Maurice Ravel Quotes

• Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.

  Maurice Ravel

  Emotional, Intellectual, Firsts

  57 Copy quote

• The only love affair I have ever had was with music.

  Maurice Ravel

  Love, Inspiring, Affair

  68 Copy quote

• I did my work slowly, drop by drop. I tore it out of me by pieces.

  Maurice Ravel

  Pieces

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• We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art

  Maurice Ravel

  Art, Real, Emotion

  Maurice Ravel, Arbie Orenstein (1990). “A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews”, p.42, Courier Corporation

  28 Copy quote

• I do not ask for my music to be interpreted, but only for it to be played.

  Maurice Ravel

  Asks

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• I begin by considering an effect.

  Maurice Ravel

  Considering, Effects

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• Tell me that not everything I wrote was bad.

  Maurice Ravel

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• Why become a second-rate Ravel when you're already a first-rate Gershwin?

  Maurice Ravel

  Ravel, Firsts, Rate

  60 Copy quote

• Does it not occur to people that I might be artificial by nature?

  Maurice Ravel

  People, Doe, Might

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• Remember that I wrote a pavane for a dead princess, and not a dead pavane for a princess!

  Maurice Ravel

  Princess, Remember

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• 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.

  Maurice Ravel

  Men, Thinking, Symbolism

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• To George Gershwin, on refusinghim as a pupil: You would only lose the spontaneous quality of your melody, and end by writing bad Ravel.

  Maurice Ravel

  Writing, Quality, Ravel

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• 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.

  Maurice Ravel

  Art, Writing, Should Have

  "Ravel: Man and Musician". Book by Arbie Orenstein, p. 126, 1975.

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• 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.

  Maurice Ravel

  Cells, Ravens, Mathematical Equations

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• If he'd been making shell-cases during the war it might have been better for music.

  Maurice Ravel

  War, Musical, Shells

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• 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.

  Maurice Ravel

  Littles, Composer, Worst

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• You might lose your spontaneity and, instead of composing first-rate Gershwin, end up with second rate Ravel.

  Maurice Ravel

  Ravel, Might, Firsts

  19 Copy quote

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