![]() ![]() In most music composition major undergraduate degree programs, students take at least four semesters of music theory-by which we mean Western European music theory. I understand why Ravel came to this conclusion 90 years ago: Any composer who has been indoctrinated with the idea that melodic and harmonic development are inextricable from good compositional practice cannot process “Boléro” as a “good composition.” But this raises the question: Why do so many composers trained in Western European Classical Music™ accept as truth that melodic and harmonic development are, and should always be, our primary concerns (When Ravel was told of this, he reportedly quipped: “She understands!”)īy 1931, Ravel had also identified a pattern in the criticism: “It is perhaps because of these peculiarities that no single composer likes the “Boléro”-and from their point of view they are quite right.” I, a composer who likes-even loves-“Boléro,” can’t help but smile to read this. A woman at the first performance screamed that Ravel was a madman. Yet some listeners and performers are horrified by the lack of melodic invention. In a 1931 interview with the London Daily Telegraph, Ravel described “Boléro” as “an experiment in a very special and limited direction… There are no contrasts, and there is practically no invention except in the plan and the manner of the execution.” The result of his experiment was polarizing: Audiences cheered at its premiere and have continued to do so for nearly a century. The melody receives little, if any, development as defined by centuries of practice: It is not fragmented, nor sequenced, nor treated contrapuntally, nor turned upside down or inside out, nor reharmonized, nor stated in a different key (other than an abrupt modulation near the climax). Unable to immediately secure permission, Ravel set out to write his own original composition: a melody less than a minute long, backed by Spanish dance rhythms, repeated eighteen times in a slow crescendo. Commissioned by dancer Ida Rubenstein to write a Spanish-themed ballet, Ravel was initially tasked with orchestrating “Iberia” by Albéniz. Criticisms of “Boléro” began much earlier, originating with several of the composer’s own self-deprecating comments. Whenever any work of art achieves pop culture ubiquity, a backlash is sure to follow. That endless melody triple-lutzed in my head from a young age. Its music? “Boléro.” At the time, I was three years old and lived in Australia, but I remember the mania for both the performance and the music. If you remember the 1980s, you remember Ravel’s “Boléro.” Although the work became a fixture on orchestral programs shortly after its premiere in 1928, the ’80s was arguably the decade of peak “Boléro” saturation, bookended by the soundtrack for the 1979 Dudley Moore comedy, “10,” and Frank Zappa’s 1991 album, “The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life.” At the zenith between these two points, British ice-dancing superstars Torvill and Dean won a gold medal at the 1984 Winter Olympics with a routine that became the highest-scoring figure-skating program of all time.
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