Yet it is not in technical treatment of the piano that Ravel is most clearly to be differentiated from Debussy, but rather in the matter of structure. Most of his pieces are relatively long, and few of them are written in the fragmentary, suggestive way characteristic of Debussy, but are consistently sustained and developed. This in general. In particular one will notice not only a regularity in the structure of phrases but a frequent repetition of phrases in the well-balanced manner we associate with his predecessors, sequences that except in harmony are quite classical. The _Jeux d’eau_ will offer numerous examples; and the same regularity is noticeable in the _Ondine_ and _Le Gibet_. The phrases are long and smooth. They have not the epigrammatic terseness of Debussy, who, even in passages of melodious character, always avoids an obvious symmetry. Nor is Ravel’s music so parti-colored as Debussy’s. It does not touch upon such exotic or such foreign scales and harmonies. Ravel shows himself a lover of the Oriental in his string quartet, especially of the Oriental mannerism of repetition; but one does not find in his pianoforte music, as in Debussy’s, hints of ancient Greece, of Italy, of North America, of England. Even the _Alborada del gracioso_, for all its length and brilliance, is not Spanish as Debussy’s _Soirée dans Grenade_ or _Puerta del Vino_. The impressions one receives from hearing works of the two men performed one after the other are really not similar. Debussy’s music is subtle and instantaneous, so to speak; Ravel’s is rather deliberate and prolonged. Other French composers have hardly made themselves felt with such distinctness as these two men. The most prominent of them is Florent Schmitt whose _Pièces romantiques_, _Humoresques_, and _Nuits romaines_ are worthy of study. Within the last year or two several sets of pieces by Eric Satie have appeared which must give one pause. These are almost as simple as Mozart; indeed many of them are written in but two parts. They are not lacking in charm, whether or not one may take them seriously. Satie shows himself in many of them a parodist. He plays strains from the Funeral March in Chopin’s sonata, twisting them out of shape, and writes slyly over the music that they are from a well-known mazurka of Schubert’s. He parodies Chabrier’s _España_ and Puccini’s operas.