Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast

Nowadays it's hard to imagine Maurice Ravel as a "bad-boy" revolutionary, a member of a group whose name can be loosely translated as The Hooligans. To most listeners today, Ravel's music is the very picture of sumptuous beauty. But the group he belonged to, Les Apaches ("The Hooligans"), earned its name because of its members' uncompromising attitudes about music; attitudes that clashed sharply with the conservative tastes of the establishment. Another composer who belonged to Les Apaches was the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla. Falla is certainly not as well known as Ravel, but the two became fast friends when he arrived in Paris in 1907. They formed a kind of mutual-admiration society that proved immensely fruitful for both of them. Falla was deeply impressed by Ravel's Spanish-inflected music, marveling at its authenticity given that Ravel was French. But Ravel, now a symbol of French music, was the son of a Swiss father and a Spanish-speaking mother, and he was born just eleven miles from the Spanish bo