Joseph Maurice Ravel is French and lived from the 7th of March 1875 to the 28th of December 1937. He was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with and along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was known as France's greatest living composer.
Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire. He was not well regarded by its conservative establishment. The treatment he was under caused a scandal. After leaving the Conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity, incorporating genres of baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works,