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A musical impressionist like Debussy, Paul Dukas and Jacques Ibert, Ravel worked with combinations of tone as impressionist painters did with blurred combinations of color, got nebulous and exotic effects from his orchestra. He was an eclectic, often deliberately imitated the idioms of exotic or historic peoples, dishing them up in his own particular French sauce. Thus his opera L'Heure Espagnole and his descriptive orchestral works Bolero, Alborada del Gracioso and Rhapsodic Espagnole are built up of Spanish idioms; his La Valse has a Viennese, his Le Tombeau de Couperin an early 18th-Century flavor. A movement in Ma Mere I'Oye reflects Oriental idioms; a violin sonata is based on American "blues." Though a brilliant orchestrator and a resourceful stylist, he was not a great originator.
Once when someone asked him if it were not necessary for a composer to be sincere. Ravel answered: 'I don't particularly care about this 'sincerity.' I try to make art." He had a little story about how he had worked for four years on a certain sonata and had spent three of the four taking out unnecessary notes.
In 1928 dapper, long-nosed, quick-moving little Ravel visited the U. S. to conduct some of his own compositions with Walter Damrosch's New York Symphony and other U. S. orchestras. Shy, almost hysterically affable as a conductor, he seemed continuously surprised and pleased that his music sounded so well. Once he lost his place in the middle of his own La Valse and had to be pulled through by the orchestra.