“Plunder” may unduly unnerve, previous aspects of Ravel's style having been more gently intertwined. Ravel's Exotic was characterized by a wide range of unusually successful appropriations of musical “others”: sensual, on occasion breathtaking, tinged with irony, parody, comedy, even tragedy, they have transcended their times and stand as puzzling musical mirrors to the great colonial conquests of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The panorama of the musically Exotic in European culture is, of course, vast. Félicien David's “Ode-symphonie” Le désert, of 1844, was cited as a turning point in 1889 by a critic of central importance to this (and other) chapters, Julien Tiersot:

First assimilations of “foreign” elements in Western music being impossible to trace, Richard Beyer chose three representative examples in France from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Lully's “Ballet des nations” from Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), Rameau's opera Les Indes galantes (1735) and Grétry's instrumental work La cérémonie du Turque (ca. 1770–90) in his analysis of the Exotic as a principal motivating force behind the use of organum-like musical textures by both Debussy and Ravel. The two composers’ early encounters appear at first blush to have been benign and captivating, Debussy's reaction to the novel sounds of Oriental music at the World Exhibition in 1889 yielding, as Lockspeiser put it, “an inexhaustible gallery of exotic mirages.”