Maurice Ravel

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Maurice Ravel with his friend Finlayson.

Joseph-Maurice Ravel (March 7, 1875 – December 28, 1937) was an impressionisting French composer and pianist, and a good friend of Seamus Winnipeg Finlayson, profound collector of traffic lights and inventor of the hangman game.

[edit] The Early Years

Finlayson first met Ravel in early 1880 on top of a building that was knocked down during November 1912 to build another building at the same place (that was knocked down in the meantime as well). Between 1880 and 1912 history reports not one meeting of the two, however, Ravel became acquainted with another guy called Jack.

We don't know much about that "Jack", except that he lived with his mother, never washed his fingers and disliked breakfast cereals, particularly the red ones. He never won the Prix de Rome and refused studying hermeneutics. Jack became a good Friend to Maurice Ravel, he was in the audience to some of the first performances of Fauré's operas, and it is said he later made a more or less big career in some business. Amazingly, he never met Finlayson.

[edit] Minden, Nebraska, and the Beginning of Composition

Portrait taken by Maurice Ravel.

After 1910 Finlayson and Maurice Ravel met more often, no longer only on top of buildings, but also in parks, on the street, and in Finlayson's flat in Minden, Nebraska, where they spent nights playing Bridge, Canasta, and other things rarely mentioned in common biographies. When in 1905 Maurice Ravel did not finish his studies at the Paris Conservatoire, the same day Finlayson did not, too, without knowing about Ravel's omission. That was the moment they became good friends five years later.

1915 Finlayson moved to Henry Morgan Ave. in a larger flat with a garage to store his huge collection of traffic lights and invited Maurice Ravel as one of the first to have a look at his collection. Ravel was thrilled. He wrote to his friend Kevin (who he met first in 1892 on a trip to Belgium and started a philosophical correspondence during the First World War that was abruptly abandoned when Kevin found out Maurice Ravel never won the Prix de Rome): "I am thrilled." And so he was. He immediately wrote down his first composition, a "Traffic Light Minuet" in A Minor, that was a triumphant success at the evening dinner with Finlayson and his wife Deirdre.

[edit] The Hangman Game

The first hangman game Finlayson lost. Can you imagine the solution?

Deirdre was an exceptional woman. She could tie her shoes in seconds, and she was the one who held the ladder when Seamus Winnipeg was on collection business. And it was said that actually it was her who made the first sketches for what later became famous as the hangman game. However, she never claimed her rights on that epoch making invention.

Not surprisingly it was the name of Maurice Ravel that became the first hangman search word ever, and Finlayson lost his first game, since he couldn't suss out the last missing letter "v".

[edit] Notable Works by Maurice Ravel

• Traffic Light Minuet
• Second Traffic Light Minuet (unfinished)
• Third Traffic Light Minuet (unbegun)
• Fourth Traffic Light Minuet (never thought of)
• 465 Symphonies in G Major, some of them with happy end
• Opera Moses and Finlayson (not performed yet)