have been better for music.Collection: War