Bolero
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
In 1928 the dancer Ida Rubinstein commissioned Ravel to write a short ballet that would feature her dancing in a Spanish style. This was a congenial project, because Ravel had always been fascinated by the dance and preoccupied with Spanish music. He wrote what he later insisted was merely an experiment, "a piece...consisting wholly of orchestral tissue without music." A slow, marked rhythmic pattern is stated quietly by the snare drum, which repeats it unchanged several hundred times, while the remainder of the orchestra sings "folk tunes of the usual Spanish-Arabian kind," as Ravel called them. Gradually, obsessively, the level of sound builds (corresponding, in the ballet, to Ida Rubinstein's solo dance before and through twenty male dancers whom she gradually aroused from a state of apathy to high excitement).