THE LISTENING SERVICE
There’s nothing like Ravel’s Boléro: just two tunes, repeated throughout the orchestra, over and over again. It’s a 15-minute piece ‘without music in it’, as Ravel himself said. There’s no thematic development in Boléro, none of the conventional ways of making and sustaining a piece of orchestral music, even in the experimental decade of the 1920s.
In fact, Boléro’s popularity on classical favourites playlists is one of the strangest things about it. It’s made only of obsessive repetitions – one of the orchestra’s two side-drummers has to play the same two-bar rhythm 170 times, turning into an orchestral automaton: the only changes in the piece comes from how Ravel orchestrates the two tunes, the way he structures the piece as a single, gigantic crescendo, and the surprise modulation at its end. Boléro might be a warhorse, but it’s the single most experimental piece of orchestral music in the classical-pops canon in the way its melodies and its rhythms hammer their way into your brain.
And yet Boléro does have precedents in the paradoxically opposed modes of expression that define it: the terpsichorean and the mechanical. Boléro is a ballet, commissioned by Ida Rubinstein for her to dance in 1928. A bolero is also a Spanish dance in three-time, but you don’t just find boleros in folk traditions. Beethoven included two in his arrangements of Spanish tunes, and even if Ravel didn’t know those, he could have heard dances with strikingly similar repeated, castanet-inspired rhythms everywhere from Berlioz’s Zaïde to Verdi’s Les vêpres siciliennes.
But Ravel’s Boléro is different from any of those sources, because of how much slower it is than a true bolero. The Cuban composer Joaquín Nin pointed that out to Ravel – who replied, ‘That is of no interest whatsoever’. That’s because Boléro – ironically, now the most famou
