In 1911, Victor Debay wrote an essay in the widely read Courrier musical entitled “L’Anémie,” in which he lamented the current state of musical affairs: too much “weakness” (even decadence) manifested itself among the most promising composers of the day—Maurice Ravel, for instance, from whom one had expected so much, was entirely too preoccupied with matters of technique and most especially of “sound,” the novel explorations of which had become for him an end in itself. Ravel's career was securely established by 1911. Through considerable patience, he had managed to construct a remarkably promising career almost entirely outside the established channels of artistic and commercial compromise. Surviving three expulsions from the Paris Conservatoire, five failures in the Prix de Rome competition, and invective in the Paris press from the likes of Debay and others (including Camille Saint-Saëns at one point), Ravel had nonetheless brought to the French public a series of superb works. Other critics (including Laloy and Vuillermoz) had already made mention more favorably of Ravel's fascination with newer palettes of sound, Vuillermoz noting specifically, in 1909, the importance—especially to new music—of the “recherche voluptueuse du son pour le son.” By 1925 he had characterized Ravel's virtuosity of timbre and orchestration as “the sonoric equivalent of splitting the atom,” and there was ample precedence for such “discursivity.” In Le Temps, five years earlier, T. Lindenbaum had opined that the world of sound had never had such a discriminating visitor as Ravel; his mastery distinguished him fundamentally from Debussy; manifested a certain “human undercurrent” that someone like Richard Strauss, for instance, “had never sensed, nor communicated”; and represented—as in La valse—something “better than the most extraordinary of sonorous dreams.”

There is, of course, no such thing as “simple” sound—the adjective is used merely to introduce an early parameter in accordance with Henriette Faure's remembrance of working with Ravel privately; music, as she saw it, was “the art of achieving the sensually perceptible through sound.”