Ragtime, jazz and other popular New World musical forms found their most sympathetic ear not from the young American composers who came to Paris to study in the ‘20s (most famously under the tutelage of Nadia Boulanger), but from their European counterparts. Over the next two weeks we will focus on several of these composers, with a special eye to their jazz-tinged and playful output, but also to their more conventional and serious work as well. The loosely-knit group of composers dubbed “Les Six” in 1920 by critic Henri Collet–most notably Milhaud, Honegger and Poulenc–will be one point of focus. This group, inspired by composers Erik Satie and Igor Stravinsky and poet/aesthete Jean Cocteau, rejected the Romanticism and Impressionism prevalent in French art music at the time for a cleaner, more direct style based in part on “the sounds of the streets and music halls.” Maurice Ravel, himself a proponent of Impressionism, was equally receptive to the new musical currents from America, as is evident tonight and next Wednesday in his famous Piano concerto in G major and Sonata for violin and piano, both clearly inspired by the works of George Gershwin, who himself claimed influence by Les Six.